The Cornell Family Life Education Office in Seneca County is hosting a roundtable on the topic of safe schools on June 7 from 10 am to noon. They are involving a prof from CU who has spent decades researching the topic of violence. May be some stuff worth sharing...

At last week's BOE meeting we approved a video surveillance plan for the three active entrances we have to our building. Aside from a central monitor with VCR, it will tie into our computer network so we can monitor the doorways from any workstation on our network ( all offices and classrooms). We also approved an in-house silent alarm connecting each of our offices similar to a nurse's station button in hospital. We are exploring speeddial from all teacher phones to an in-house 911 type of number automatically relayed to each office.

On the preventive side we are implementing Peer mediation and exploring Natural Helpers, as well as funding a part-time school social worker in the general fund budget.

Small steps, but some, anyway.

Jack- I think it is wise to try to have common expectations for kids between home school and voc ed center, BUT given the diversity of our region, I think this will be very difficult to accomplish.

Walt and anyone else interested- we are working with Colacino Electric out of Newark. We're not installed yet but hope to be by month's end. Total cost for five doors monitored and tied to network = $5,000. Will let people know how well it works when we have something up and running.

We plan to install the "official" video monitors for our three unlocked entrances in the office of the transportation dispatcher/school switchboard operator ( one person in Romo). From there a card is supposed to allow us to connect the monitors to the network file server so that we can select which stations on the network ( my office and the principals' offices for sure)will have access. I hope it works as good as it sounds.

Just read Joe's message to the Lt. Gov's Public Hearing and wanted to comment on it. Very thoughtful, very articulate, and very accurate - the security measures are far from a sufficient response. The promotion of schools as caring environments and parts of caring communities is essential to the prevention of such symptoms of a cultural disease that these incidents of school violence represent. We all want the disease treated when we go to the doctor, not just the symptoms. Nice job, Joe. Thanks for representing us so well.

We did NOT put our monitoring cameras on the file server for distribution over our network at the advice on the BOCES install crew here this summer. We have placed monitors in all offices and so far things seem to be working well. You can certainly see when there's activitiy in an area of the building that's supposed to be locked down, anyway. Only positive reaction to date- no negative.