Students have been back in the classroom for the 2024-25 school year since early this month. And while much of the focus for educators and kids alike is squarely on academics, extracurriculars and athletics, school safety is also on the agenda.
Hudson Valley One reached out to superintendents of four local school districts for this story and received responses from Paul Padalino in the Kingston City School District (KCSD), Daniel Erceg in the Saugerties Central School District (SCSD), and Victoria McLaren in the Onteora Central School District (OCSD). Stephen Gratto, superintendent of the New Paltz Central School District, declined to participate.
The numbers are numbing
On the subject of school shootings, the numbers are numbing: Since the Columbine High School Massacre on April 20, 1999, there have been 417 school shootings in the United States, touching over 383,000 students who were in attendance on those days. There have been 25 incidents across the country in 2024 alone, leaving eleven dead, 34 injured and countless others traumatized. The numbers were tallied by the Washington Post in an interactive database editors say they felt compelled to maintain because the federal government doesn’t keep track.
As of press time, there have been two school shootings in September of this year: On Friday, September 6, a 16-year-old student at Joppatowne High School in Joppa, Maryland allegedly shot and injured a 15-year-old student in a school bathroom. Two days earlier, Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, allegedly shot and killed eleven people, killing two students and two teachers with a semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle.
One week before the shooting at Apalachee High School, all teachers were issued a form of ID through the Centegix safety platform, which includes a panic button for active shooter situations and other emergencies. The technology also includes digital mapping with real-time dynamic locating aptitude. Classroom doors in the school lock automatically when shut and unless the user has a key must be opened from the inside.
According to a September 4 Associated Press article written by Jeff Amy, terrified students began piling desks in front of classroom doors as emergency lights began flashing and the words “hard lockdown” appeared on in-class screens, and parents felt helpless as they received texts from their children in the midst of chaos.
Gray had allegedly left his classroom prior to the shooting. When a fellow student was asked by their teacher to let Gray back into the classroom, they noticed a gun and the door remained locked. Gray was later taken into custody after being confronted by two school resource officers.
Gray had allegedly been interviewed in May 2023 after the FBI received anonymous tips about threats of a school shooting. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which looked into the threats, could not substantiate the tip, and the investigation was closed.
School districts across the country are in a constant state of adjustment when it comes to safety, matching technology and trends with budgetary restrictions and community feedback. They are also mindful of sharing too much information so as not to give those who might potentially put schools in danger an advantage.
School resource officers
In the KCSD, schools are monitored by a combination of school resource officers (SRO), security guards and other monitors.
“We have four SRO’s district wide,” said Padalino. “There’s two in the high school and one in each of our middle schools. And they do circulate for the other schools sometimes as well, but they’re not stationed in our other schools. And we have a pretty substantial security force between security guards and monitors.”
In Onteora, there is a full-time SRO who moves between the high school and junior high.
“He is an integral partner in our safety work and teams,” McLaren said. “This is ongoing work and we are constantly reviewing our procedures and our facilities to make improvements. Safety drills are run and then debriefed to identify potential improvements. The safety of a school district is a dynamic function and it is the responsibility of the entire school community to be aware.”
In Saugerties there is a single SRO as well as other security.
“Each of our buildings, the junior-senior high school, (and elementary schools) Riccardi, Cahill and Morse do have armed security guards through a private company,” Erceg said.
Panic buttons
Erceg declined to answer whether the SCSD had a panic button system, and McLaren said the OCSD does not have one at this time. Padalino said he was intrigued by the ID cards with panic buttons in Apalachee High School.
“Since reading about that I started to look into it a little bit, and what that entails,” he said, adding that the KCSD has its own panic button system, plus teachers can access telephones within the classroom. “Any teacher can call lockdown from any classroom from any phone. And we also have installed panic buttons in the hallway. So a student or a teacher or a security guard, they can press that button in the hall and it triggers a lockdown. But we don’t have that panic button on the ID card, which is pretty ingenious actually.”
Secure entrances and checkpoints
All three local districts report having secure entrances and robust checkpoints. The SCSD and KCSD augment theirs with Raptor visitor management software, which checks a visitor’s ID with law enforcement records and other databases. None have metal detectors at their entrances, but in the KCSD they conduct bag checks and use metal detecting wands on random days.
“So some days kids might show up and find out there’s a bag check, or some days people find wands,” said Padalino. And we do use the wands at indoor sporting events, especially larger basketball games and those kind of things.”
In all three districts, concerned students, parents, teachers and community members can anonymously report concerning behavior, and each has the infrastructure in place to deal with those reports. Padalino said it doesn’t happen too often.
Padalino confirmed that an altercation between two students at Kingston High School took place earlier this month, and that one was found to have an unloaded flare gun in their possession.
Parent and students share their concerns
Answering a question from this reporter on a Saugerties parents’ group social media page, Brandon Schoonmaker said he and his wife worry about school safety, and so do his children.
“I think a security company does a good job of smoke and mirrors but in point of fact does very little to protect our kids,” Schoonmaker said. “When my mother sent me to school in the 90’s she never once thought I’d be killed there. I fear for my kids every single day they go to school because every single act of violence against kids in school including mass shootings happened in places they said it would never happen.”
He added that he believed teachers shouldn’t have to “save kids from fucking bullets,” but added he didn’t believe there was an easy answer to the overall problem.
“All I can say is that my kids worry about this and so do my wife and I,” Schoonmaker said. “My kids go to school with kids who have access to guns and my opinion is that the general mental health of kids nowadays is frayed at best. So I have no reason to think they are safe in school (with) SRO’s, security firms or otherwise.”
Cell phone use in schools
In Kingston, a further discussion around safety has unfolded about the new Yondr system, which sees students at Kingston High School and both of the district’s middle schools seal their cell phones in a lockable pouch as they enter school, and then unlock the pouch at the end of the school day. Centralized magnetic unlocking bases are located at school entrances. Each of the three schools using the Yondr system also have delineated spaces in administrative and the nurse’s office where they can unlock their phones if they need to contact parents or guardians. Students who use their phones for medical reasons will have different pouches allowing them access when needed.
Some parents oppose the Yondr system for a variety of reasons, including inaccessibility in case of emergency. During a Kingston Board of Education meeting held on Wednesday, September 11, Robin Tiano said she and other parents felt the district’s school safety efforts didn’t go far enough, and the Yondr pouches exacerbate the situation.
“If students felt safe and if parents felt their children were safe because metal detectors or wands were being used, and if there were more full time security staff in buildings, then maybe the cell phone policy would be less of an issue,” Tiano said.
A Kingston High School tenth-grader who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed.
“I don’t feel safe at school,” they said. “And if someone comes in with a gun, I can’t call my parents, I can’t text anyone. My phone is just a brick in a pouch, and it’s helpless to think about that.”
Erceg said the SCSD hasn’t considered Yondr yet because it doesn’t have money in the budget for the program. But he said that even if service didn’t go down, he believed it was safer to not have students using their phones during an emergency because it might give an active shooter an opportunity to find them.
“The authorities have said there’s a good chance that cell phone service would go down just because of the volume of calls coming in and out,” he said. “And whenever I get contacted by parents with that question, I always say that in the event of a lockdown, we want our students to quietly and quickly get out of the line of sight and then follow the authorities’ directions.”
Padalino agreed.
“We want our students following the directions of our trained faculty and staff, and the people who are telling them what they need to do, not spending their time on the phone,” he said.
There remains much uncertainty.
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