Swampscott principal: Booze-drug use ‘worse’

SWAMPSCOTT – Swampscott High School principal Layne Millington said Thursday he remains convinced that drug and alcohol problems at the school are serious and need to be addressed in a serious manner.”Compared to other schools I’ve been in, it’s worse,” Millington, who’s been principal since July, said Thursday. “During the first month and a half I was here there were a ton of incidents. There was at least five right off the bat, involving either individual kids or kids at parties, and we had a near fatality.”He declined to describe the incidents in detail because people would know who was involved, but called the near-fatal incident “scary as sin.”Millington also said there will be a second meeting on the school’s new chemical health policy, which is scheduled to go into effect in late March.The meeting will be held at the high school on Jan. 26 at 6:30 p.m. and parents will be allowed to comment on the policy and to pose questions to Millington, two things that weren’t allowed during most of the two meetings held on Monday night. The press will also be allowed to attend, the principal said.Millington said he made the decision to bar the press and not allow questions at Monday’s meetings after he heard some parents were planning to stage a protest by turning up the ringers on their cell phones and then having someone call them repeatedly during the meeting.”I made the decision on the fly while I was standing there (not to allow the press or take questions),” he said. “I didn’t think anything constructive would come out of taking questions considering what I had been told.”Millington also said he been told by “a number of folks who had lost kids to drugs and alcohol” that they wanted to attend, and he didn’t want things to become unruly.”Maybe it was a good choice, maybe it was a bad choice,” he said.A Daily Item reporter was barred from attending after first being told the press could attend the event.Swampscott resident Ronald Brooks said many parents, including him, were angry that were ordered to attend the meeting or their children couldn’t participate in sports or extra-curricular clubs.In addition, the parents were forced to sign a form saying they had reviewed the chemical health policy and “agree to abide by these rules as a condition for participating in athletics or extracurricular activities at Swampscott High School.”Brooks, a retired federal criminal investigator whose daughter attends the high school, said he was angry _ and acknowledged that two police officers came up to him during the meeting and cautioned him that he was being disorderly _ because parents were not allowed to speak during the first of the two meetings on Monday.”You’ve commanded all of us to be here, shouldn’t we have an opportunity to talk about the policy? before it’s crammed down our throats,” Brooks said Thursday.The crux of the change in the policy is that now students who want to participate in all extracurricular activities _ and not just sports _ will be forced to abide by the policy, according to Millington.But Brooks said Millington is “out of touch” with students in the school and “seems to believe Swampscott has a much more serous problem than neighboring communities.””I believe Swampscott has a serious drug problem, but no more serious than other communities in the United States,” he said.Brooks also said he feels the new principal is being too strict, and said Millington was not only looking at police reports he received to monitor teenage drinking and drug use, but looking at student Facebook pages as well.”He told us flat out, I look at the Internet, I look at Facebook,” Brooks said.”The ACLU(American Civil Liberties Union) contacted me. They think there’s serious civil rights violations and they’re requested a copy of the tape (of the meeting.”Christopher Ott, spokesman for the Massachusetts Branch of the ACLU, said Thursday the group has been “following the situation, but we’re not formally involved yet.”Both Brooks and his