Good afternoon, Monticello community:
First and foremost, I want to thank you all for your patience and cooperation during the events of Friday, Dec. 1. I am grateful to our staff and community partners who ensured every single one of our students was accounted for and arrived home safely following our district-wide evacuation.
When we returned to school on Monday, building administrators met with students and staff to hear their perspectives, thank them for their cooperation and discuss improvements for the future. Counseling was made available for any student in need of support as they resumed their regular school routine.
On Monday evening, administrators and school resource officers (SROs) held a post-incident debriefing. At that meeting, we discussed the successes and challenges of Friday’s events, and areas of improvement for our schools’ emergency response plans. In the upcoming weeks, our school safety teams will conduct similar debriefings at their respective buildings. In addition, I have been in contact with law enforcement agencies to discuss their feedback on the events of Friday and hear their suggestions for improvement.
The district-wide safety committee’s next meeting will be held in January. At that meeting, the committee will review any potential changes to our emergency response plan, taking the insight from all these debriefings into consideration.
I extend my sincerest appreciation to our staff, SROs, law enforcement, Monticello Raceway, and the Monticello and Wurtsboro fire departments for their assistance on Friday.
We are grateful that this bomb threat turned out to be a hoax. While we hope that we will never need to experience an evacuation again, we did learn a great deal through this incident, and we will use that newfound knowledge to continue to make student and staff safety our top priority.
With Monti Pride,
Matthew T. Evans, Ed. D.
Superintendent of Schools
Monticello Central School District