Dear Editor:
Thank you Dianne Singh for supporting The Children First Team with this letter to The Jersey Journal about last week’s school security breach at the trailer at PS41.
Today’s security breach involved an autistic student who was found at a bus stop after managing to get out of his school building. This is the 3rd security-related incident in the last 2 weeks.
The district is failing to keep our children safe. The ratios of students to security guards (250:1) are clearly ineffective, especially considering that we live in a high-alert terrorism zone.
Last year this time, the district hired an outside “security firm” to “assess our schools’ vulnerabilities. (My running mate, Lorenzo Richardson, recalls receiving frantic calls and texts from school staffers across the city who stated that “armed gunmen” were in the schools – the principals and security guards were given no notice of the men’s arrival that day. My running mate Gerald Lyons, a board member at the time, later exposed the fact that the district secretly hired the firm. I’d like to see that vulnerability report Ranade commissioned and know what was actually implemented from the findings.
The security guards of the Jersey City Public Schools perform a difficult job in understaffed environments yet they know our children individually and personally. They know exactly what the problems and vulnerabilities are.
As a member of the Jersey City Board of Education, my first order of business will be to meet and collaborate with the security staff and their union to discuss the safety issues security guards see every day and present to Dr. Lyles and the administration a proper Vulnerability Report that will highlight the gaps and areas in need of improvement.
I look forward to working with the administration on implementing real changes to make our children safe including hiring more security guards – especially in schools with large pre k and special needs populations.
Gina Verdibello
Candidate for the Jersey City Board of Education