Schools chief defends storm response
Some parents complained about dismissals being delayed due to tornado warning
KINGSTON, N.Y. » School district Superintendent Paul Padalino says his decision to issue a shelter-in-place for students during a tornado warning Tuesday was correct despite complaints from some parents of students that their children were being held hostage at the end of the school day.
The storms that swept through the region around school dismissal times spawned at least five tornadoes, including one that formed in Saugerties. The storm killed at least three people in the Hudson Valley and caused tens of thousands of power outages,
At a Board of Education meeting Wednesday, Padalino said some district students were told by parents to disregard the directive from administrators.
“For a parent to tell their student, ‘No, don’t do what that building principal tells you to do, do what I tell you to do’ is a problem for us,” he said. “In an emergency situation, we are to act as reasonable and prudent parents, and the safest place in the community in those situations are probably our school buildings.”
Padalino said conflicting or-
ders from school personnel and parents make it difficult to carry out safety procedures.
“I really do want to appeal to the parents in our community about that,” he said. “If the decision is made that we need to hold our buses, we need to hold our students in our school buildings ... I don’t do that
without thinking about the fact that we have 6,000 students getting on buses and travel on 130 different buses ... [and] the confusion and disruption that brings.”
Padalino said the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Kingston and the surrounding area about 2:50 p.m. Tuesday and lifted it about 3:30 p.m.
“We were told ‘get to shelter’ right when we were about to start dismissing
students,” he said. “So our job at that point is to get our students to shelter.”
The weather forecast was so ominous, in fact, that district officials were concerned about the safety of people outside the schools.
“Our principals went out [to] parents who were waiting and asked parents to come into the building for shelter,” Padalino said.
“We don’t randomly call a ‘shelter in place’ for nothing,” he said. “We called that because there was an
imminent warning, and as you can see in several of our surrounding communities, there were serious issues.”
Padalino said the storm presented a real-time need to put to use measures that previously were done only as drills.
“We have safety protocols in place for a reason, we do these drills for a reason, and they are not to keep your student away from you,” he said. “It’s because we’re worried about the safety of our students.”