Plans to beef-up security measures at Ridgefield’s nine major school buildings, at a cost of $731,000, will come before voters next week.
“The reality is we’re living in different times, and we need to protect our children,” said Board of Education Chairman Austin Drukker.
A public hearing and town meeting on the proposal is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 14, at 7:30 in the town hall’s lower level meeting room. The proceedings may be moved to the Veterans Park School auditorium if the crowd is too big for the room.
The $731,200 request was put together by the School Security Committee formed in the wake of last December’s school shooting in Newtown. It was approved by the Board of Education and Board of Finance before coming before the Board of Selectmen, who voted last Wednesday night to schedule the town meeting.
The plan is designed to improve security at six elementary schools, the two middle schools, and the high school.
The request includes:
- $231,000 for “access control” improvements — swipe card systems — at 69 entrances, between four and 12 exterior doors at each of the nine schools. This allows all entrances to be locked at all times;
- $162,000 for “access control” locks to interior doors in the nine buildings so, among other things, classrooms can be locked by teachers from the inside;
- $338,000 for an estimated 105 security cameras, with related wiring and software, so parking lots, driveways, playgrounds and building entrances can be viewed at any time from the front door security desk, the building’s main office, the school system’s central offices, and the police station.
“We’ve done a lot of very thoughtful work on this,” Mr. Drukker said. “It’s not something we’ve just pulled out of the air. We’ve had a lot of input from a lot of different sources.”
The swipe-card entrances, new locks and cameras won’t make the schools impregnable, Mr. Drukker admitted, but adding them will make schools better prepared to handle trouble — so they’re not easy targets.
“We’re not going to protect against every possible scenario. We’re certainly aware of that,” he said.
“We want to make our schools less interesting to people who might be interested in doing bad things.”
“I’m in agreement,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi said Monday. “As I stated at the Board of Selectmen meeting, I feel the Board of Education Task Force reviewed all the possible scenarios that might exist in addressing security in our schools.
“The recommendations being made now are pretty much the low-hanging fruit, in that cameras and locks on doors are an absolute necessity.”
School and town authorities decided that some things that are more complex and difficult — physically, maybe politically — will be considered as part of next year’s budget process for inclusion in the capital budget requests.
“With respect to more sophisticated front entrances — aka bullet-proof vestibules — that will be an ongoing topic of discussion and, if felt to be necessary, will be part of the budget request for the 2014 budget cycle.”
In an interview last week, Craig Tunks, the school system’s director of information and operations development, said the swipe card system for the exterior doors “allows us to have all the doors locked, all the time.”
The new interior access control equipment would allow teachers to lock doors from the inside of classrooms, which is “part of the lockdown procedures,” he said.
An estimated 105 cameras will be used to enhance security around the nine schools.
All the cameras will increase the ability of school staff, and the police, to see building entrances and significant areas of school grounds.
“We want to see the parking lot, the people entering the building and be able to identify their face, and be able to identify license plates,” Mr. Tunks said.
Although the motion to send the $731,000 request to voters at a town meeting was approved unanimously by the Board of Selectmen, discussion at last Wednesday’s meeting revealed some uneasiness with the proposal.
“We’re sending this to a town meeting, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem with it,” said Selectwoman Barbara Manners, who made the motion.
“Some of us — me — question how much this really does add to safety.”
Selectwoman Di Masters said the selectmen weren’t so much endorsing the school board’s request as giving voters a chance to judge it.
“We’re just the gatekeepers. We’re being asked to set up a town meeting,” she said.
Selectmen Andy Bodner also had doubts.
“We’re not done with security. There’s going to be more coming back next year,” Mr. Bodner said.
“The piece that bothers me is not the security, it’s that we don’t have unlimited money. You have to make choices.”
First Selectman Marconi had fewer doubts
“I don’t see this as being very controversial, whether we want to improve the security in our schools,” he said.
The main question to ask, he said, is whether the recommendations are part of a sensible, well-designed plan that will in fact improve security.
“Are we spending money to increase security, rather than spending money to spend money and show we care?” he said.
The whole package of recommendations that came out of the committee isn’t being pushed forward right away, he said, which suggests that the school authorities were thinking in depth, and prioritizing.
“What I liked about this, they pulled things out and said ‘We’re not comfortable with vestibules, yet,’ ” he said.
Ms. Masters addressed the contingent of school officials at the meeting, which included Mr. Tunks and board members Irene Burgess and Michael Raduazzo.
“I think the pendulum can swing to the point where you’re raising little neurotics,” she said. The town’s goal shouldn’t be to guard its children so exhaustively that they grow up “afraid of everything, every corner, ever shadow.”
The school board should balance the testimony of forensic experts with input from specialists on children’s emotional and mental outlook.
“Find a middle ground between being overprotective and underprotective,” Ms. Masters told them.
“You’re talking about building confident children that can solve problems,” Mr. Raduazzo replied. “That’s inside the classroom.”