A student with a holstered gun under his shirt was seen in the IHS parking lot at approximately 3:10 p.m. on Tuesday, September 18. The school called the Ithaca Police Department (IPD), but the suspected student had left campus in a car by the time police arrived. School officials considered, and decided against, a lockdown. The police officers remained on campus through dismissal. IHS cooperated with the IPD’s efforts and also carried out a school-level investigation into the incident. A restraining order was later issued barring the student from campus.

The Initial Response

The day following the incident, IHS Principal Joe Wilson sent a confidential memorandum to the school staff informing them of the matter; however, students and the public remained unaware until Wilson’s memorandum was leaked to The Ithaca Journal, which printed an article about the situation and the school’s response to it, on September 21. Wilson and ICSD Superintendent Judith Pastel later said that the school’s failure to inform the community had resulted from a misunderstanding between them.

Wilson’s memorandum to the staff described the incident and the actions the school had taken. It also stated, “Dr. Pastel is aware of all the facts and is providing support and direction. This information is for staff members only. Please do not share it or discuss it. Please carefully destroy this memo after you read it.”

As quoted in The Ithaca Journal, Wilson said that “[Pastel] and I discussed my communication with the staff prior to my communicating with the staff.” Pastel told the Journal’s reporter, “This is information that was only intended for the staff.” She explained, “I think what [Wilson] was attempting to do was not cause a panic, because there was really no reason for a panic. From the report that we got from the students that saw him, if in fact it was a gun, the young person didn’t in any way bring it out in a threatening manner or anything of that nature so there was no reason to have a panic.”

A Misunderstanding

The Journal’s article prompted greater investigation into the issue within both the district and the community. At the Board of Education (BoE) meeting the following Tuesday, Wilson apologized for his failure to inform students and parents. “When Dr. Pastel and I discussed sharing information with the school community, I understood that we would confine our sharing to the IHS staff. That is not what Superintendent Pastel intended, as I later learned. I regret and apologize for the misunderstanding.”

Pastel added, “... [Wilson] and I, after the fact, did realize that we were not clearly communicating on the telephone in terms of going forward. And I’ll take some ownership with that because it’s pretty clear that Joe [Wilson] would follow direction from the superintendent if it was clear, and obviously I was not real clear as far as the follow-up communication on Wednesday.”

When asked to comment on the discrepancy between her original statement to the Ithaca Journal reporter and what she said at the meeting, Pastel explained that on Thursday night, when she spoke with the reporter, she hadn’t realized that there had been a misunderstanding, as she hadn’t yet read the memorandum.

“It was the first I heard about ‘please carefully destroy this memo.’ So I thought that Joe [Wilson] was trying to keep the information quiet in terms of students ... well, that’s also when I realized it hadn’t gone to the parents,” Pastel said. As she understood the situation, Wilson had kept the information confidential in order to prevent students from becoming upset or panicked: “[That response] was the only thing I could think of at the time.” It was not until the following Monday that Pastel and Wilson met and untangled the confusion between them.

At the BoE meeting, two parents raised their concerns regarding the incident. Steve Cariddi spoke first; he asked board members to respond individually to the question of whether parents should have been notified.

The board members mostly agreed that the parents should have been told, though they commended Wilson for how he handled the incident otherwise. As Seth Peacock said, if parents had been notified, “the worst that happens is, kids stay home that day.... Maybe the default should shift to ... more, ‘hey this is what happened, this is how we took care of it.’” Deborah O’Connor commented that as she knew that the PTSA president had been informed, “as far as I was concerned, parents knew about it,” and so she didn’t think about it any more until several days later, when it became clear that parents were upset about not having been informed. Beth Kunz stressed that the information should have come from “a voice of authority. It needed to come from Mr. Wilson or Dr. Pastel. It shouldn’t have come from students chatting to each other.”

Keith Smith, another district parent, said that having been in education for 30 years, he was not “so concerned about the gun on campus. If you find one, I guarantee you there’s more than one.” However, Smith asked the Board to confirm the allegation that Wilson’s memorandum had asked staff members to destroy the communication after reading it. Addressing Wilson, Smith then said, “Both you and Dr. Pastel talked about a misunderstanding in communication. My reading of such verbiage would be to prohibit communication. That’s not a misunderstanding.”

In Retrospect

At the BoE meeting, Wilson explained the events of the afternoon in question. When the main office became aware of the situation, he said, “we considered and decided against a lockdown. Students left the campus that day, at the time of dismissal, in the ordinary way. There were no disturbances, and there were no unusual occurrences.”

After calling the police, said Wilson, “We cooperated with IPD as they sought information on which to base a warrant for the suspected student.” Wilson spent several hours the night of the incident interviewing potential witnesses and coordinating efforts with the IPD. He said, “We understand that the student was eventually detained and a citation to appear in court issued. We immediately began a school investigation and we have since followed through on our Board of Education’s policies for school discipline.”

Wilson stated that because of the misunderstanding with Pastel, “we didn’t follow our typical information-sharing approach, and I regret that. We have reviewed our communication process since, and I believe that no such future misunderstanding will occur. When and if it is necessary in the future to convey this kind of information, we will share it in a timely and appropriate way with our entire school community, as we have in the past.”

When Wilson finished speaking, Pastel added her own remarks. Among other issues, Pastel said that the school had reacted appropriately to the level of the threat, outside of the problematic communication: “I am not going to get into a big debate over whether [the situation] was a crisis or not. At that time, I did not feel that it was.” Pastel also said in a later interview that in a crisis, “you don’t do anything to escalate that.... That’s where the judgment call comes in.”

Pastel expressed her regret at the failure to communicate. Beyond parents’ and caregivers’ need to know about the situation, she said, “it was an opportunity for us to let the public know that their children were safe and that the staff followed procedure and did a really excellent job ... and that was information that really needed to be shared also. It was an opportunity for a very positive communication, and without that ... there are people who are angry and feel that we purposely did not communicate, and that was not the case at all.”

Pastel later said that on Wednesday, the school should have let the students know that there had been police on campus the day before during dismissal, and that it should have explained the situation to them. On the day of the incident, she and Wilson were distracted by the need to communicate with the IPD, find the student, talk to the parents of potential witnesses, and tell the staff and the PTSA president what had happened. “On Wednesday,” Pastel said, “what we should have done was communicate via a number of vehicles, whether it’s the internet or a written letter that would go home to the parents.” Usually, said Pastel, she would have met with Assistant Superintendents Patrick Jensen and Lesli Myers, and together they would have gone through a checklist to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything important, such as communicating with parents and the community. On Wednesday, however, Pastel was caught up in the investigation.

At the meeting, BoE President Thomas Frank commented, “I suppose I could have asked the question about how the community and parents were going to be informed ... I didn’t do that. I have in the past.... Arguably, it would have been a good thing to ask; it can’t hurt, right? But I didn’t, so for that I apologize.”

Since the incident, with recent heated events involving protests and rumors of violence occurring at IHS, the school has shown a commitment to improved communication. Wilson has on several occasions informed students of situations via announcements during school, and he has also sent letters home to parents.