School steps up security in wake of graffiti incident

By Alice Waugh

At a hastily called public forum on Tuesday night, school officials and police shared what they knew about graffiti found on Monday morning outside the Brooks school and fielded questions from dozens of anxious parents.

Students and teachers entering through the main Brooks entrance were greeted on Monday morning with the words “memento mori” spray-painted in large black letters under the portico. The Latin phrase, which means “remember that you must die,” has its origins in medieval reflections on mortality and the transient nature of life and is sometimes evoked in historical illustrations featuring skulls or skeletons.

“Memento mori” is the motto carved in an arch over the Prufrock Preparatory School entrance in the 2009 book A Series of Unfortunate Events #5: The Austere Academy (part of the popular Lemony Snicket series of books for middle-school-age children) and is also the name of a gift shop at Disneyworld.

Parents and school officials were understandably nervous given the recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the history of school shootings in America. “This incident has made this feel real,” Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall said at the forum. “It’s the first time on this campus, at least for a while, that has made it feel very close-up to us that something dangerous could actually happen.”

Tighter security

The school has tightened security measures, including keeping doors locked at all times except during drop-off and dismissal. Visitors at other times must now press a buzzer to alert the office, where staff can see visitors on camera and hit a release button to let them in.

Lincoln police have increased patrols on campus and reached out to other area police department, and the regional School Threat Assessment Response team (STAR) that responds to school crises. Though there are currently no suspects, “the more people who know about it and talk about it, hopefully some information will filter back to us,”Lincoln Police Chief Kevin Kennedy said.

Officials have also contacted mental health professionals at the Lincoln School and Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School to see “if there are kids on our radar,” McFall said, adding that “we’ve identified some of those kids to have conversations with.”

Kennedy and Detective Ian Spencer reassured parents several times that the police were taking the incident very seriously. However, because the graffiti was a “veiled statement” and no specific individuals or ethnic/religious groups were targeted, police have classified the incident as a low-level threat, Kennedy said.

Some parents at the forum said the threat level should be raised, but officials steered away from that idea. “We’ve done everything we could do short of canceling school,” McFall said. “We’ve taken as many steps as we can at this point.”

Kennedy agreed, saying, “I’m personally at a loss as to what more at this stage of investigation we could do.”

Several parents asked about security after dismissal when most teachers have left but after-school activities are going on at the school. “I’m going to be completely honest and say I don’t think we can fully support supervision of the building after school, so to some extent this is a decision for families,” McFall responded.

Widespread anxiety among forum attendees

The fear of something worse happening could be heard in many of the parent questions and comments, which included suggestions for keeping the doors locked at all times (even during drop-off and dismissal), a town-wide robocall, more sophisticated security cameras or even alerting the FBI. They worried about past situations where a seemingly minor incident turned out to be a missed warning sign.

“This response feels very measured and very logical and well thought out, but part of me is also frightened,” one woman said. “I don’t know the answer but I wanted to share that those things are really swirling in my head.”

The school security cameras operate in real time and do not make recordings for later review, McFall noted. If the school wanted to take that step, the school administration would have to notify all parents that their children are being recorded and install signs to that effect, and the School Committee would have to draft a policy governing the use of video recordings, she said.

A survey last year showed an almost even split between parents who want more security measures and those who want to preserve the welcoming atmosphere of the school, McFall said. “It’s a question about our culture and how much of a change we want to make,” she said.

“The dark fears we’re all thinking and not saying are not going to be stopped by locked doors,” a parent said. Although increased security and cameras would probably be a good idea, he worried about changing the school “to the point where it feels really cold and falsely secure.”

“It’s hard to say, but we have to acknowledge that a lot of these steps we take are about making ourselves feel safe when we may not actually be safe,” McFall said. “It’s about how we want to feel as a community and if we want our kids to live in fear or not. We need to think about what those tradeoffs are.”