School officials react to bomb scare complaints

A bomb threat at West Hempstead Middle School earlier this month has left the district administration under some fire from parents and staff who are unhappy with the way the situation was handled.

The evening of Thursday, Jan. 6, someone left a threatening voice message on the middle school answering machine. District officials described the message as vague and brief. “It sounded like a prank,” Superintendent John Hogan said at a Board of Education meeting on Jan. 18 at which people aired complaints about the matter.

It was only around 7:45 the next morning, Jan. 7, that the receptionist checked her voice messages and discovered the threat. The message was relayed to middle school Principal Marcia Murray, who then contacted Hogan, who called police.

Students and staff were already in the building, which is connected to West Hempstead High School and sits on Nassau Boulevard across from Echo Park. After working with detectives from the Nassau County Police Department’s 5th Precinct to ascertain the level of threat, it was decided that no evacuation was necessary.

“The message itself was not specific and appeared from the beginning to be prank-like, but of course, certainly, we’re going to take it seriously,” Hogan recently told the Herald.

Staff members immediately searched both the middle and high school buildings. By the time police arrived, both had been swept three times, according to Hogan. Police cleared the cafeteria and gymnasium at the middle school and the auditorium and gymnasium at the high school, and students and staff gathered there while police conducted more thorough searches of the buildings. Once they were cleared, students and faculty returned to their classrooms.

Parents and faculty members asked at the board meeting why district officials did not evacuate the building as they had during two other bomb threats made in 2009. Middle school teacher Amy Rogan wondered why students and faculty weren’t instructed to leave the building and go to Echo Park.

Rogan said she was concerned for her students’ safety and that of her colleagues as well as her own safety. “I’m a mother of two, a wife, a daughter,” she said at the meeting.

Hogan responded by saying that he, too, was deeply concerned about everyone’s safety. “All of these kids are mine,” he said, “and I take this very seriously.”

Based on the details of this case, it was decided there was no need for evacuation, Hogan said. Additionally, he explained, calls placed to Echo Park management that morning had not been answered and sidewalks in the area had not been plowed of the six or so inches of snow that had fallen  earlier that week.

Deputy Superintendent Richard Cunningham added that in some cases, threats made to the inside of a building are actually bait, intended to cause evacuation, forcing everyone outside into the real danger zone.

“One of the things you’re always thinking about is the safety of everybody that’s in our care,” Hogan said. “That’s always the most important thing in decision making when you’re in situations like this, and that’s why when we’re done with these situations … we review everything.”

Hogan met with PTA parents after the incident and had planned to meet with faculty members as well to get more feedback and input. Hearing from members of the school community, he said, is essential to improvement.

George DiGiovanni, a West Hempstead father with two children in the high school, offered a few suggestions at the meeting. He said the district should be screening calls before school starts in the morning and, in the event that such a threat should be made again, there would be time to make decisions before people enter the school buildings.

As for the decision not to evacuate, DiGiovanni, a retired NYPD officer, was skeptical. “What if someone just wanted to see the building blow up,” he asked in a recent interview with the Herald.

One way to prevent these types of scares in the future is to send out a memo to parents and students saying all bomb threats will be treated seriously, DiGiovanni said. Announce that any days off resulting from scares will be made up at the end of year, when the weather is nice and students would much rather be outdoors, and “now you’re not going to get so many pranks,” he added.

Parent Shanell Brown said communication with parents is another key subject for the district to address. She said phone calls to parents should have gone out immediately, not 45 minutes to an hour after initial details were made clear. Connect-Ed — the phone system the West Hempstead school district uses to alert parents to emergency situations — had failed to reach each of the numbers Brown had provided as emergency contact numbers, she said at the meeting.

According to Hogan, the district is reviewing its Connect-Ed system, as Brown had suggested.

“I actually was quite pleased that both staff and the few parents who spoke [at the board meeting] really were comfortable enough to share their concerns because that’s how we learn, when we’re in these type of situations,” Hogan said. “That’s how we learn from one another in terms of … what did we do well, what did we not do so well?”

He said parents who would like to be added to the Connect-Ed system should call the schools in which their children are enrolled and provide all contact phone numbers, which will be forwarded to the district and added to the system.