MASSENA — The latest iteration of the Massena Central School District’s safety plan is now available for public review and comments prior to school board approval in August.
The plan can be found at wdt.me/NGNheF, and comments or suggestions can be emailed to District Safety Team co-chair Alan C. Oliver at aoliver@mcs.k12.ny.us.
District Safety Team co-chair Duane L. Richards Jr. updated board of education members on the plan. He said the plan “basically presents or minimizes the effects of serious violent incidents, and it also helps us coordinate our district with local and community resources.”
“One of our roles as a safety team is to be able to review and update this plan so that you as a school board can adopt it and have it in place by Sept. 1,” he said.
He said the plan was a team effort by the District Safety Team.
“I’m very proud of the District Safety Team. We had a very successful school year. We had completed evacuation drills at every one of our buildings. We had tabletop drills in every one of our buildings, and we completed the 12 required emergency drills in all buildings very successfully,” he said.
He said there were “broad strokes” in the district’s safety plan, unlike building-level safety plans that went into more detail that’s not available to the public.
“You really get to the secret nitty gritty in each individual building plan. That where the annex is, the stuff that we don’t publish,” Richards said.
He said the safety plan was reviewed annually and much of it “is a repeat of what you’ve seen last year,” but had some updates including staff contact numbers. He said there were also two major plans that also had to be included — remote instruction and suicide prevention.
The plan is broken down into three sections. The first section defines the purpose of the plan and the concept of the operation, while section two is mitigation, prevention and response planning. He said that’s where the discussion is contained regarding lockdown and evacuation drills, tabletop exercises, partnerships with local agencies and visitor protocols, as well as other information.
Section three covers the district’s response to events.
“That’s communication, whether it’s cancellations, delays, evacuations, the whole process that’s involved in that,” Richards said.
A new section is titled district plans.
“The first plan is listed there as a threat assessment plan. That’s not new to the district. It’s well-established. Each building has their threat assessment piece, and there’s also a district threat assessment piece to that, so that plan is well in place,” he said.
The new section also addresses cybersecurity, suicide prevention, conflict resolution and remote instruction. Richards said the remote instruction plan is similar to what the district instituted post-pandemic.
More work is still to be done, including the addition of protocols for first aid and CPR training, as well as swatting. Police describe swatting as contacting law enforcement agencies with false reports of criminal activity or, in these cases, fake threats of bombs or shooters at schools. Making threats that illicit a heavy police response is called swatting because they can lead to a response from heavily armed SWAT teams.
The plan must be submitted to the state Education Department by Sept. 1, following approval by the board of education during its Aug. 17 meeting.
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