SWAMPSCOTT — The school district recently acquired $310,000 in Community Oriented Policing Services grant funding from the Department of Justice, which will be used to fund a number of district-wide school safety improvements.
“We are deeply grateful to the COPS program for recognizing the importance of school safety and supporting our efforts to create a secure and nurturing environment for our students,” Superintendent Pamela Angelakis said. “This grant will enable us to implement cutting-edge security technologies and provide essential training, ensuring that our schools remain safe havens for learning and growth.”
The funding will be directed toward several initiatives, such as district-wide school shooter response training sessions for police officers and school staff following the “I Love U Guys” standard response protocol, and an enhanced exterior camera system that allows police to monitor live feeds coming from schools’ exterior cameras.
Swampscott Public Schools Technology Director Lytania Mackey said the district currently has blind spots in some of its exterior school camera systems and that the currently installed security cameras were outdated, lacking the ability to move horizontally or clearly capture faces. The new cameras, slated for installation in June, can more efficiently monitor school perimeters and allow law enforcement officers to see multiple feeds simultaneously.
“We want more cameras focused on our entrances or exits to the perimeter instead of monitoring as much as we do internally,” Mackey said. “You’d be able to see someone’s face right now, but the image is a little fuzzy — it looks like a TV from the 80s… at the perimeters of all of our schools, those (new) cameras can be fed directly to the police station, and they can monitor the town safely.”
The funding will also fund safety infrastructure improvements, such as advanced public address systems that can broadcast pre-recorded emergency alerts to an entire school from a mobile device.
Mackey said the updated PA system, which is expected to be installed in Swampscott’s middle schools by February, will bring other schools in the district up to the same safety standard as the town’s new elementary school.
“The PA system has some pretty cool pieces of it — the ability for us to press a button and talk to just a classroom and not the whole school,” Mackey said. “We’ll have a PA system that will work with pre-recorded messages in a familiar voice to our principal. If they’re not in the building or they’re out for the day, their voice comes through, not a strange person who is shaky and nervous if they have to get on the intercom.”
In addition to infrastructure training, the COPS grant funding will fund sweeping changes to the district’s threat recognition and response training by implementing the protocols of Navigate 360, a school safety company that establishes guidelines for districts’ social-emotional services, student harm prevention, and student risk assessment.
Swampscott Public Schools’ Social Emotional Learning director, Craig Harris, said the additional funding will give school staff members the training and resources they need to discern students who pose a legitimate threat to their classmates and schools from students who simply behaved in an alarming way but are not at risk of endangering others.
“This is to try and differentiate between those who make a threat versus those who pose a threat,” Harris said. “If we hear that there was a report of a threat by a student, this would give us access to an entire decision tree to try and understand if we need to immediately respond to a threat and what the best type of response might be.”
Harris added that the advanced training and additional resources excited him, as these changes will allow Swampscott Schools to use the resources more effectively.
“It means that we can be more equitable in our response so we’re not over-disciplining groups. It means that we can really work as a team, and we can be much more efficient and accurate in our responses. Our goal is to support students, and I think this will help us figure out what the right supports for those students are,” Harris said.
In a written statement sent to The Item, Congressman Seth Moulton (D-6) applauded the grant, adding that the funding was a valuable and lasting investment for student safety.
“I’m thrilled that Swampscott is receiving this funding from the Department of Justice. Every child in our community should be able to learn in a safe environment – and every parent should have the peace of mind that their kids are safe when they send them off to school. This money will go a long way,” Moulton wrote.
