Portsmouth tightens up its school buildings

District puts buildings on fast track for security upgrades

By Jim McGaw
Posted 2/22/18

PORTSMOUTH — Allan Garcia stands inside the new “mantrap” at Hathaway Elementary School, pointing to all the high-tech security upgrades designed to deny unwelcome visitors …

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Portsmouth tightens up its school buildings

District puts buildings on fast track for security upgrades

Posted

PORTSMOUTH — Allan Garcia stands inside the new “mantrap” at Hathaway Elementary School, pointing to all the high-tech security upgrades designed to deny unwelcome visitors access to the building.

He can’t divulge all the details on what those upgrades are, choosing to refer to the improvements as a “hardening” of the foyer.

“We can’t give away the playbook,” explained Mr. Garcia, the district’s safety and security coordinator.

However, he’s confident the safety improvements being made to the district’s four schools will serve as a model for the rest of Rhode Island.

“This is state of the art,” he said. “When this is done, this is going to be the district that everyone measures themselves up to.” 

The schools’ new mantraps are among several security upgrades the district is making in an attempt to thwart potentially dangerous intruders. The ongoing enhancements come on the heels of an incident at the high school Jan. 30 in which a former student forced his way into the field house and assaulted a gym teacher, as well as a Florida high school shooting Feb. 14 that left 17 people dead. 

School officials, however, say the improvements were already in the works since they were part of a three-year, $423,000 capital improvement project ratified in June 2017. 

However, the School Committee, on the advice of administrators, decided to speed up the upgrades by voting Feb. 13 to combine the last two years of the plan in the 2019 fiscal budget. The district is looking to spend $225,000 in fiscal 2019 for the remaining upgrades.

“It seemed clear we should not delay,” said School Committee Chairwoman Terri Cortvriend. “I’m talking to teachers about (the high school intruder incident) and what we just saw in Florida. Teachers and parents are on edge. Everybody’s on edge.”

“We’ve been very proactive,” added Matt Murphy, the district’s director of facilities. “This isn’t reactive and I think people may think we’re reacting to that (PHS intruder) event. This is something we’ve been working on for a while. We made some adjustments since, but we’ve been working on this plan with the superintendent for some time.”

Mr. Garcia said the intruder incident “just brought things to light and it’s served as a motivation to put this thing together.”

Nothing happens in a vacuum, however. Mr. Garcia is quick to point out that no one security upgrade can guarantee the safety of everyone inside a school building. They all have to work in concert, with teachers and other staff members on the same page and properly trained on what to do in the event of an emergency.

A former sergeant with the Middletown Police Department, Mr. Garcia has spent much of his career training other cops and educators on how to defend against school attacks. (See related story.) 

First hired as the local school district’s part-time truancy officer two years ago, Mr. Garcia later got more involved in what he’s best at: school safety and shooter response.

‘Holes in our game’

“When I came here, we found some things were lacking,” said Mr. Garcia.

He went around to the different properties with a school safety checklist that’s required by law — and which he helped design.

“I went to each school: Do we have this —yes or no? There are about 500 items,” he said. “We had some holes in our game and it’s not uncommon with a town like this, where we live in a ‘It never could happen here, U.S.A.’ town.”

Many small towns have a “cultural utopia,” he said. “I was born and raised in Newport, Middletown. I get it; we don’t see a lot of that stuff. But look at these people in Florida. They were probably thinking the same thing,” Mr. Garcia said.

He pointed out that one of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was only 13 miles away when police searched UMass Dartmouth, where he was a student. That same year, he said, the Washington Navy Yard shooter was only a few miles from the school — holed up in a Newport hotel for seven days — a month before the attack.

“The devil’s at our door, as it is everywhere,” he said.

The most important development was getting a school resource officer (SRO) in the schools, he said. The first was assigned to the high school, and another was hired for the middle school through a grant, he said.

“There is no panacea with armed intruder/school shooter attacks, but the best defense is an armed good guy,” he said. “I’m very happy that every day we have police officers that patrol our schools. They break up their time; one has each of the grammar schools.”

Teaching the teachers

Next was professional development for school staff. While studying other school shootings throughout the country, Mr. Garcia said he quickly recognized one of the biggest obstacles in warding off an attack.

“I realized right off the bat that we were always showing up too late. We’re kind of missing the boat here because we’re not teaching teachers how to react, recognize and how to prevent these things,” he said. “We wanted to change the mindset from, ‘This is Portsmouth — nothing happens here,’ to ‘This is Portsmouth — things could happen.’ There are a lot of things you can do besides just panic.”

As an example, he talked to teachers and staff members about school lockdowns, which are commonly used when an intruder is spotted. Lockdowns are not always the answer, however, and they can often cause problems, he said.

“They were locked down at Sandy Hook. What happened?” Mr. Garcia said. “Lockdowns came from the prison environment, where one thing is consistent with the schools: accountability — we can lose people. Other than that, what are the other similarities? There are 50 tools in the toolbox; the lockdown is just one wrench.”

Staff members were taught when and how to safely evacuate students, the difference between cover and concealment, and other information that’s common knowledge to military and law enforcement but not to educators.

“But it’s high time they start knowing this stuff,” Mr. Garcia said. “There have been 300 mass shootings since Columbine. In real time, when these things happen, the cops aren’t the ones who are going to mitigate the loss. It’s the teachers, it’s the staff, it’s the custodian in the hallway who tells them, ‘Kids, climb out the window.’”

‘Brick and mortar’ upgrades

After that, the district turned its attention to “brick and mortar stuff,” Mr. Garcia said. 

“We had an issue here with visitor management,” he said. “We were using the old prehistoric pad and paper. You know as well as I do — it’s human nature — the front office staff is not trained on how to handle stuff like an armed intruder coming in the building.”

Besides training front office staff on how to handle suspicious visitors, the upgrades include new, $25,000 mantraps at each of the schools’ front entrances, where the points of attacks are usually located. 

Visitors to Hathaway, for example, are used to pressing a button outside the front door, with someone in the main office across the main lobby viewing a grainy video monitor for identification purposes. If they’re satisfied, the visitor is buzzed in. 

“And now you’re in the skin of the building,” Mr. Garcia said. 

After the upgrade is completed, however, visitors will pass through an unlocked door and into the “mantrap” to be vetted via a 4K-quality video and audio monitoring system. An unarmed security guard — the schools’ fiscal 2019 operating budget calls for four of them — would be just outside the mantrap, ready to immediately notify staff members of anyone suspicious via radio.

“They’ll help vet people coming into main entrances and assisting SROS. It will be another set of eyes,” Mr. Garcia said.

If the visitor appears dangerous, a press of a button will lock the front door and trap the suspect inside the small enclosure, he said.

“It’s buying you safety, but it’s also buying you time,” said Mr. Garcia said. “No other school district in Rhode Island has this.”

Security ‘towers’

Security “towers” have already been installed at each school as part of the security upgrades. While they’ll be valuable in the event of a mass shooting or other school attack, the towers will also come in handy if someone got injured on a playground or fell ill, Mr. Garcia said.

“These towers work real simple. There’s a big red button. You push it, and it calls the front desk of the police department,” he said. 

If the caller is unable to talk, police will still know his location. And, if someone wants to play a prank, police will know who they are. “We vectored cameras on them,” Mr. Garcia said.

There are two towers at the high school — one on the south end of the building and another at the football field. Mr. Garcia said the athletic field is accessed by many people at all times of the year, so it made sense to have one there in case of an emergency and when someone doesn’t have access to a cellphone. 

The towers are solar-powered with a blue light that comes on at nightfall, which serves as another crime deterrent, he said.

“We’re the only school district in the state of Rhode Island that has these at the grammar schools,” he said.

Key card system

Mr. Garcia has also led efforts to tighten up access to school buildings. 

“For years, our buildings were very porous,” he said. “Doors were open, doors were unlocked. People said keys were copied and passed down from senior class to senior class and people were coming in and out. That’s unacceptable.”

The district is in the process of installing an access control key card system similar to those found in industrial buildings. “It will be tied into our video monitoring, and the doors that don’t have the readers will be secured,” Mr. Garcia said. 

Should the district need to terminate an employee, his or her card will be deactivated with just a keystroke, he said.

After he was done showing a reporter some of the upgrades at Hathaway School, a parent stopped to thank both Mr. Garcia and Mr. Murphy, especially in light of the Florida school shootings.

“It’s scary. We had to sit down with our 6- and 10-year-old last night,” she said.

“Rest assured,” Mr. Garcia told her. “When this is done, these will be, construction wise, the safest schools in the State of Rhode Island.”

He added, “These are our community treasures — our kids. People need to start taking that seriously.”

Portsmouth School Department, Portsmouth School Committee, Portsmouth High School, Melville School, Hathaway School, Portsmouth Middle School

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