SABATTUS – It’s now been twice this year that Sabattus Central School students have had their bathroom use monitored due to bomb threats made by classmates.
A monitor has been paid the substitute teacher rate – $60 a day – since a Jan. 5 threat penned on a bathroom wall caused the school to be evacuated for a third time this school year, Principal Beverly Coursey said. The monitor lets students into one of six individual bathrooms in the middle school wing, and after they have left, checks the walls to make sure there is no graffiti.
“It’s really hurt the climate of the school,” Coursey said. Students asked to write about the threats repeatedly used the words “annoyed” and “frustrated,” she said, and many are upset that their new school is being defaced and classes are being disrupted.
Bathroom use was first monitored after a bomb threat on Oct. 12. That’s when the school started asking students to sign out of their classrooms when visiting the bathroom, and asked janitors to begin regular graffiti checks, Coursey said.
The monitoring was stopped after a few weeks, but the next day, Nov. 8, a second bathroom-wall note was found. Fortunately, so was the student who had made the threat.
Eight days later, on Nov. 16, a third written threat left on a school bus was not considered to be serious, so no direct action was taken, Coursey said.
But the Oct. 12 threat carried enough weight to cause the emergency evacuation of the school. Within 20 minutes, all the students and teachers were shipped to another school, where they tried to continue with their academic day.
Coursey and Paul Malinski, superintendent of School Union 44, said they expect the hall monitoring to end shortly.
“Since we’ve done that we have not had any other threats or bomb scares, but it’s not been cheap,” Malinski said.
He will propose money for video cameras in the next budget cycle, hoping to replace hired monitors with technology.
“What I attribute (the bomb threats to) is it’s probably some student that’s saying to himself, I don’t want to take this test this afternoon,'” Malinski said. But the district has decided to err on the side of caution whenever a threat to student safety is perceived.
Coursey said she does not know what the school will first do to protect against bomb threats once the bathroom monitoring stops. The issue will be raised at the next Sabattus School Committee meeting at 7 p.m. Feb. 1 at the Central School, where the police and fire chiefs will be present.
Chairman Mark Fournier said the school board has not been briefed on the latest bomb threat because it has not met since the incident. Nor has he received any complaints or phone calls from concerned parents.
“Hopefully people come (to the meeting) and let us know their thoughts and feelings,” he said.
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