Sandy Hook mother discusses school safety at symposium
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
Michele Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, speaks Friday to a room full of law enforcement, school officials and others attending Friends of Safe Schools USA-Pennsylvania’s School Safety Symposium at the Hyatt Place in North Strabane Township. Michele lost her daughter Josephine in the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy.
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
Michele Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, speaks Friday to a room full of law enforcement, school officials and others attending Friends of Safe Schools USA-Pennsylvania’s School Safety Symposium.
NORTH STRABANE–Friends and family of the 20 children and six educators and administrators who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, have all dealt with their grief in different ways.
Some have launched foundations. Others have filed lawsuits. Some have simply decided to get on with their lives and try to move on.
Michele Gay, whose 7-year-old daughter, Josephine, was among the students who died in one of the country’s worst school shootings, opted to start the organization Safe and Sound Schools with fellow Sandy Hook parent Alissa Parker. The nonprofit group offers insights on how schools can be made more secure and how a community can rebuild after tragedy that is almost beyond description.
“Each and every one is trying to find our way forward,” Gay said.
Gay discussed the events that unfolded that day, and things she and the community learned in the aftermath, at a school safety symposium at the Hyatt Place Pittsburgh South hotel in North Strabane Friday morning. She told school and law-enforcement officials that simple things could have helped lower the death toll at Sandy Hook, such as having doors that teachers could have locked from the inside, or access to the public address system being somewhere other than the front office, an adjacent conference room or the library.
“If my child’s substitute teacher had been able to secure the classroom with a key, the whole thing might have been different,” Gay said. “We still would have had a tragedy, but of a different sort.”
The 1960s-era elementary school where the shooting took place has since been leveled and replaced with a new, state-of-the-art building. Along with detailing the hard lessons learned in the wake of the killing, Gay recounted in granular detail how that day unfolded for her, which included taking her two older daughters to school, and then taking Josephine, her youngest daughter, to Sandy Hook just minutes before “a very profoundly disturbed young man” who brought many guns pulled into the parking lot. Josephine was in a classroom with other students who had special needs.
Gay received a phone call at home indicating there had been a shooting at one of the schools, she remembered, but she assumed it was at the high school. She later found it was at Sandy Hook and, much later, that her daughter had been one of the victims.
“A lot of parents waited in agony all day, wondering what had happened to their loved one,” Gay recalled.
Before the shooting, though, many in the Sandy Hook community took false comfort in the idea that a school shooting on the scale of what unfolded could not happen there – that such calamities took place elsewhere and “not here,” as Gay put it.
She continued, “Everybody took safety seriously. … They were doing everything they had been told to do.”
The symposium was sponsored by the charitable group Friends of Safe Schools USA. Information on Gay’s organization can be found at www.safeandsoundschools.org.