Nora Grace-Flood photo
Cecilie Boaheng: Everyone’s terrified.
One day after police arrested a student for carrying a loaded handgun in his backpack on school grounds, Hamden High students said they felt unsafe — and unsupported.
“I didn’t want to come in today,” first-year student Cecilie Boaheng said Wednesday. “Yesterday was really scary.”
While walking to her last class Tuesday around 1 p.m., Boaheng was instructed to get in a room and stay in place. “I heard a police siren … I thought it was a fight,” Boaheng recalled.
It wasn’t until she got home that she learned what had transpired earlier that day.
Sometime around noon Tuesday, school administration got a tip that one student had been seen holding a gun over the weekend. Upon receiving that information, security found and escorted the 17-year-old to the principal’s office, where student resource officer Jeremy Brewer “counseled” the student alongside the student’s family, Hamden High School administrators, and mental health professionals, according to school and police reports.
Police arrested the student after a loaded .45 caliber handgun was found in his book bag. He was then taken to a juvenile detention facility in Bridgeport.
Superintendent Jody Goeler said legal procedure requires the school system to suspend the child for ten days while they conduct a mandatory expulsion hearing.
The stay-in-place order lasted around 40 minutes Tuesday while police investigated the incident. Goeler said that Hamden High Principal Nadine Gannon debriefed and informed teachers about what happened after school dismissal on Tuesday and met with a crisis team on Wednesday morning. (Gannon did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
During that meeting, teachers were instructed to look out for kids who were showing signs of struggling and to refer anyone who asked for mental health support to one of the school’s psychologists and guidance counselors, according to Goeler. Hamden High has four social workers, four psychologists, and eight guidance counselors.
Hamden PD also sent two additional cops to the school to stand by on Wednesday for added security.
According to Boaheng, tensions were high among students throughout Wednesday. She said that students in a couple of her classes were instructed to talk with their counselors if they felt the need, but that many students didn’t even know who their counselors are.
“Everyone is so tense now,” she said. “Everyone seemed terrified.”
Jamileen Sutton: The school needs to take more responsibility.
Sophomore Jamileen Sutton said that the extreme event indicated a need for additional everyday safety measures at school. “I feel like they should have metal detectors,” she said.
While this was the first time she heard of another kid bringing a gun into school, she regularly hears about other students bringing knives on to campus, she said. Her stepfather, she said, works in security at Wilbur Cross, where students pass through metal detectors every morning.
Sutton said she believes the frequency of fights at school has increased since the pandemic. “We’ve been trapped in the house for two years,” she reflected. “And we’re teenagers. There’s gonna be drama.”
She scoffed at the school’s decision to bring in extra police officers after the event. “What’s a police officer going to do?” she asked, asserting that she did not notice heightened police presence at any point in the day.
What would make Sutton feel safe? Open dialogue and additional available social workers, she said.
Sutton said that on Tuesday she was told the stay-in-place order was a “drill.” The next day, she said, “None of my classes talked about it.”
“There should have been an assembly with the whole school outside,” to inform kids what happened and build community, she suggested.
“The school needs to take more responsibility.”
Grace Stiltner: More compassion, less punishment.
Eleventh-grader Grace Stiltner also critiqued the lack of communication that occurred between staff and students during and after the incident. “I felt like the teachers were avoiding it all day,” she reflected.
She and her friends, who asked to remain anonymous, critiqued the fact that the school enacted a stay-in-place order rather than a lockdown. The fact that a loaded weapon was present in the school, she said, made it feel like the student body was pretty proximate to a potential shooting.
She and three friends debriefed about the school’s handling of the situation in the CVS parking lot on Wednesday afternoon. One friend said that “being a young Black man” makes him concerned about the fact that administrators decided to bring more cops onto school grounds.
Students had reportedly only actually noticed the cops looking at their phones outside the school building on Wednesday morning, Stiltner said, so she and others figured that “safety precaution” was essentially irrelevant.
Stiltner and her friends suggested that school should have been canceled on Wednesday to allow students to rest and recover. Hamden High needs more social workers, clearer pathways by which to access them, and to make fundamental efforts to erase social stigma around mental health within the school., she said.
“We only talked about mental health for like a minute once in health class,” she said. Her friends exchanged stories of guidance counselors ignoring students’ emails and of kids struggling or failing to get academic accommodations for mental illnesses and learning disabilities, which Stiltner said perpetuates judgement towards those who have to ask for accommodations in the first place.
A step in the right direction, she said, would entail having school social workers visit classrooms and requiring teachers to provide all students with clear information at the beginning of the school regarding who their counselors are and how to have productive and safe conversations with them.
“We need more compassion and less punishment,” Stiltner asserted.
“I fully believe it was better for students to be in school today,” Superintendent Goeler told the Independent, so that they could “process issues” and reach out to available staff upon request.
This event marked the first gun violence scare in five years, according to Goeler. The district safety team will meet throughout the week to discuss whether or not to alter their standard security system.
The past year “has been hugely challenging for our students and families,” Goeler said of the pandemic. “We’ve done everything we can do to continue providing support. He noted that the district has hired an additional counselor at the high school and additional social workers at the elementary and middle school levels over the last several months as well as hired academic interventionists to support students struggling disproportionately with their work due to hardships created by Covid-19.
He said multiple families have brought up the possibility of metal detectors and book bag checks since Tuesday’s news. “We have 1,730 kids,” Goeler stated. “I don’t think people understand the operational implications of that, and the fact that there are ways around it.”
“Everything I hear from law enforcement is that the most important thing is to build trust between students and staff,” he said.
If the students are telling you they need better access to mental health support, and a more proactive mental health approach, and a direct discussion of this gun incident and other issues, and that they don't know who to turn to for their counselors, believe them, listen to them, and do something about it.