| 0:04:51 | How the lockdown began | Herrington: “I’ll go through as it happened to me, and I’ll go through the things that we found out.” At 0:05:12: “on the afternoon of February 11th, I got a phone call from the River Valley Tech School, the assistant director there.” “I have a report that a student may have a gun in Stevens High School.” The school went into lockdown while he stayed on the phone; then, at 0:06:10, “I just hear her go, oh, God, that’s a gun.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:06:56 | 911 and the police response | “There’s probably about five seconds between hanging up the phone and calling 901 [911].” “I had a police officer running through the door saying, get off the phone.” At 0:07:20: “It was less than a minute”; “the entire lockdown lasted 40 minutes.” | |
| 0:07:57 | Entry, detentions, and the BB gun | “About 10 or 15 police, my guess, came through with loaded weapons.” “They detained one student in a hallway. They found three more in the bathroom. In the bathroom with them was a, what was later found to be a BB gun.” At 0:08:27: “Just from being four feet away, I could not tell the difference.” Camera review showed the four out of class “for about 30 or 40 minutes before the lockdown started.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:10:06 | Sticky notes; a deleted video | “when they tried to hide in a bathroom, they jumped up and tried to put a sticky note on that camera.” At 0:10:28: “The, the assistant tech director went back to video it on her phone, and that video was gone. All right. Deleted.” | |
| 0:11:41 | “That wasn’t real”: community talk of a BB gun | “A lot of the lot of the students have come up to me and said, you know, it’s frustrating when people in the community say, I was BB gun. That wasn’t real.” At 0:12:02: “And that’s what our students had to deal with. And that is what they’re still dealing with”. | |
| 0:12:30 | Two offices did not hear the lockdown | “We found some errors in our, to system. There’s least two offices with people in them that did not hear the lockdown and were just busted in by police with guns.” The school was then gathered in the auditorium and told what happened. | OBSERVATION POSITIVE |
| 0:13:22 | Response time; “we can’t do this alone” | Pratt: “the response time from Plymouth [Claremont] City PD and all the surrounding areas was incredible”. At 0:14:35: “We can go as far as we, we want with security, but we have to know what the what the city and what the community, they want us to go and not go, we can’t do this alone.” | |
| 0:15:52 | A principal’s safety day; drills | Lewis: “from the moment that we enter the building, we’re always watching. We’re always looking. Do we see doors that are proud [propped]?” At 0:16:50: “it’s a whole lot scarier when you’re five”. Blount at 0:17:54: “we are required by the state to do at least two lockdowns a year and two fire drills each year. And I would say we always learn something after every single drill.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:19:36 | Romeo: safety is everyone’s job | “it’s not just my responsibility, but we are all part of the safety of our school”. On money, at 0:20:50: “whether it’s, it’s in the budget or not. If we need it, we need it. Right. So we need to figure out is there a grant?” | |
| 0:21:21 | What changed after the fall threat and February 11 | Pratt: “we had a scare the beginning of the school year where there was an online threatening.” Stairwell floor numbers readable with the doors closed; at 0:22:33, “we put the strobes on the exterior of the building in each ministry [entry]” and emergency lockdown switches in administrative offices; at 0:23:21, radios across buildings: “We do radio checks at least 3 or 4 times a week to make sure they’re online.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:23:53 | Cameras and door hardware | Unidentified panel member: “We applied for a grant, and we were able to add, a bunch more security cameras. We had a lot of blind spots. Before this incident even happened.” At 0:24:25: “He’s added locks for the doors. For keep [keypad] of entry. So the doors, exterior doors are always locked.” Pratt at 0:24:51: a buzzer and cameras at the central office, where “anyone could just walk right in”; and, of the glass he installed at the high-school attendance office as principal, “some people thought it was overkill”. | POSITIVE |
| 0:26:06 | How a bullying report is handled | Herrington: bullying and harassment are legal terms to lawyers; “They’re not legal terms to children.” At 0:26:26: a student statement sheet, “a Google form where they can write down everything”, that “sends a notification to all the administrators.” Restorative circles with the director of restorative justice. Pratt at 0:28:54: “Harassment is a protected category. Bullying is just ongoing.” | |
| 0:30:23 | The behavior matrix | Pratt: discipline “if it’s not consistent and fair. It’s not going to work with students”. At 0:30:46: “We we put the behavior matrix in place, especially for the middle and high school to be as a like as possible.” Lewis and Blount describe the elementary equivalents. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:37:21 | Rep. Hemingway: two ways it could have gone | “My name is Henning Way [Hemingway].” “I have a daughter in CMS.” At 0:37:53: “we have to look at it looked like a real gun and it could have gone different ways.” At 0:38:52: “It’s the largest city in Sullivan County.” “Our our major problem is drugs.” | |
| 0:40:26 | A father who was in the parking lot | “first I’d like to know what we’re doing proactively to identify kids who may have issues.” At 0:41:15: how the four were in the halls so long unnoticed. At 0:41:44: “at that point, the community knew this was not a drill. Something’s going on. There’s a gun in the school.” He thanked responders who “ran in to unknown danger.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:43:29 | Herrington on students of concern | “this is on television, and I want to be respectful, so I’m just keeping generalities.” At 0:43:51: “Every student, that has an issue that may rise to a concern in this building is well known and well worked with.” “There wasn’t any one person involved in this that wasn’t well known by the administrative staff”. | |
| 0:45:49 | The new hallway rule | “if you are not where you were supposed to be and you were out wandering halls, I’m just sending you home. It is. It is a safety risk. I am not playing around.” At 0:46:37: “It is not an ideal situation, but I don’t ever want to be in this place again.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:47:26 | Student principal advisory committee | “I put out to the student body a principal, a student principal advisory committee, about 17 to 20 students.” “the structure is going to be two students for every grade.” Athletes, drama students, uninvolved students, high achievers and strugglers. | POSITIVE |
| 0:48:36 | No one patrols the halls | Pratt: “For the most part, kids aren’t in the hallway. We really don’t have anyone patrolling the hallway.” At 0:49:14, the focus is on the “95 to 98% of the kids who want to be here”. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:50:24 | Is anyone watching the cameras live? | A parent: “if not, you think there would have been any benefit to the incident management or future incident management if there was somebody watching the line?” Pratt at 0:51:00: “So currently we don’t we don’t have anyone watching to defeat [the feed] live to to monitor the halls.” At 0:51:08: the district is “looking at ways to, possibly bring back that position that was here at the high school.” At 0:51:28: “I think it would have made a difference in hindsight.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:51:53 | “sharing the why some things can’t happen” | A parent who does investigations for the state: “when we can’t come up with a preponderance of evidence to prove their allegations” the public is angry; at 0:52:43, “One thing that may be helpful is that, sharing the why some things can’t happen.” Pratt at 0:54:17: “I’m not a mental health person. I’m not a police investigator. But we’re trying to do the best we can in what we have.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:55:57 | Ashley Goff: “This is not a drill.” | “My name is Ashley Goff. I have a son who is a sixth grader at CFS [CMS]”. At 0:56:21: “Other classrooms didn’t know, and they thought this was a drill”. At 0:56:55: “They need to know when it’s real. It needs to be announced. This is not a drill.” Pratt at 0:57:20: at the high school “the kids knew it was real, just by the tone of the inflection”; he will take the question to the police. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:58:55 | Bill Madden, from the podium | “My name is Bill Madden. I have a son. Stevens, graduated this year.” Passes that cannot be checked; a gym door found unlocked. At 1:00:22: teachers told his son at conferences that he was being bullied; “So it is real.” At 1:00:46: “I don’t think the administration know what the simple rules are. As far as discipline, it’s different from different schools. It’s different from one teach it to another teacher and it’s not enforced.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:04:59 | “draw the line in the sand” | Pratt: consistency is lacking; “we have to draw the line in the sand and say, our schools are for kids who want to learn.” At 1:05:59, a commenter: “consistency is absolutely one piece of the transparency.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:07:27 | Rep. Damon on mental health and peers | “I sit on the Education Funding Committee.” An organization premised on the idea that “the students know who is not in a good place”. At 1:08:37: she asks about “connections on mental health and recognizing which students have some needs”. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:09:08 | “very, very difficult to expel the student” | An unnamed speaker who has sat in expulsion and harassment hearings, at 1:09:36: “There is state law that is very precise and very restrictive, and some of these restrictions have come within the last few years.” At 1:10:05: “the advocacy can start in concrete [Concord] as well.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:10:27 | McCosker: two clinicians who never started | “One of the first tactics I had when I came in July, first to find the mental health clinician for us”; the first “never showed us”; the second, at 1:10:52, “Changed her mind. Didn’t want to come.” “We did go sign a contract with Counseling Associates.” At 1:11:16: “So just know that the issues are real.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:13:02 | Enrollment and counselors, from the floor | Crosstalk the diarizer could not separate: “How many students are currently at”; “400”, “And 71?”, “471”; “How many times counselors? One.”; “Two one.”; “One two. Next year.” Pratt at 1:13:51: “I think we only have two, maybe three social workers in the whole district.” At 1:14:12: “Repost and repost and we just can’t find it.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:15:10 | Priscilla Stevens; metal detectors | “Trust transparency foremost because once we lose the trust, it’s very hard to gain back.” Pratt at 1:16:07: “Now we’re not ruling out anything at this point.” | |
| 1:16:44 | Romeo: noticing a child before something happens | At 1:17:06: “We have alerts that we have built in any student after ten minutes.” Pass alerts for “Certain students of interest”. At 1:17:44: “We put every kid’s name up on a sheet during faculty meetings”; students with no check mark go to the counselors “to kind of see and build a bridge and build a rapport with them”. At 1:18:10: “it’s not 100%”. | POSITIVE |
| 1:19:32 | “zero bullying incidents” in the state data | “I looked at the Stevens High School board for the last three years, 21 through 24, there were zero bullying incidents.” At 1:19:55: “where do we go to find out what’s really going on?” Pratt at 1:20:05: “They probably haven’t gotten around to updating it.” “So we can say we definitely have bullying.” At 1:20:44: “We could probably get what we have before we went out to the state.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:22:09 | A retired teacher on buy-in | “whatever we do as adults, the kids have become a buy in. If if they don’t, it won’t work.” “I would challenge any school board members, parents who are interested in if they could be allowed to go into a school for a day”. | |
| 1:24:22 | The matrix is not followed evenly | “you got the matrix and all of this kind of stuff, and it is not followed exactly as written across the district by, you know, per teacher, per administrator and whatnot.” Pratt at 1:25:03: “No, I agree with you. And I’m not going to argue that is because we know it’s it’s not.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:26:37 | Metal detectors, and who pays | “I don’t think the the tax rate could handle another increase, but I would I would definitely go get some grants”. Pratt at 1:27:43: “As far as the detectors, goggles [Google] looked into it”; at 1:27:58, “It’s not something we want to pass on to the taxpayers”. | |
| 1:28:29 | “the previous administration did not listen to us” | “I think that’s because the previous administration did not listen to us.” “Mr. Romeo has done an incredible job with the changes.” At 1:29:00: “So come talk, express your opinions, give your input”. | |
| 1:29:26 | Closing: two committees | Pratt: “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and it’s my 10th year of superintendent.” At 1:29:48: “I would say December. I started a superintendents community committee.” At 1:31:09: “hopefully at some point we get the two committees together”; “We’re not there yet.” | POSITIVE |