PATERSON NJ October 27 2021— In a brawl outside Paterson’s School 15, a female student on Tuesday afternoon grabbed another girl by the hair and repeatedly banged her head against the pavement as others looked on — some laughing, screaming and recording video.

The incident became the latest assault in an ongoing outbreak of violence at Paterson schools, a problem the Board of Education tried to address on Wednesday night by approving two emergency contracts for extra security guards.

Meanwhile, 13 Paterson police officers went through training this week so that they could be deployed to fill security gaps at Paterson schools.

“There are fights all over the place,” said John McEntee Jr., president of the Paterson teachers union, citing separate brawls during the past week inside a classroom, hallway and bathroom at John F. Kennedy High School.

“The things that are going on are absolutely bizarre,” McEntee added.

Officials said part of the problem has been the lack of security guards provided by Motivated Security Services, the firm hired by the district under a $3.3 million contract. Under that deal, the company is supposed to assign 177 security guards per day to Paterson schools. But district officials said Motivated has not been able to fill all the requisite slots, partly because of the hiring problems affecting many companies during the pandemic.

“We’ve been short,” said Paterson Public Schools Security Director Dalton Price. “We’re trying to fill the gaps.”

Citing the confidentiality of security information, officials would not reveal exactly how many guards Motivated has been sending to Paterson. The number varies from day to day, officials said. Last Thursday, when a fight at Kennedy resulted in reports of a student with a gun, four of the Motivated guards who were supposed to be at Kennedy called out, officials said.

The school board on Wednesday approved a pair of $44,000 contracts with Allied Universal Security Services and CSI Security to provide guards to fill the assignments that Motivated has been unable to handle, officials said.

Those emergency contracts are designed to cover the next 30 days, officials said. By then, the district plans to complete the regular contract bidding process to hire a firm to fill the security gaps for the remainder of the year, officials said.

The district’s overall security budget is $4.4 million, which covers the outside contractors, an in-house security force and the use of off-duty cops, officials said.

During the current academic year, the district has been deploying seven off-duty police officers — who are armed and in uniform — to fill between three and five separate posts per day. The district’s alternative high school gets an off-duty cop every day and so does School 10, officials said. Kennedy and Eastside high schools get off-duty officers as well, with the number ranging from none to two per day, officials said.

More than five years ago, the district would deploy as many as six off-duty cops at Eastside and Kennedy, officials said. The district used to set aside more than $1 million for paying off-duty officers, said school board president Kenneth Simmons. But budget cuts have lowered that number to $200,000, he said.

Price, a retired Paterson police lieutenant who became the district’s security director earlier this year, said the 13 cops who went through training for school situations would be used to augment security already in place. Price noted that sometimes it can be difficult getting off-duty officers for the schools because they can get $75 per hour working at construction sites – about twice as much as the district can pay them.

Price said that if he had enough money available he would like to see 15 off-duty officers deployed in Paterson schools every day. But he said that simply hiring more security guards may not solve the problem of violence among students.

“These incidents are happening in isolated areas,” he said.

northjersey.com

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