Walter Bird Jr.
They knew it was coming, but it didn’t make it easier for some Worcester school teachers when they arrived back to school Monday to find the large, white “Go Buckets” sitting on their desks. The 5-gallon buckets held rope, duct tape, door stoppers, toilet paper and other items aimed at helping teachers and students respond to a violent scenario in their school.
The buckets are part of the ALICE training rolled out last summer, a program that will not be fully-implemented until next year. The training - the acronym stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate - is part of a larger response to mass school shootings. ALICE came into being a couple years after the Columbine tragedy in 1999.
The buckets will be in every Worcester Public Schools classroom by the end of September, according to School Safety Liaison Rob Pezzella, including Head Start programs.
“Before we invited teachers to take the e-Learning course on ALICE, we had told them Go Buckets would be part of the process,” Pezzella said, adding they were mentioned during the trainings.
Roger Nugent, president of the Education Association of Worcester, said there had been “mutterings about [the buckets]” last year.
“I don’t think it was a complete surprise,” he said. “It’s a way to facilitate a long-term lockdown where, essentially, students could use it to go to the bathroom if they need to.”
Indeed, the buckets can be used for that purpose, hence the toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Other tools, such as rope, duct tape and door stoppers, are there to help prevent an intruder from entering the classroom, according to Pezzella.
One of the teachers greeted by the buckets was Worcester Magazine columnist Janice Harvey, who writes about them in this week’s upcoming issue.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Harvey said. “I’m not making light of a very scary and very real possibility. I appreciate the supplies. I just haven’t quite been able to wrap my brain around why we need ALICE and Go Buckets. I know we need both, but the fact that teaching nowadays requires survival training saddens me.
While he said he doesn’t disapprove of the buckets, Nugent suggested they are but one part of a larger issue. He said he wants to see expanded background checks on those entering the schools.
“If we’re going to this extreme, which is fine,” Nugent said, “you have to look at why anyone is allowed to go into the schools without [Criminal Offender Record Information] checks. CORI checks need to be done on anyone for field trips, as it should be, but it needs to be looked at more globally, not with pockets of exception.”
Oftentimes, he continued, the identify of a shooter is known to the schools in some capacity.
“Just because people have been out in the school yard, or escorting students to school, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a safe person,” Nugent said. “[We should] expand CORI … to anybody that’s going to go into that school, even if it’s for a parent meeting.”
Nugent he planned to raise his concerns to Pezzella and School Superintendent Maureen Binienda.
