The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
THE NEW NORMAL
Threats, intruder drills becoming part of attending school
Principal Calista Boyer’s voice sounded perfectly calm over the PA system as she announced that there was an armed violent intruder roaming the halls of Lincoln Elementary School.
Her calm was due, no doubt, to the fact that it was a drill.
Nevertheless, there was something inarguably jarring about the sight of Patrick Fadigan prowling through the halls of the eerily silent elementary school, jiggling locked door knobs and sticking his head into vacant classrooms.
The only sound was of Boyer’s voice and those of other teachers over the walkie-talkie, calling out Fadigan’s location as he headed up the stairs and walked the second floor.
Unseen by him, that was the signal for the first and second graders on the first floor, along with the kindergarten class, to silently make for the door to the street and comparative safety.
In real life, Fadigan was no intruder, a fact made more obvious by the guidance being given him by maintenance supervisor Robert Fine, who ran along with him and directed his actions, and the fact that he was wearing a day-glo vest clearly marked “Intruder.”
In fact, Fadigan was an invited guest; the owner of the automotive repair business that bears his name, located
across Eighth Street from the school, and willing to help his neighbors hone their response to what was once unthinkable.
Now, not only does the nation think about school shootings all the time — with the most recent events in Florida and Texas never far away from the newscrawl — but school officials now have to think about how to prepare for it and, if possible prevent it.
And you don’t need to watch CNN to get a taste of what such threats mean to schools near you.
‘It could happen anywhere’
Tensions are so high that when two students brought a chicken into Pottsgrove High School as a prank on May 23, the fact that they had hidden their faces — something in a previous era we would all have chalked up to not wanting to be get caught playing a prank — not only caused some classrooms to go into lockdown, but for charges to be filed against them.
Lower Pottsgrove Police Chief Mike Foltz said the active shooter drill held at the high school June 11 had been planned long before “the chicken incident” as he referred to it, but the two are not unrelated.
“One of the things we’ve learned from unfortunate experience nationwide is the importance a few seconds can make,” said Foltz.
“Thirty seconds can save many lives, and it means officers have to be hyper vigilant all the time and may need to make snap decisions. So what if the school resource officer had been on the other side of that door when those kids brought in the chicken?” Foltz said.
“He would have needed to make a split-second decision that could have gone very wrong,” Foltz said. “The way the world is now, police have to be hyper-vigilant and in some cases, that leads to people saying we’re over-reacting, but we’re walking a very fine line.”
As another example, he noted that someone flew an ultra-light airplane over the high school campus during graduation.
“At one time, we just all would have thought that was neat, but even though there’s nothing illegal about it, now our officers have to look at that as a potential threat,” said Foltz. “I would just hope that someone who is going to do something like that would let us know beforehand.”
“So really, we need to be prepared for anything. So what if I’m the first person to arrive at an incident, I may be going inside? In which case I’m not going to be the person in command and we need a clear chain of command,” he explained.
So he and his peers in West Pottsgrove and Upper Pottsgrove have worked out those details in advance.
Training for nonemergency personnel
Another thing the drills provide is experience for those who are not police, because in such incidents, everyone is emergency personnel.
Foltz said looking at the possibility of such an attack in Pottsgrove began when Shellie Feola was still Superintendent of Schools, but he credited the current Superintendent, William Shirk, for moving things forward faster.
“He really wanted to take it to the next level, so he really deserves a lot of credit for moving this forward,” Foltz said.
The next level meant involving teachers and school staff.
“We began training with our officers after Columbine, but we’ve come to understand this is more than just police who are dealing with this,” Foltz said.
“The teachers need to learn what something like this will look at from their side. We now involve medical staff and even the parents need to learn not to come to the school when an incident happens because they could block emergency routes,” he said.
“The next stage will involve the students, and teaching them to understand what they need to do, and we’ll have to keep doing that as there will be new students every year,” he said. “Sadly, we all need to recognize and prepare for the fact that this can happen anywhere.”
Pottsgrove is not unique in this regard.
John Corcoran, spokesman for the Montgomery County Department of Public Safety, said such drills are becoming more and more common.
“We have a full-time team working with all of the schools on their security issues,” he told Digital First Media. “They coordinate trainings and tabletop exercises in a progression leading up to large scale exercises like the one held Monday.”
New security post in Spring-Ford
In Spring-Ford, where school security has been a subject of discussion since the shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the board hopes to improve security by approving the creation of a new “coordinator of safety and emergency preparedness” position, which it did at its May 29 board meeting.
According to the job description, the person filling the new position — the district’s second devoted solely to security — will have four primary goals: enhancing emergency planning and preparedness, provide a vision for an overall physical security program at all buildings, enhancing workers health and safety and promoting a culture of safety and security.
Among the specific assignments will be to develop “a threat assessment team.”
Board member Mark Dehnert cast the only vote against the creation of the position.
Mirroring debates going on across the county, Dehnert argued that, “with limited resources,” the money for that post would be better spent having armed guards in all of Spring-Ford’s school buildings.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” he has said previously.
Superintendent David Goodin replied that under the current security plan, one of the two security positions in the district will conduct routine “rounds,” or patrols of each school building, in addition to the coordinator position.
Uproar in Boyertown
Assessing threats when they do come can be a tricky business.
After rumors about a threat at Boyertown Area Senior High School blossomed on social media over the Memorial Day weekend, administrators, who had already announced the threat was “non-viable,” had to scramble to deal with parents’ and students’ reactions and rumors to the point that a pop-up “town hall” was called on May 31.
Even with only three hours notice, hundreds showed up to try to get more information, and to complain about the lack of information.
At the request of one parent, high school principal Brett Cooper explained the process conducted by the school and, if necessary, the police, in trying to assess whether a threat is valid or just teens being teens.
It begins with obtaining a written statement from students reporting the threat, following up with other students who may have been witnesses, and then looking for corroboration among the statements, Cooper said.
“We look for trigger words, and some of them were mentioned tonight, like ‘bang,’ shots,’ ‘gun,’ ‘bomb’ and those sort of things to determine whether or not its something to be taken to the next level,” he said.
“And is it something that is specific with time, or location, that sort of thing. That’s how we determine if it’s a viable threat or not, and how we respond,” Cooper said.
Boyertown Police Chief Barry Leatherman reminded the crowd that thinking about school threats is evolving as more and more of them are carried out.
“The things that trigger an alert now, are things we probably would have ignored as recently as five years ago,” Leatherman said.
Assistant Superintendent MaryBeth Torchia reminded the crowd that due to privacy laws and school policies, there is only so much information that can be released to the public.
Even after the meeting, when it was revealed some believed the threat to be against a ninth grade class assembly, there was some talk on social medial about armed parents showing up on the day of the assembly to act as guards.
On June 12, the Boyertown School Board approved spending $355,649 on improved security measures for the district’s buildings.
On Thursday, the Phoenixville School Board reviewed for the second time an update to the policy governing the use of metal detectors at the school.
Pottstown threat
Similar complaints were made on Pottstown Schools’ Facebook page beneath a statement posted there Thursday about a threat at the high school June 7.
The language was about as vague as the language that upset the Boyertown parents, although it did not even mention which school.
“The administration investigated and identified the source of the concern. The situation was addressed immediately. As a result of the information shared with the staff, we were able to quickly address the concern and keep everyone safe,” according to the statement.
“This is ridiculous. You can’t post vague things like this and expect us to not be even more concerned than we already are. There definitely needs to be more clarification,” Shana Marie Enochs responded on Facebook.
“Exactly, no idea what this means! How about some specifics?” posted James Franey.
John Armato, a school board member, the district’s director of community relations and a parent, said he understands how frustrating such vague statements can be, but emphasized that the district must try to walk the line between informing the community and not encouraging future activity by offering too many specifics.
What he could say was that the police were notified and investigated the matter; that the student was removed from school and is currently being seen by a mental health professional.
“What I hope people take away from this is that the system we’ve set up worked, students reported an issue, we investigated, involved the proper authorities and, hopefully, prevented an incident which could have cause harm,” Armato said.
3 shooter drills a year
In Pottstown, prevention comes from preparation and practice — three drills per year in every school.
Boyer expressed satisfaction with Monday’s drill at Lincoln. She had tried something different and wanted to see how the staff and students would react. They did not disappoint.
As part of Pottstown’s process, after the drill and the children return to their classroom — or their classroom is returned from a barricaded refuge to normal — teachers review the simple mantra of “run, hide, fight.”
In Kristin Lafferty’s firstgrade class, she explains to her students why first they barricaded the door with her file cabinet, as they have in the past, but then fled when the walkie talkie reported Fadigan on the second floor of the building.
Stacey Vandruff asked her students what they had learned, and what they thought they could do better next time.
Boyer said she does not find that too many of the children become scared by the drills, that they look at them much like fire drills.
“Frankly,” said Foltz, “its more like statistically that we’ll have an active shooter drill in a school than a fire. I’ve been a police officer for almost 30 years and when I started no one would have ever thought something like this could happen,” said Foltz.