Keeping children safe is the first duty of schools. But it’s not the only one. School officials also have a duty to adequately inform concerned adults — parents and the broader community — when trouble escalates to the point of disrupting the school’s normal operations.
This past week at Greenfield High School, officials did their job of keeping students safe. But they fell short in following up with information that addressed reasonable public concerns without compromising student privacy.
This much is clear: an incident took place about 20 minutes before the end of school on Monday, resulting in the arrest of an unnamed student. Whatever happened prompted the school to issue a shelter-in-place order, under which students and staff carry on normal classroom activities but stay out of the hallways. It’s different than a lockdown, in which students and staff are instructed to stay in the rooms behind locked doors.
In a letter sent to parents, GHS Principal Donna Woodcock explained that officials took this step “in order to keep students and school environment calm, to provide privacy to the student(s) involved, and to ensure safety of all students and staff in the school.”
At the same time, school officials contacted the parents or guardians of those students involved in the trouble. Once the school day ended, to “maintain safety while students were boarding buses, staff walked their classes to the exit doors.” The letter added that school officials “took all appropriate measures to handle this internally,” guided by their code of conduct.
So far, very good: parents and community members should be glad to hear it. But as to the important details of what took place, officials have made public very little helpful information, other than to say a juvenile was arrested, no weapons were involved and there were no injuries.
“It was an issue in the school, and I find it inappropriate to make something worse or larger for a juvenile,” said Greenfield Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr. “It’s not like the last time where there were multiple arrests of multiple people,” he said, referring to a fight that broke out at the school in March, after which eight students were arrested and charged. “The arrest that was made was juvenile, and we’re not talking about a 17- or 18-year-old. They do have a right to privacy.”
Fair enough. We would not argue for making public the name of a juvenile whose identity is protected under criminal law.
But the school’s decision to place the school under a shelter-in-place order and summon police aren’t common events. In light of the earlier fight between students and a later altercation — which raised questions by the Greenfield Human Rights Commission and others about whether officials had been racially insensitive — school officials and the police chief may be a little skittish about discussing this new incident. But they could easily provide a fuller picture without identifying any students.
School Committee Chairman Timothy Farrell is correct that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 provides the schools with guidelines for the kind of records that the public can access, including disciplinary action. What doesn’t fall under this federal act’s umbrella, however, is the legitimate and legal step of keeping parents and the community informed.
In incidents like these, the public has no need to know the identities of the juvenile arrested. But people do have a right to know what happened.