The Westbury School District faced yet another burglary last week, further encouraging the Board of Trustees to hire Summit Security Services Inc. to provide mobile security services.
At a Board of Education meeting July 17, the board discussed the seriousness of the recent string of burglaries and need for increased security in the schools. Summit was hired on a 30-day, month to month basis. They will be paid $20.68 per hour and $29.94 per hour for overtime/holidays.
Summit Security is a 37-year-old company that works with several school districts including Baldwin, Herricks and Jericho. James Volpe, a manager at Summit, described the burglaries as unusual.
“It’s a pretty extreme situation. We’ve (dealt) with break-ins, vandalism and thefts, but from what I understand, this is pretty large scale,” said Volpe. “It’s unusually large for a school district.”
Trustee Karin Campbell called for an assessment of the current security team personnel and systems.
“It seems we are not addressing the real problem,” said Campbell. “This is a Band-Aid solution. Although probably necessary, I don’t believe it will deal with the core issue.”
While Campbell voted against hiring the firm, other trustees did agree with her that something had to be done internally.
“We agree this is not the root of the issue, but we have an immediate concern. We have a large-scale theft problem and we need to put a stop to it immediately,” said board president Dr. Pless Dickerson. “We agree we need to review…but hopefully this can curb what we’re experiencing presently.”
Since April, district schools have been broken into four times, resulting in the thefts of more than 87 MacBook Pros. Westbury School District administrators did not release details about the fourth burglary, which happened last week.
