WATCH: School & Safety Officials Seek to Balance Preparedness & Mental Health

School district leaders and law enforcement officials walked a delicate line on September 21 as they discussed the need to keep students safe in an era of mass shootings while also assuaging concerns about students themselves being targeted by profiling or traumatized by school safety drills.

“It is about supporting the student,” said South Orange-Maplewood School District Director of Safety Stanley Valles at the 2023 South Orange-Maplewood School District Safety and Security Forum. “This is not about profiling.”

Valles made this statement after explaining the make up of the 10 new BTAM — Behavioral Threat Assessment Management — teams that have been formed for each school in the district as mandated by state law. There is also a districtwide BTAM team made up of the district’s Senior Leadership Team.

Valles noted that all New Jersey schools were required to have BTAM teams and the teams themselves are required to consist of the principal/senior administrator, school psychologist/counselor/social worker, the school liaison to law enforcement, the school safety specialist, and a teaching staff member.

The teams will work to help students who “raised concerns, gather additional information, assess the risk posed to the community and advise parents or guardians.” In addition, the team “will develop intervention and management strategies to support the students and mitigate any risk of harm to anyone.”

Valles shared another “exciting new update — in 2019, Alyssa’s Law required us to have silent panic alarms in all our buildings throughout our district … every single school in the South Orange-Maplewood School District is compliant.” Valles said the system was tested “constantly.”

“Some new news — our IT team is working on implementing a remote lockdown device for mass notification. I’m looking forward to that occurring,” said Valles. Valles appeared to be referring to the Alertus system first championed by his predecessor Dr. Thomas Shea.

Valles also announced that drone flights would be taking place over the schools in the coming days and weeks in order to generate school mapping that is required by another new state law. The mapping will be shared with law enforcement so that “our officers will be able to digitally pull up that map on any electronic device and find their way to our students.”

South Essex Fire Chief Joseph Alvarez, South Orange Police Chief Ernesto Morillo and Maplewood Police Chief Albert Sally attested to their collaborative relationship with Valles — who has now been on the job for a year — and district senior leadership, and said they had been able to participate in walkthroughs in order to familiarize themselves with the buildings.

Morillo invoked the specter of school shootings to stress the seriousness of the situation and explain the need for walkthroughs and drills: “We try to see what we can do to improve or increase the survival rate… I know some parents sometimes are uncomfortable with the whole drilling process and the walkthrough processes that take place, but we do the best that we can to minimize interaction with law enforcement while these processes are going on. And where we want the focus to be is between the faculty and staff of the school and the students because that is where the students’ greatest interaction is going to be if one of these occurrences is to happen.”

“We want the students to be familiar with the process so that they don’t freeze,” said Morillo, adding that the aim was to make the response “muscle memory” — “giving a child or anyone in the school an opportunity to be a survivor and not a victim.”

Valles, who is a CHS graduate, noted that the buildings had changed enormously since his days here as a student and continued to change with the Long Range Facilities Plan. He stressed the importance of the walkthroughs.

Valles also reported that Supt. Dr. Ronald Taylor was hosting quarterly security meetings with law enforcement, district staff and building personnel and leaders.

Questions

The forum quickly moved to questions submitted by parents. The questions illustrated the conflicting and multiple fears parents had on the topic of safety. One parent wanted to know what the district was doing to proactively monitor threats; others wanted to know how to mitigate the traumatic impact of the drills on students — and asked why students needed to be present for such drills. Yet another parent worried that security personal could harm students while doing bathroom checks.

Some of the responses were frustratingly vague (and Taylor had indicated that some of the questions submitted were not able to be responded to due to confidentiality standards), while others revealed specific and surprising new information.

When asked about what was being done differently this year to deter fights in the middle and high school, Taylor said, “We are very transparent about incidents, as transparent as we can be.” He directed parents to the district website for a list of incidents, but, as Village Green, has reported, the data are vague. Additionally, Board of Education members complained of the lack of details in Student Safety Data System (SSDS) Part 1 data presented in August and the inability to drill down on incidents by week or month in order to determine trends.

Taylor pointed to work on Climate and Culture that the district outlined in May. Read more here: With Suspensions Up, South Orange-Maplewood Schools Plan More Aggressive Approach to Restorative Practices

Valles responded, “This year I’ve noticed the teachers are present in the hallways more .. in the doorways, our teachers are more present .. building those relationships with our students.”

Notably, Taylor reported that CCTVs had been installed throughout the district in response to a question about use of technology. Valles noted that some of the new cameras — “I’m not going to say where” — had night vision capabilities.

Regarding the question about security guards entering the bathrooms, Valles said that the checks happen hourly and are important, since bathrooms are the scene of much student harm.

Valles remembered his days as a student: “Other things that happened in the bathroom — people fought, people got bullied, people felt upset, people didn’t go to class.” He said that guards are instructed to have one foot in and one foot out and call into the bathroom during their checks.

“So they want to make sure our students are in class … not to harass the students, not to abuse the students, but to make sure our students are safe.”

Other information that came up during questions: The Underhill Sports Complex, where CHS junior Moussa Fofana was shot and killed in 2021, is now patrolled 24/7. Taylor also said that all elementary schools now had security guards.

A parent asked about checking students IDs at the high school. Valles said the scanning machines were in place and IDs were being scanned and checked.

CONTENT WARNING: The forum video below contains a short video (from 8:45-10:15) which does not depict scenes of violence but does contain content that may be disturbing.