Threats Shut Down High Schools

By Nora Grace-Flood, New Haven Independent

December 6, 2021

High schools in New Haven and Hamden closed at least for Monday, if not longer, amid a barrage of online threats of violence.

Hamden’s Board of Education has scheduled a special community meeting starting at 6 p.m. Monday to address multiple threats of gun violence that have closed the town’s high school for three days running.

Wilbur Cross High School and Hillhouse High School sent students home early Monday after both schools were the subject of online threats, according to New Haven schools spokesperson Justin Harmon.

One of the Hillhouse threats contained a racial epithet following by a vow to “shoot everyone there.”

Police descended on Cross Monday morning after a report about a gun possibly being at the school. The school went into lockdown.

Another threat targeted Career High School, to “shoot up” the campus on Tuesday at 11 a.m. and deliver “a long painful death.” The school went into partial lockdown.

Another threat was reported at Amistad High, a charter school on Dixwell Avenue.

Eli Whitney Technical School had a lockdown and then early dismissal after an online threat that “who ever is in eli by 11:30 … will die,” followed by racial epithets and a parting call to “die in flame fuckers.”

Hamden High has been shut down since Friday, and will remain closed at least through Tuesday, following social media posting from individuals threatening to shoot up the school.

Those two separate incidents, which followed the tragic news of the Michigan High School shooting on Tuesday, first led to Hamden High closing down Friday and then again Monday and Tuesday. Superintendent Jody Goeler said the school currently intends to reopen on Wednesday.

Those threats, which are currently under investigation, alongside two other recent Hamden High headlines — including one student getting stabbed just off campus in late November and another student carrying a loaded gun within the building in early October — are prompting parents to start pushing for answers regarding what security, social supports, and communication look like like within Hamden High and across the district.

Monday night’s Board of Ed meeting will kick off several events organized this week by concerned community members to discuss not only the recent anonymous threats which have led to canceled classes, but broader issues of heightened intrapersonal violence — and the common presence of weapons within school buildings — that have reportedly defined day to day life for students and teachers throughout the district since the early fall.

“Parents are very worried, very scared, very concerned, and feel very paralyzed,” Karlen Meinsen, whose youngest daughter is in Hamden High’s freshman class, told the Independent Monday morning.

Those threats, which are currently under investigation, alongside two other recent Hamden High headlines — including one student getting stabbed just off campus in late November and another student carrying a loaded gun within the building in early October — are prompting parents to start pushing for answers regarding what security, social supports, and communication look like like within Hamden High and across the district.

Some have said that daily violence within the school system has long been a given; it has only recently reached an obvious tipping point.

“When my husband was home during the pandemic, the only sliver of light was that I did not have to worry about any violent act towards my husband and my child,” Jayme Clark, a healthcare provider whose husband works at Hamden’s Middle School and whose child is an elementary student in the district, told the Independent.

“Kids are two years behind in social emotional behavioral abilities. They don’t remember how to raise their hand, how to ask to go to the bathroom … or how to have a conversation with a teacher,” said Meinsen, who is also a fifth grade teacher in New Haven and member of Hamden High’s School Governance Council.

“Now, they live in the world of their phone and social media. Tik Tok challenges are at the forefront,” she added.

In addition to regular fights taking place between students within Hamden’s High School and Middle School, students are destroying bathrooms or publicly disrespecting, and in at least one case, slapping, their teachers to copy and reproduce viral video trends, she said.

“It’s a domino effect; it’s just snowballing and snowballing and the kids are clearly very angry, and they are carrying weapons into school,” Meinsen said. “They may not have been caught,” she said, unlike the student who was expelled in October for carrying a gun. “But it’s common knowledge among the youth that kids have weapons.”

Hamden Superintendent of Schools Jody Goeler and Human Resource Director Gary Highsmith were not available for comment Monday morning. Goeler told the Independent on Dec. 1, after a stabbing at the high school, that “the one thing that’s consistent in all students’ lives is going to school.”

He pointed to what the school has tried to do to support students this past year, including using federal funds to offer free summer programming to all students, including no charge transportation and meals. Since the beginning of the school year and up to the first of December, Goeler said Hamden High had increased their security by 25 percent. Now a total of eight security guards monitor the high school.

Just as the challenges faced by socially deprived students and overworked teachers have been felt on a national level, their consequences have as well.

“Look at what happened in Michigan… In Meriden there was a lockdown, high schools are in crisis all over the country,” Meinsen observed. “These kids are screaming for help,” she added, whether they’re sitting next to the student holding a gun or carrying it themselves.

Meinsen said she has called for the School Governance Council to hold an emergency meeting Tuesday evening, following Monday’s Board of Education forum. She said she and several other parents, teachers, community members and administrators like Hamden High Principal Nadine Gannon will draft a letter to Superintendent Goeler with recommended policy suggestions.

On Sunday, she said, she is organizing a rally alongside the leaders of the Facebook Group “Concerned Parents For School Safety.” The goal is to bring local groups combating gun violence and supporting youth health together to walk from Hamden High to Town Hall to bring the community together, create pressure on the administration to provide answers, and to build solutions among those directly impacted and involved.

And on Thursday, Hamden’s Strengthening Police and Community Partnerships Council will hold yet another meeting to review Hamden’s current school security system and answer public questions.

“In the short term, until we have a grip on the crisis, the answer is metal detectors,” Meinsen said, offering her stance on how to begin combatting issues of violence.

Goeler had previously said he does not believe in metal detectors in schools, asserting that they undermine trust and are unfeasible in a large building of 1,700 students. On Dec. 1 he said: “We’re not taking anything off the table.”

Paul Bass contributed reporting.

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.