Q: Are schools safe? TV station: Let's get one locked down and find out

You would think there could be grounds for public mischief charges if not trespassing, but I don't know the laws in that state or in that municipality. I do agree with many that most schools do have signage about the doors people are supposed to enter and the protocol they're supposed to take when in the building.

I would hope that when the reporter went in the opposite direction that someone thought to confront him, but then, I suppose if someone is acting erratically there's probably some fear he could be armed.

Not being from the area, I'm wondering if this is a school the station would regularly cover and, if so, what the relationship would be like after this. If the school has a graduate of distinction, a winning basketball team, or neat community service project if they now think twice about calling that station or if they still feel they want the exposure despite this incident.

 

He did identify himself. He even gave them his phone number. And there is absolutely nothing to suggest he knowingly caused a false belief or fear that an incident has occurred or that a condition exists involving danger to life.

By the way, everyone keeps bringing up "the main entrance." My oldest is a high school sophomore. I have visited his campus at least a dozen times. I have no idea where the "main entrance" is, if it even has one.

 

By asking to go to the bathroom then going the opposite direction, it could be construed as causing conditions to exist that could lead to that belief. Also, when the school tried calling the station to verify he was there on an assignment and the station would not tell the school or verify if he had left or not, it could be considered causing those kind of conditions.

Not saying I agree that they should be charged, just saying that under Missouri law, there's an argument for charging them.

 

Different direction, not opposite.

 

You really can't make a reasonable case that asking where the bathroom is and then not immediately walking in that direction causes "a false belief or fear that an incident has occurred or that a condition exists involving danger to life." It's just not there, and a prosecutor is never going to file on that.

And you can't charge "the station." You could try to charge individuals, but we have absolutely no idea who the people from the school talked to or what was said. I can tell you at my station on any given day, there are maybe 3 people who know what the investigative reporter is doing, and the person who answers to phone isn't one of them.

 

I know you can't charge "the station." Meant the person who wouldn't verify. And I know there are questions to be answered there before they could charge, including who they spoke to and if that person had knowledge of whether the reporter had left the school or not. None of the stories address those facts. However, if they spoke with the reporter's supervisor, and that person knew the reporter wasn't there and wouldn't divulge that, the supervisor could be charged.

Again, not saying it should happen or that things added up to that. There are questions we don't know the answers to that would determine that. I would hope the school was smart enough to ask for someone in the newsroom. I doubt they'd ask for an editor, but you'd think when they mentioned the school was going to go on lockdown if they didn't know, whoever answered would send the call to someone who knew what was going on. I'm pretty sure the receptionist wasn't the one answering the questions for the school.

 

I hate doing this, but people do not seem to want to read the story to see how this day played out.


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/ksdk-reporter-working-on-school-safety-story-prompted-kirkwood-high/article_aa2ef2de-9905-5b26-a500-1105ae4b0df5.html

An undercover television news story to test security in local schools triggered a lockdown Thursday at Kirkwood High, angering parents and raising questions about media ethics.
Students and teachers at the school were huddled in classrooms with the lights off for about 40 minutes Thursday afternoon after a man came into the school and asked to speak with security, then left.

The visit was one of five made by the television station to schools in the region aimed at exposing lapses in school security.

After hours of social media uproar, KSDK aired the news report at 10 p.m.

During the segment, the station showed how a staff member was unable to enter four schools unimpeded, but was able to walk right into Kirkwood High School, which had no buzzers at the door and whose entrance was not locked. The news report also questioned why the Kirkwood lockdown took place an hour after the reporter left the school building.

Even before the segment aired, KSDK used its 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. broadcasts to issue a statement standing by its reporting.

“This lockdown certainly was not the intent of our visit,” KSDK said in the statement, pointing out that the lockdown didn’t happen for an hour until after the reporter left. The station says the reporter “identified himself by name” to school officials. However, KSDK didn’t claim that he identified himself as a reporter.

“NewsChannel 5 will continue to be vigilant when it comes to the safety of our schools and your children within,” KSDK said.

Kirkwood School District spokeswoman Ginger Cayce said the incident highlighted problems in the district security Thursday. But she expressed frustration over the station’s handling of the situation.

“We learned some things from this, but we are still dismayed that a call was not given after to let us know this was a test,” Cayce said. “We could have prevented the alarm to our parents, students and staff.”

The KSDK reporter initially gave his name and cellphone number and when the Kirkwood High secretary left to get the school resource officer, the man left the office, Cayce said. Administrators became alarmed when he asked the location of a restroom, left the office, but went a different direction.

When they called his cellphone, he did not answer, but his voicemail said he was a KSDK reporter. Cayce said she tried three times to confirm with the news station that the man was actually with KSDK with no success.

“I told them ‘I’m going to have to go into lockdown if you can’t confirm that this was a test,’” she said. “When we couldn’t confirm or deny it, we had no choice.”

PANIC ENSUES

In the hours after the incident, some parents said that while they did not like the disruption, they were more concerned about possible lapses in security.
But more often, parents and others derided the station’s tactics on social media and on news story comments. That was especially true of Kirkwood parents, who spent the lockdown in a panic.

Stacey Woodruff said she was in tears when she first heard about the lockdown, and spent the entire time communicating with her 14-year-old daughter, who was in a math class, on her cellphone. She said her teacher was keeping the students calm.

“She kept saying, ‘Mom, I’m OK,” Woodruff said. “When I found out it was KSDK, I was and still am livid.”

Among the Kirkwood students on lockdown was freshman Caroline Goff, 14.

“We got the announcement over the intercom … then the principal walked by and said, ‘You need to lock the door and turn off the lights.’”

The students were instructed to stand against the walls, out of the sight from anyone passing in the halls. Caroline said they stood and listened for close to an hour, worrying that sounds they were hearing outside — including what were apparently police on the roof — were the noises of a gunman.

“We would hear footsteps ... We were really scared, but we were all trying not to show it,” she said. “My teacher told our class that he would step in front of the person and let us all leave” if it came to that.

“We were scared that something was going to happen to us, like at Sandy Hook,” she said, referring to the 2012 school massacre in Connecticut.

Outside, Caroline’s father, Jeff Goff, was trying to figure out what was going on as police set up a perimeter. He said he noticed a media cameraman setting up outside the school immediately after the lockdown started, and wondered momentarily how the cameraman had managed to get there so quickly.

When rumors about KSDK’s role began circulating he called the station.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, do you know what you just put us through? There’s a guy [a police officer] with an automatic rifle standing in front of the school!’ ”

Officials at elementary schools in the Francis Howell and Parkway school districts reported similar visits from a KSDK reporter on Thursday.

At Bellerive Elementary, a man was buzzed into the office and asked to speak with the person in charge of security. But the man was evasive about his identity and why he was there, said Paul Tandy, spokesman for the Parkway School District. Security was alerted. Administrators later confirmed with KSDK that a station employee was at the school with a hidden camera.

When speaking over the intercom from outside the doors of a Francis Howell elementary school, the reporter said he wanted to set an appointment with the office about school security.

A secretary at Becky-David Elementary greeted him at the door and asked more questions, and she thought his responses were vague. He eventually identified himself as being with KSDK and left, district spokeswoman Jennifer Henry said. School officials notified administrators, who also called KSDK.

REPORTING ETHICS

School shootings in recent years have prompted local and national debate about school security — and, in response, local and national media investigations of the issue, some of which have created controversy.
In 2006, The Poynter Institute, a respected national journalism foundation, tackled the issue of “Reporters Testing School Security.” Among the questions the piece suggests reporters should ask themselves before undertaking such an approach is, “How will the journalists’ intrusion affect the students? What kind of disruption could be caused, such as a lockdown?”

A related list of concerns includes the question: “Do we run the risk that our ‘reporting tactics’ will become the story rather than the public safety issue we are exploring?”

That has happened sporadically around the country in recent years.

In 2012, a Fargo, N.D., television reporter aired a story using a hidden camera to demonstrate that she could walk unimpeded through three local schools. After the story aired, school security was tightened — but the reporter also faced a police investigation for ignoring signs at the school warning all visitors that it was illegal to enter the school without checking at the school office.

Last year, two reporters for a high school newspaper in New York state did their own test of security at a neighboring school, walking through an unlocked door to demonstrate the lax security. They were ultimately apprehended by school security and taken to the principal, who, upon learning what they were doing, told them (according to one account) that they “would see the full extent of the security at the school” — and had them arrested for trespassing.

After the lockdown at Kirkwood High ended, Goff and his wife, Jenny Goff, “went and hugged” their daughter. “Life is precious these days,” Jeff Goff said.

“If someone else did this, they’d be arrested,” Goff said. “It’s just not smart, with all the things that have happened in our country.”

More education news by the numbers:

School-by-school: MAP test scores

2012-2013 Missouri educators' pay

Kirkwood city employee payroll

Valerie Schremp Hahn of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

The reporter went out looking to stir some shit, note that he went to multiple schools, and the shit storm would have stopped if the station would have said he was one of their reporters. But they did not. They did not and the school goes on lock down for an hour. Mind you, their video van was ready to go the moment the school went on lock down.

So the school has a strange man enter their building and it looks like he gives false identification and starts walking around the school. What are they supposed to do?

Looks like the TV station got their five-minute feature. Mazel Tov.

We charge families $20,000 - $25,000 for a bomb scare if their kids are caught. Maybe the local police can send them a bill?

 

I like that you included this in your quote:

More education news by the numbers:

School-by-school: MAP test scores

2012-2013 Missouri educators' pay

Kirkwood city employee payroll

Very thorough.

 

In what way did it look like he gave false identification?

And, what was the point of ordering a lock down an hour after the reporter had left the building? This was a CYA move. They realized they were going to be made to look bad for having poor security, and did this to look like they were taking every precaution, and so they could accuse the TV station of being disruptive.

Look at the video from the TV station:

http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/01/16/newschannel-5-statement-school-safety/4531859/

At about 2:27 he gets to the office. The secretary sends him on his way, pointing towards the bathroom.

There is no "alarm". The alarm resulted from them learning he was a reporter, not from being unsure of who he was.

 

man this thread....I bet you guys are a blast at a party.

the station and the reporter were in the wrong, big-time. Not a lot else to talk about

 

93, don't get huffy and repost the article for us, then summarize it in a way that is totally inaccurate.

He wasn't looking to "stir shit." He was looking to see if the schools had security in place to keep someone from wandering into the building. Four of them did. One did not. (And note -- I went on the record early saying this was a stupid story. I'm not defending the idea or execution. It's dumb all around.)

And when a school goes into lockdown, every station will be there in minutes. That's not evidence of anything other than a school went into lockdown.

Absolutely, patently false. He gave absolutely correct information. He told them his name and gave them his phone number. He didn't tell them his occupation, and wasn't asked. They knew it as soon as they called his cell. 10 seconds on Google would confirm whether he was really who he said he was.

As for what they were supposed to do when he walked around the school... I dunno, stop him? Say something? Ask him to leave? Ask him what he's doing?

Instead, they opted to wait an hour and lock it down.

Yes, a TV station aired a story. That's what they do. If it was a newspaper reporter, they probably would have printed a story, because that's what they do.

There was no threat here. None. But if you want to play that game, maybe we should fire all the administrators and front office people who apparently thought there was a crazed gunman in their building, and didn't do a damn thing about it for an hour?

And while we're here: notice the article says the person they talked to couldn't confirm or deny the reporter was at the station. In other words, they didn't know. As much as people would like to believe the station was trying to fuck with the school, the reality appears to be the school didn't talk to anyone who knew where the reporter was.

 

The reporter created the story. The story was not there before his behavior.