Parents angry about gun at school

They also are unhappy with officials’ silence about keeping school safe

Furious parents stormed from the doors of a South Baltimore elementary/middle school Thursday morning after a meeting with administrators about school safety, where they say school officials passed blame about how a gun came to be fired in the school.

The meeting came the day after two students brought guns to Maree Garnett Farring Elementary/Middle School in Brooklyn on Wednesday, and one went off in a bathroom. No students were hurt in the incident, but parents said they were frustrated by the lack of clarity surrounding how the school would guarantee student safety in the future.

Parents met with Principal Benjamin Crandall and other administrators, who spent several hours fielding their questions Thursday morning. But they said they came away with few answers as to how the elementary and middle school planned to improve its safety.

“They’re trying to get ideas of what to do now,” said Cynthia Damian, whose 7- and 5-year-old daughters attend the school. “They don’t have a plan. They’re just telling us basically what we want to hear and answering our questions, but the principal keeps redirecting our questions.”

Edie House Foster, a spokeswoman for the school system, said Crandall declined to comment.

In a statement Wednesday, city schools officials said they would provide police officers at the building during arrivals and dismissals for the rest of the week, as well as send officers by the school each day for periodic check-ins. Foster said the school would evaluate security at the end of the week to determine its next steps.

Alison Perkins-Cohen, chief of staff for Baltimore City Public Schools, said the school system had been in the process of bolstering school security across the city by ensuring all classroom doors can be locked, training staff in emergency preparedness protocols and issuing a new emergency preparedness guide.

“Most of those things are in place,” Perkins-Cohen said.

She said Crandall and school police will review protocols at Maree G. Farring and recommend changes.

Parents who attended Thursday’s meeting said those steps are not enough, and that they received few concrete details as to how the school would address safety concerns in the near term.

“What assures us as parents that the kids are going to be fine again?” Damian said. “How am I going to let my kids have a normal day at school knowing that somebody shot a gun in school? You see it happening on TV — you see like what happened in Florida, these crazy students shooting up schools. I mean, how do you want us as a parent to be calm?”

Some parents, like Datril Griffin, kept their children home from school Thursday. Griffin said he wanted answers as to how school safety would be strengthened before sending his 10-year-old daughter back to class.

“Till I find out whether they’re going to be able to keep her safe, then I’m not bringing her to school,” he said.

Virginia Robert said her two daughters, 7 and 9, were afraid to return to class.

“My daughter was terrified to come to school this morning,” she said. “I [brought] my kids to school today because at the end of the day education is a must, but I don’t feel safe and they don’t feel safe.”

Robert said she began to worry about safety when a student brought a knife to school last year. She and other parents lamented the violence in the larger Brooklyn neighborhood — problems they said trickle down to children in the school.

“How are you going to provide safety for our children if you can’t even provide safety for our neighborhood?” Robert said.

Perkins-Cohen praised Maree G. Farring’s response to the shooting.

“I think the school really handled this in a really effective way. It was dealt with very quickly when it occurred,” the school system’s chief of staff said. “If you had gone to the school yesterday, you wouldn’t have really even known than an incident occurred.”

Some parents said they suggested new solutions at the Thursday meeting, such as requiring students to carry clear backpacks. But the school did not yet commit to adopting any of those measures.

“It’s so easy to stay complacent,” said Ronald Phillips, who has a 6-year-old daughter at the school. “I didn’t hear anybody coming up with a real different solution to what we have been doing.”