NEW YORK STATE (WSYR-TV) — A new report from State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, claims schools are not doing enough to prepare for emergency situations, like shootings.

DiNapoli’s auditors looked at safety planning at 16 school districts and two charter schools from 2017 to 2018 and 2019 for one school district.

Two of those districts included in the audit were the Syracuse City School District and Fayetteville-Manlius School District.

Among the things the report found was that no schools met all of the annual safety training requirements, even though they certified they trained staff.

Eighteen schools either did not have a safety team or did not have all the required members. Two schools did not have safety plans and 17 others had incomplete plans.

None of the schools met all 19 minimum safety plan requirements.

The report did not specify which districts fell into which category.

Fayetteville-Manlius Superintendent, Craig Tice, posted a statement to the district’s website on Thursday morning that said, in part, “The auditor’s findings for Fayetteville-Manlius were items that we can easily address to be in full compliance. At no time were any students or staff placed in jeopardy because of the findings identified by the auditors.”

In a statement provided to NewsChannel 9 on Thursday afternoon, the Syracuse City School District says:

“The Syracuse City School District takes the safety and security of our students and staff very seriously. This past year in collaboration with Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut from SUNY Oswego we conducted standard response protocol training at every school building. SRP provides consistent, clear, shared language and actions among all students, staff and first responders that can be applied in any emergency.

We also have a district wide safety plan as well as individual school safety plans in place at every school building. We utilize a single point of entry at every school building, we have bag scanners, wand searches and metal detectors at our high schools and every visitor to a school must be vetted through the RAPTOR visitor management system by a member of our school security team.

We have already begun addressing Comptroller DiNapoli’s report and believe we have addressed the concerns raised. We also provided the Comptroller’s office with a written response to the preliminary draft audit.”


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