BOSTON — The student who was shot outside Boston’s Jeremiah Burke High School continues to recover after surgery. In the moments following the shooting Tuesday morning, there was a robust public safety response.
But Boston 25 News heard from scared and frustrated parents saying there was no direct communication from the school district about what was happening.
25 Investigates later learned that communication didn’t come for hours. After days of asking questions, anchor and investigative reporter Kerry Kavanaugh spoke one-on-one with the Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper about what went wrong.
Skipper told Kavanaugh on Thursday, improving transparency in communications to parents is one of her top priorities.
Kavanaugh: “Since you recognize a lag in communication, in communication that day [on Tuesday], what should have happened?”
Skipper: “Whenever there’s any kind of an incident at a school, we work really closely with our communications department and the school leaders. We’re always trying to work with the schools, and so we have very set protocols on how to do that. I want to have our communications pieces with our parents fully transparent and responsive. And so, this is something that we’re looking at across the board, both in school communications as well as at the district. It’s something that as I begin my superintendency, I’ll be working very hard on with the teams.”
Kavanaugh: “So was the failure then at the Central District level, to notify?”
Skipper: “In this particular case, we as the Central should have issued something. Knowing, you know, and understanding how chaotic the scene was and we’ve addressed that. We’ve gone back. We’re looking very closely at those, and we will at the school as well, just to make sure that we have every possible situation accounted for.”
Skipper (cont.): “But anytime you have that kind of a crisis where you have life and death, right, it’s a shooting or any kind of a physical, the first piece is getting that site safe. And so that’s why you saw such a response from all of us going to the site, along with BPD, to make sure that the leaders, staff, students knew that the adults were there to protect and to support. And that’s always the first piece. But then we owe, as our responsibility, to let the community know it. And so, we’ve reviewed that. We see this as a huge opportunity for us as a team to review it. And we will.”
Skipper said the district has protocols in place to notify parents in the event of an emergency, but they are all under review to make sure they can swiftly react to all scenarios. She says parents can expect emails, texts, robocalls, or a combination of those depending on the situation.
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