Cherry Hill School Security Changes Coming, Administrators Say

Dropping off that forgotten lunch or a student from an early-morning dentist’s appointment won’t be the same at Cherry Hill schools starting next week.

In the first of a wave of new security measures, the district is changing how parents will be able to access all 19 public schools in the township, following a school security assessment, school officials announced.

The biggest change is coming in drop-offs—whether for students or stuff—but it also includes new restrictions on how many adults can attend classroom events and other policy shifts.

“We are not going to allow parents past the main office,” Superintendent Maureen Reusche told the Zone PTA earlier this month in a video released Wednesday. “In some buildings, that's not a change at all, but in some schools, that's a big change. We are not adopting a policy where we will not accept drop-offs; you'll just be dropping them at the main office.”

There is one exception to that rule, Reusche said, at the Barclay Early Childhood Center, where parents will still be allowed to walk their children back to classrooms.

The district will also restrict classroom parties to two parent volunteers per class, Reusche said, and those parents will, in most cases, have to be registered ahead of time.

Field days at the schools won’t change this year, Reusche said, though there will likely be a mandatory sign-in sheet for parent volunteers at those events.

“We're not going to tell parents who have signed up at this point in time that their volunteerism is not welcome,” she said.

While the changes may seem major at some schools, Reusche said they’re being implemented with balance in mind.

“One of the things the principals value is that their buildings are a second home for your children, and they do not want to lose that atmosphere,” she said. “We're hoping these changes are not putting up the big X…we do still want our parents to be very involved, as involved as possible, in our schools, in our programs.”

Other changes going into effect next week include requiring staff to wear ID badges at all times while on school property, requiring all visitors to have ID badges while in the buildings and requiring service or delivery workers to notify the district’s central office before arriving at any of the schools.

There will also be shifts in how the Extended Day Child Care and School Age Child Care programs access school buildings, in order to minimize traffic in hallways, school officials said.

The new policies and upcoming changes were developed in partnership with Cherry Hill Police, Reusche said, who went through all the district’s buildings with an eye toward three categories—communication, building access and behavior changes.

“They toured every aspect of the facilities, they met with the building principals, they met with staff,” she said.

There are still other areas the district needs to address, which will be taken care of over the summer and into the fall, Reusche said. Those include buzzer systems and both Cherry Hill East and West, new classroom door locks and locks for larger areas such as gyms and cafeterias, and changes to security systems.

“We'll let you know what will be in place for that for the start of the school year,” Reusche said. “As we get into the year, we will be communicating those changes.”