In response to the Sandy Hook school shooting of mid-December, Scholium decided to examine Episcopal’s own campus security protocol and its response to this tragedy.
Two of the main people in charge of security on campus are Len Haley and Mark Notaro, both members of EA’s Department of Facilities and Operations.
The topic of school safety and security was an essential topic in the initial design of EA’s current campus.
As Notaro stated, “This campus was designed specifically with two entry points” with cars “funneled into certain areas. We have our staff not necessarily stationed permanently in different areas but when we make the rounds it is pretty easy to see if someone has come onto campus and if someone is in the wrong place. The design of the campus is beneficial in that we have an easier way of keeping track of where people are.”
According to L. Hamilton Clark, Head of School, Episcopal has not contacted any outside consultant for security advice, although Haley does attend numerous conferences as the school’s representative on the matter.
“There is also a safety committee that meets regularly, with different teachers on that committee,” Clark added. “But it’s not as though we have taken a huge amount of time to be training our faculty and again that’s something that maybe we want to focus on.”
Episcopal also employs two on-campus safety officers, both of whom are on-duty during school hours, and one who remains on campus until closing time.
In conjunction with specified safety personnel, Haley remarked, “If you take a look at everybody who works here, they’re really security in a sense that if they see something strange, we have a walkie talkie system that they can call. We can talk to everybody or we can talk privately.”
Notaro also assured, “We are also in constant communication with Mr. Clark, and with the unit heads.”
As a result of Sandy Hook and other shootings, many schools have reevaluated their own security policies; Episcopal Academy was no different. As Notaro stated, “Almost instantaneously on that Friday there were exchanges between the senior administrators about what we were going to do, just on dismissal alone. We have what we refer to as the emergency response team, which is a group of administrators, who are really are responsible for handling any crisis on campus. We met; we went over our crisis plan. We updated it just recently and we are now talking about some additional updates.”
Although Episcopal’s updates will most likely be very minor, some schools have resorted to much more dramatic shifts in security protocol.
As Clark noted, “There’s been this benchmarking group that we are apart of, along with fifty other independent schools around the country. One of the things this group has been talking about is the idea of having an armed security guard, and there’s at least one school in the group that has done it. To me, that was just a scary notion. But, in light of these issues in Connecticut, do we need to be looking at these issues differently? That’s really the question we’ve been asking ourselves and that’s what these other schools are asking about.”
With an ever-changing subject like school security, general procedures constantly evolve. As Haley articulated, “Every day is a learning experience, every day you try to improve.”
To the proposed idea that EA enact radical security changes Haley said, “We could have cars stopped at different locations, lock the doors, bars on windows – that isn’t what Episcopal Academy is all about. I’ve been here forty-one years, no person has ever been assaulted on either campus, and we haven’t even had a car stolen. Everybody has to be smart about this and not be afraid.”

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