Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - During a Buffalo Public School Board meeting Wednesday night, the board officially approved $3 million worth of expenditures that will go towards security equipment and other upgrades in an effort to keep students safe at all schools in the district.
The school board voted to add concealed weapons detection systems, hand-held metal detectors and improvements to two-way radios.
Buffalo School Board President Lou Petrucci feels that this investment will go a long way towards bringing the district to the level it should be for security purposes, especially after the recent string of violent incidents that have occurred in the district.
"It's the actual kind of fiscal investment, because this is for walkthrough metal detectors and upgrading our walkie talkie systems, and putting the behind the scenes systems in place," said Petrucci on Thursday with Susan Rose and Brian Mazurowski on WBEN. "But it also bolsters the other efforts that [Superintendent] Dr. [Tonja] Williams and her staff have made to improve security with increased staffing, with changing of our dismissal times, coordinating efforts between the various police agencies in Buffalo so that we can do everything to ensure that our kids are as safe as possible."
Related
According to Petrucci, the district is expecting the process to begin as early as next week with the installations. And since they're going to be in all buildings of the district, it's not going to be a one or two-day event.
"It's going to take a little bit of time to get them installed across the district, but we want to make sure that this level of security and safety was at all of our buildings," Petrucci said.
The process to improve security equipment and measures in the district began a while back, according to Petrucci. The district has been working to review security measures, and not only examine the quality of the systems in place, but also the implementation. Petrucci and the rest of the school board realize that parents want these new enhancements installed as soon as possible.
Also a part of the plan going forward is to connect cameras to a central monitoring system, but also monitors on the doors if someone illegally leaves an exit, and controlling the access points. However, this plan is not specifically part of the expenditure that was approved on Wednesday.
"Many of these things were in place already, I don't want to give the impression that we didn't have cameras or that we didn't have alarms on our doors," Petrucci said. "I think this last effort is one to fill in the gaps, where we realize that we really need to have every door, where we really need to have a more robust coordination with respect to the monitoring. It's not just the cameras, it's the person monitoring to make sure that someone's keeping an eye on people coming and going in-and-out of our buildings."
Hear more of Petrucci's appearance Thursday morning on WBEN in the player below: