Lynn police probe put hold on needle news

LYNN – Lynn School Superintendent Catherine Latham on Thursday said Tracy School parents were not informed that a second-grader found a syringe and used it to prick himself and another student until five days after the March 24 incident.”There was an active police investigation and the (police) chief asked us not to speak about this publicly until the investigation was complete,” Latham explained Thursday. “As soon as we got the call (Tuesday) that the police investigation was over and there were no criminal charges, we immediately informed parents (using the district’s phone system) in both English and Spanish.”Police Chief Kevin Coppinger said Thursday he did ask Latham not to make a public statement during the police investigation “because we knew this would become a big thing” in the media.”As far as informing parents, that’s up to the School Department,” Coppinger said.Latham said only Tracy School parents were informed by phone Tuesday, but that elementary students district-wide will receive the show-and-tell presentation already given to Tracy students, to help prevent this from happening again.Latham said she had no specific information about where or what time of the school day the March 24 incident occurred. Asked how it could occur without an adult noticing, she said, “I think anything can happen when a teacher looks away for a few minutes or is writing on a blackboard. We catch most everything, but some things do get by.”Latham said the school learned of the incident the next day, when a parent sent a girl to school with a note for her teacher, that the girl had mentioned other kids at school had a needle.”The teacher immediately went to the principal and the principal immediately called Officer (Robert) Ferrari and my office to figure out what to do,” Latham said.Lynn Director of Public Health MaryAnn O’Connor said Thursday she also was not informed of the incident until Tuesday. O’Connor, however, was not critical of the School Department.”This was a single incident. I don’t think it warranted a public announcement,” she said, adding, however, that she does believe school parents should be informed quickly of such incidents. O’Connor said she works closely with Lead School Nurse Katherine McNutly “and she is very good about calling if they need me.”Asked how prevalent the problem of discarded syringes is on Lynn streets, O’Connor said, “Same as every other city.”It’s less of a problem in Lynn today, she said, than when she began on her current job eight years ago. “It was a problem in the downtown and the Union Street area ? My office has only been called one time; we were told there were needles at a Frey Playground on Walnut Street. We searched and couldn’t find anything.”O’Connor said the Tracy School incident was the first time in her years on the job that there’s been a report of a child picking up a used needle and playing with it.”It’s rare,” she said.The incident, meanwhile, points to the high risks of improperly discarded syringes.”We do get calls on occasion to pick up syringes and we have boxes in all the cruisers to put them in,” Coppinger said. “Yesterday I was speaking with our captain of detectives about this and he theorized a lot of junkies may have discarded needles over the winter by tossing them into snowbanks and the needles have been covered up with all the snow we had. Now with the snow gone, we may see a little spike in the number of needles.”Despite the occasional spike, Coppinger said he’s not an advocate of clean needle exchange programs such as those in place in Boston, Cambridge, Northampton and Provincetown.In fact, Lynn was on a losing side of a Supreme Judicial Court ruling in 2002, in a suit that challenged those state Department of Public Health needle exchange pilot programs.The city sued because those who use those programs are issued a card that exempts them from arrest in other communities for possession of drug paraphernalia.”If there is a participant in the Cambridge progra