Firm to examine security measures at Katonah-Lewisboro schools

CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - A firm specializing in school security will assess the safeguards now in place at Katonah-Lewisboro schools and present their findings to district officials, perhaps by this spring, Schools Superintendent Ray Blanch said last week.

The announcement comes as parents of students at Increase Miller Elementary School continue their months-long pursuit of a police presence on the IM campus. Blanch, in his presentation to school board members near the close of their Jan. 16 meeting, did not link the parents’ calls for a school resource officer (SRO) to the new security initiative.

At present, KLSD has one SRO. With an office at John Jay High School, he also visits the district’s three elementary schools and the middle school. 

Earlier in the meeting, as parents renewed their SRO appeal, a mother of two IM students told the board, “Since a school shooting can’t be predicted by even the best risk assessors, it’s really our responsibility to be fully prepared by having an immediate response time. And the only way of getting that is to have a dedicated SRO.”

At last month’s meeting, another mother, Agnes Petrocelli, warning that school shootings were random and unpredictable, said, “It could certainly happen here.” She urged the school board to “find the budget to give our school its own dedicated SRO.”

At the same meeting, Trustee Roddy Burke, a member of the KLSD Finance Committee and its former chairman, said money could be found to pay for an increased SRO presence if fact-finding supported that commitment. “How do we come to a decision on this?” he asked.

“How do we find data that we can rely upon and that we can stand behind with the community to say, ‘Here’s what we’re basing our decisions on’?  . . . If we feel that this is really important for our district, we’ll find a way to fund it.”

The superintendent, in discussing the Altaris survey last week, said, “In essence, they’re going to come and look at the schools’ safety and security from a layered approach. . . . It’s a very thorough look we’ll get.”

After Altaris completes its study, Blanch said, the consultants are “not going to come and say, ‘Hire this or hire that or do those things.’ They’ll tell you, ‘Here’s some options that we would be looking at from our experience. . . . They’ll present multiple layers of the safety and security in our schools.”