Boyertown Crowd Faults School's Threat Response

Photos by Evan Brandt

Despite only three hours notice, more than 200 people showed up for a Town Hall meeting about school security held Thursday at Boyertown High School.

Faced with continuing rumors about threats at Boyertown High School, the administration called a town hall meeting Thursday which, despite only three hours notice, attracted hundreds of worried parents and students.

Assistant Superintendent Marybeth Torcia made what School Board President Donna Usavage called "the command decision" to call the meeting largely "to make sure everyone has the same information" and in an attempt the stem the rumor mill rampaging on social media, texts and phone calls.

And she took her lumps, with parent after parent telling her that the district's response to a recent threat had been inadequate, particularly in the communication department.

Boyertown Police Chief Barry Leatherman addresses
last night's meeting about what his department can and
can't do in such situations.

It began before the Memorial Day weekend on Thursday, May 24, when a
student was overheard by several others to have made a threat against ninth grade students, calling them "snitches."

Principal Brett Cooper said in the information that his team received, no specific threat was issued, and there was no mention of a gun or shooting. They deemed it to be not a viable threat after interviewing the student involved.

"At no point did anyone provide information to the administration that anyone was going to shoot the entire class," Torcia said. "What we knew was student said there were snitches and he would take care of them."

However, over the weekend, rumors of an attack spread, students expressed fear about returning to school on Tuesday and parents began comparing notes.

"We were caught off-guard by information that was going around on social media," said Torcia. "If there would have been a threat made that involved a gun, that information would have gone out that day."

Boyertown junior Lindsey Scott told Torcia that
it felt like the district only communicated with
students and parents because of the rumors.

By Monday, it had become obvious to the administration that some kind of communication was necessary, but the vaguely worded, non-specific email did little to allay fears and only allowed room for more speculation, parents said last night.

Subsequent rumors about the student's girlfriend opening up a door at the high school to let him in for a June 1 ninth grade assembly finally triggered Torcia to hold the meeting in an attempt to put the matter to a rest -- a delay she said, in hindsight, was a mistake.

She said the two students involved have not been expelled, but are no longer in the district and will not be returning next year.

She and Cooper also said the student who made the threat was no under the care of a "certified counselor."

Donald Fry said the high school should have
armed guards.

"Not to be mean, but these people don't trust you," said parent Jon Emeigh.

"This isn't the first time Boyertown has held back information," said another speaker.

Torcia confessed, repeatedly, that the administration had made mistakes and was learning from the meeting what parents, students and staff need in terms of information.

There was no shortage of suggestions.

Donald Fry said the school should have armed guards, dismissing concerns about cost by adding, to applause, "come one, the price of a bullet is 26 cents, and how to you compare that to the price of a life?"

But parent Stephanie Dietrich and Emeigh warned overreacting.

Colebrookdale Police Sgt. Amy Babb listens to a speaker.

Noting that she has a "law enforcement background" and has interviewed shooters, Deitrich said metal detectors and an enhanced police presence will not stop a determined shooter.

"If they are bound and determined to kill you, they don't care if the whole SWAT team is in front of them," she said.

Emeigh said while he favors armed guards "I don't favor turning the school into a fortress." He said it may make students feel safe at first, but that studies have show it ultimately increases their stress level and is detrimental to education."

But parent Joe Fava said he had been able to enter the ninth grade section of the

This speaker said she is a survivor of a school

shooting at Upper Perkiomen High School. 

"I don't want anyone else to go through what I did."

school that night without having to identify himself and without being challenged at any point.

"You have a problem," he said, calling for an expert to help make the district's new security plan. "I trust you to educate my kids, not to secure them.

But Torcia said the district had engaged an expert, a former employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who had helped craft the plan which, she said, will be put into place in three phases.

She said on Tuesday, the school board approved spending more than $300,000 on the plan, which includes "physical plant upgrades" like cameras and other items she did not think it prudent to detail.

Torcia also said the doors at the high school will be fitted with alarms, to prevent students opening them at inappropriate times to let people into the building.

There will also be education for students and staff about a new reporting matrix, and better education, she said.

Here are the Tweets from the meeting:

School Security in Boyertown

STEM Learning Really Gets Around in Pottstown

Submitted Photos

Pottstown High School students in Andrew Bachman's engineering class check out the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle built by Montgomery County Community College students.

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Pottstown School District.

Students in the Pottstown School District from elementary to high school know that we need to protect our environment and not waste our energy. 

And so teachers in the school district focused students attention on cleaner ways to get around.

Jennifer McGraw, a fourth grade teacher at Franklin Elementary organized a school-wide solar car project that had students designing and building solar powered model cars which they raced at a school wide assembly held on the school playground. 

Franklin fourth grader Luke Grace with 

his solar-powered car.

The race was held on National Day of STEM. 

As an introduction to solar energy Pre-K through second grade students used a basic kit to build their entry.

 More sophisticated models that required design planing were build by third and fourth graders. 

"This was a great hands on learning experience for our students that included learning about,solar energy, renewable vs nonrenewable resources, aerodynamics and streamlining," said McGraw. 

Going from hand size solar cars to a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered Urban Concept Vehicle was just a matter of going to Pottstown High and Mr. Andy Bachman's Engineering class.

There, the students enjoyed a demonstration by Montgomery County Community College professor William Brownlowe and students of Team INNOVA who built the Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicle to compete in the Shell Eco-marathon competition for alternative fuel concepts. 

 The team, which has won a number of awards for the design and operation of their vehicles, were on hand to give a demonstration in the school parking lot. 

"This is a unique experience for our students to not only see the vehicle in operation but to be able to talk to and ask questions of the designers and builder," said Bachman. 

His students are no strangers to design and building. Last year they designed and build an operational hovercraft. 

Energy was well spend by students as they renewed a valuable resource, their knowledge. 

$164M Spring-Ford Budget Will Raise Taxes 2.35%

Photos by Evan Brandt

CHAMPIONS ALL: Undefeated 7th, 8th, 9th, 10, 11th and 12th grade Spring-Ford student athletes recognized at Tuesday night's Spring-Ford Area School Board meeting.

Spring-Ford board member Mark Dehnert cast the only vote against the proposed final $164,444,651 proposed final budget for the 2018-2019 school year Tuesday night.

Dehnert said his vote was because "we're not addressing security in the whole district."

He was likely referring to a previous matter on which he had also disagreed with the majority of the board -- the creation of a new position, coordinator of safety and emergency preparedness.

Dehnert said the job, meant to address safety concerns in an era of school shootings, was a waste of resources and that the money should instead be spent on having armed guards in every building.

Superintendent David Goodin had explained the budget called not only for the new position -- which would include patrol as well as administrative duties, but a second employee who would "make the circuit" among the district's many school buildings.

Dehnert was unconvinced.

James Fink, CFO of the district, said the budget carries a 2.35 percent tax hike, below the maximum 2.4 percent allowed by the state-set maximum.

The new millage rate will be 26.8599 mills, which represents an increase of .6157 mills or $.6157 for every $1,000 of assessed value.

For a home assessed at $250,000, this represents an annual increase of about $154.
School Board President Thomas DiBello said one of the big items this year was the new teacher contract which, Fink said, adds up to a collective 5 percent increase when raises and benefits are considered together.

The other big cost is special education, costs which the state mandates but pays only a small portion.

No member of the public spoke either for or against the budget.

The vote Tuesday night technically advertises the proposed final budget for 30 days and the board will have to vote again at the June 28 meeting to make the budget final.

Here are the Tweets from the meeting:

Champions, Budgets and School Security

Barth First Graders Take a 'Field' Trip, Literally

Photos Courtesy of the Pottstown School District

From left, Alonna Kacanda, Rashawn Ward, Morgan Gastonguay, check out some of the meadow's natural wonders as highlighted by teacher Connie Nye

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Pottstown School District.

Barth Elementary first graders recently took a field to, where else?

Connie Nye and Barth first graders Deandre James,
Zzahmyeir Reid-Anderson, Ashonti Stillman and
Ja'Nahla Wilson explore the meadow behind Barth

A field!

Thanks to a donation from Patient First, located at King Street and Shoemaker Road, Connie Nye, the creator of Sweet Water Education, was able to visit and present her program to the students.

The three-day program is called "Sweet Dream" and is looks at habitat, focused on the subject of animal habitats.

Isaiah Moser releases dandelion seeds to the wind

As part of the school's STEAM curriculum, it includes hands-on interactive activities such as field exploration, outdoor lessons, habitat songs and team scavenger hunts.


As one of the most under-funded school districts in Pennsylvania, Pottstown Schools reach out and take advantage of community partnerships to create learning opportunities for students.

Another reason to say Proud to be from Pottstown.

Pondering the Future of Our Local Newspaper

Photo by Lorraine Dusky

Me, my protest t-shirt and my protest sign outside the Montauk, Long Island vacation home of Heath Freeman, president of Alden Global Capital.

There is a scene I love at the end of the 1972 Robert Redford film "The Candidate."

Redford's character, the naive political novice Bill McKay, has won the unwinnable race against entrenched incumbent Republican Crocker Jarmon.

McKay is about to give his victory speech and, looking a bit dazed, he turns to his campaign manager Marvin Lucas, played in a brilliant low-key performance by Peter Boyle, and says "now what?"

Throughout the film, the McKay and his team give increasing focus to a single goal, winning the race, and less and less time and thought to what they would like to accomplish should they win.

As I stood Friday outside Heath Freeman's vacation home, a $4.8 million, five-

Screenshot from Zillow.com.

Heath Freeman's vacation mansion property
is outlined in white.

bedroom, five-bath mansion overlooking Lake Montauk at the tip of Long Island, holding a sign that read "Invest in us or sell us" -- I felt a little bit like Bill McKay (but much less handsome).

I looked at my sign and thought, "now what?"

Not that we're at the point that we've prevailed against the cartoonishly capitalist corporate raider who is stripping the meat and bones off local journalism only to invest the salaries of laid off journalists into spectacularly failed investments.

Far from it.

Screenshot from The Nation.

Here's a closer look at the Montauk house before Freeman
began expanding it.

The picture of the private equity hedge fund company Freeman and his mentor Randall Smith run, as painted in such publications as The Philadelphia Inquirer,  The New York Times, and The Nation is "a caricature of capitalism at its most greedy and amoral," as reporter Julie Reynolds wrote.

Salaries of reporters, editors and photographers who once held our local governments accountable, chronicled the highs and lows of our student athletes and undertook civic campaigns to better our communities are now literally paying instead for some of the most incredibly questionable investments in the history of Wall Street.

One included investing in one of Russia's worst polluters, with connections to President Vladmir Putin; another, in a Brazilian company that became the target of that nation's largest political scandal; and a third, a U.S. drug store chain named Fred's that, as of 2017, had lost $112 million since Freeman took the reins, according to reporting by Reynolds:

"To put that in human terms: at a cost of less than Alden’s gamble on Fred’s stock, the 350-plus news workers lost in the past two years could have kept working — and keeping their communities informed — for at least another five years."

Finally, the editorial page staff at The Denver Post, which Freeman's Digital First Media is currently strangling, along with its much smaller sibling, The Pottstown Mercury, had had enough and staged the kind of revolt that would only happen in a newsroom.

They wrote about it.

A lot.

You can find links to The Denver Post's single act of defiance (subsequent attempts were censored, followed by resignations in protest) by clicking onto this article on the web page run by The News Guild.

That's the union, part of the Communication Workers of America, representing many of the papers owned by Alden's Digital First Media company and for which Reynolds writes most of her spectacularly researched articles.

That's the same union that was meeting with Digital First officials to negotiate a new contract, including a request for our first raise in three years, while I was standing outside Heath Freeman's house holding a sign.

Having served on negotiating committees, my hopes and sympathies are with those Guild negotiators. Their job is not an easy one.

Industry analysts say the company earned nearly $160 million last year, while DFM’s own executives have said the company is solidly profitable. In fact, according to information published May 5 by newspaper analyst Ken Doctor, Digital First Media earned $18 million among the newspapers it owns around Philadelphia, which includes The Mercury, The Reporter, The Times-Herald, The Delaware County Daily Times, The Daily Local News and a fistful of weeklies. 

The 30 percent profit margin earned in "the Philadelphia cluster," is the largest in the company, which is one of the largest newspaper owners in the nation.

That should worry people beyond Pottstown, because the strategy of strip-mining newspaper jobs to generate cash for more bad investments is the same everywhere Digital First owns a newspaper. And they are certainly not interested in investing any of that profit back into the newspapers which are producing it.

According to a May 24 negotiating bulletin from The News Guild, "DFM attorney Marshall Anstandig sat at the negotiating table and said “I can’t sit here and apologize for the fact that we are profitable and our owners want us to be as profitable as possible. We have owners who are very concerned about staying in the black and quite frankly that is their prerogative.”

He concluded by adding a phrase I have heard many times at the negotiating table, “there is no wage proposal at this time.”

I suppose I'll have to take that as also being the answer I would have gotten from Mr. Freeman had he come to the door after I knocked Friday.

Although a woman I presume to be his wife told me he wasn't home when she pulled out of the driveway, the Dave Matthews Band music blaring from the outdoor speakers suggested otherwise.

So I walked to the front door and knocked.

A housekeeper answered and I asked to see Mr. Freeman. I stepped into the foyer at her invitation and I followed her eyes up as she looked to the second floor balcony and said "someone is here to see you" to the man I recognized as Mr. Freeman who was looking back at me and my "#NewsMatters" T-shirt.

He did not come down.

The housekeeper asked if he was expecting me.

Definitely not, I said.

So she asked me to wait outside and he would speak to me there.

Subsequently, she came out and asked how I knew where he lived. "It was published in The Nation," I replied.

So she said, "it would be best if you call him."

So I asked for the phone number and she said she did not have one. I replied that seemed highly unlikely.

Then I left.

My trusty reporter's notebook in my pocket, I had decided ahead of time that given the opportunity to speak face-to-face to the man who will eventually eliminate my job (perhaps sooner now that I've published this account) I would ask one question: "Mr. Freeman, what value do you place on local news?"

That is, after all, our product.

But that does not seem to be the view of Mr. Freeman and company.

Bernie Lunzer, the president of my union, put his finger on it I think when he spoke to The American Prospect last December:

“The traditional chains had to downsize, but they still thought like newspaper people — what sustains the product and the community. “With private equity, it’s about squeezing out the 20 percent and anything goes. Use it up, sell it, or just kill it. The profit is the product.”

It seems like there is little future in ownership by a company that considers its
only product to be profit.

Hence, the Guild's new mantra, "Invest or Sell."

Which brings us back to a young Robert Redford and Bill McKay.

Sell us to whom? Buyers are not exactly lining up for companies that produce single-digit profits these days.

In some ways, the Trump era is a kind of warped golden age of journalism, at least for the big boys. Subscriptions, digital and otherwise, are soaring at The New York Times and The Washington Post as people look for a place where sanity and reality have some kind of foot-hold.

But the Post is thriving mostly because it is owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, who seems to like having newspaper in his portfolio and is satisfied with much smaller profit margins.

In Minneapolis, Glen Taylor, the billionaire owner of the Timberwolves basketball team, purchased the Minneapolis Star Tribune out of bankruptcy four years ago.

The newspaper makes a profit -- not vulture hedge fund-level profit -- but enough to keep it sustainable without cutting staff. So he doesn't.

By contrast, next door in the newsroom of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, owned by Digital First Media, the newsroom hemorrhaging  continues.

But is that the only way local journalism can survive? Getting purchased by a well-meaning billionaire? There are only so many of them around and I'm not aware that any of them live in Pottstown, PA.

Although I certainly wouldn't mind if that happened to The Mercury, it's not exactly a fool-proof plan for sustaining local journalism.

Photo by Karen Maxfield

If you're going to carry a protest sign to a corporate mogul's vacation home
in Montauk, what better place to make your point than it's iconic lighthouse
and to ponder the question, "Now What?"

Lots of people smarter than me, and with way more money than me, have made plenty of attempts to find a sustainable model that ensures the function of local journalism survives.

But I have yet to see one that can be duplicated elsewhere.

Consider that Peter Barbey, the wealthy owner of The Reading Eagle, recently announced lay-offs in that newsroom, once considered impregnable to such things.

Locally, former Mercury publisher Joe Zlomek produces The Sanatoga Post, a digital hyper-local news site that is sustainable, but not for a large staff.

And, I don't think its giving away any secrets to point out that Joe also has a full-time job.

He has several other local sites as well and frankly I'm not quite sure when he sleeps, but as sustainable models for moderate-scale 24/7 news gathering goes, it lacks the 24/7 part.

So I hope that my fellow journalists, union members and non-union members alike, will begin to turn their considerable talents and attention to that vital question, all at the same time we are fighting for our publication's lives with owners who have no interest in keeping them alive, only in bleeding them for cash.

Otherwise, if we focus only on that fight, and we actually get what we asked for -- a sale to another owner who is not an altruistic billionaire -- we may find ourselves like Bill McKay asking "now what?"