Each of New Canaan’s three elementary schools will have a dedicated police officer on campus when the academic year starts this week, the superintendent of schools said Monday night.
In addition to expanding the number of School Resource Officers or “SROs” from two (New Canaan High School and Saxe Middle School) to five, the district is upgrading its radios, security of school building doors and pedestrian safety at NCHS, Dr. Bryan Luizzi said during a special Board of Education meeting.
New Canaan Police Officers Ron Bentley (East School), Nicole Vartuli (South) and Shane Gibson (West) will join Officers Jeff Deak (NCHS) and Matt Blank (Saxe) to fill out the SRO roster, Luizzi said during the meeting, held at NCHS and via videoconference.
“It’s really a great team,” he said. “They will work very well with our campus monitors—they’ll work great with our staff, with our principals. We really feel very lucky to have these positions.”
The comments came during a general update on security.
The district also completed an annual update to its radios and door accesses, Luizzi said. The latter includes “primarily alerts that will tell us if a door is left ajar,” he said.
“Very granular programming so that we can know specifically which door, where, how long and we can set each one,” Luizzi said. “It’s like a front door you might need to keep open for a period of time, but a side door you don’t. Each one will be on its own timer.”
The NCHS lot also has had a raised crosswalk installed to slow drivers and give students a chance to be seen by increasingly taller motor vehicles, he said.
“We’re going to put a few more out there because it’s still too long of a straightaway at the high school,” Luizzi said. “So we’re looking at a few more spots and we’re looking at the middle school as well. But we wanted to make sure we got that one in before the start of the school year, given that it’s serving dual purposes by being that elevation across the crosswalk for them.”
Regarding the additional SROs, Board of Ed Chair Hugo Alves noted that the elected body has been discussing the matter for two years.
“It felt like in the beginning it was going to be a pretty heavy lift, but we all came together, got on the same page, and with you guys and the town, police force all working really hard and collaborating, it’s good to see how the community is going to be happy,” he said. “Because this was in response to what people were saying — they wanted to feel really good and be able to sleep better at night knowing that we have some amazing people protecting our kids.”
Luizzi noted that Bentley has been a SRO before. Vartuli has been instrumental in past school-related efforts including traffic control for the annual grad walk.