Editorial

Safe Schools Mean
Secure Future

Back in the Dark Ages when some of us were in elementary school, it was a privilege to take the attendance sheet to the principal's office. Not any longer. These days, as several children attending P.S. 89 in Elmhurst learned to their cost last month, a short trip through the halls of their school can be as fraught with peril as a stroll through a mine field. Four pupils in primary grades were sexually attacked by a pedophile lurking in the halls of their school as they ran errands for their teachers. A fifth child was also attacked a week earlier, presumably by the same individual.

Earlier in the school year another child, this one a kindergartner, also running an errand for a teacher, walked out of his elementary school and went to his day care center a half mile away. No one noticed he was missing until the day care center called the child's mother. That the child was unhurt was due far more to luck than good management on anyone's part.

The incidents at P.S. 89 are believed to have been crimes of opportunity that occurred when an unguarded side door was opened for a delivery and left unlocked. Also, the incidents took place during Open School Week, when a number of unfamiliar faces were to be seen around the school, once again allowing the predator easy access to the prey he sought.

All the incidents point up an unsettling fact: although school safety officers are under Police Department supervision, security in area schools is still dangerously lacking. Last spring a survey conducted by the Vera Institute for the central Board of Education found that over half of 137 principals of elementary, middle, intermediate and junior high schools said they did not have an adequate number of school security officers or that regularly assigned safety officers were not replaced when absent.

While the Vera institute study found that principals were initially skeptical about losing control of school safety officers to the Police Department, 36 percent of those questioned said supervision of school safety officers was more effective after the takeover, 26 percent said school safety agents were more responsive and 17 percent said their relationship with police had improved after the transfer. However, in the light of the clear evidence that a pedophile could walk the halls of an elementary school undetected and challenged, plainly more needs to be done. An organization calling itself Concerned Parents of Queens called for year-round police protection, alarms that ring when doors are opened, an officer on permanent foot patrol inside the building and a security guard on each floor of a school.

The organization points out that an initial incident of an intruder in P.S. 89 attempting to accost a child was reported to the principal and then apparently went no further. Perhaps the most important of the demands made involve better communication between the school administration and the parents of the children who attend. Greater parental participation in security decisions is demanded, as is training for parents and children both . They also call for the installation of a telephone system throughout the school. "Our children are not messengers," they declare.

A thorough investigation should be conducted and steps immediately undertaken to ensure the safety of the children who attend the schools in the borough and throughout the city. Whether or not such steps include the removal of P.S. 89 Principal Cleonice LoSecco, other administrators and the Parent-Teacher Association is a decision that would be premature at this time. While the Concerned Parents of Queens and the other parents of children at P.S. 89 and other schools throughout the city are right in their demands that the schools be immediately made safer for the students attending them, a rush to judgment and scapegoating obvious targets will not achieve the laudable goal of safer, more secure schools. Better communication between teachers, administrators and parents is a giant step in the right direction, but all concerned must come to the table with one objective--the safety and security of our children. If the children of this city are endangered, so is the future, which ultimately rests on them.