With more than 30 security cameras placed throughout the building, alarms on the outside doors and only one unlocked entrance, which leads directly into the main office, Chief School Administrator Carol Malouf said she is confident Cranbury School students are safe.
By: Lacey Korevec
With more than 30 security cameras placed throughout the building, alarms on the outside doors and only one unlocked entrance, which leads directly into the main office, Chief School Administrator Carol Malouf said she is confident Cranbury School students are safe.
The school re-examined its emergency procedures after the deadly shootings that took place at Virginia Tech April 16 to make sure it had every angle covered, she said.
"As far as securing the building and having a system in place, we have all of that," she said, adding that the Cranbury Police Department visits the school twice a year to review its safety procedures. "And should someone be in the building who shouldn’t be, we have ways of communicating. And I think that was the difficulty at Virginia Tech getting the information out. But we do have a plan in place to do that."
Some have criticized Virginia Tech administrators for not locking the campus down soon enough after the first two shootings took place. But Ms. Malouf said keeping Cranbury School safe is different from keeping a college campus or large high school campus safe because of its small size and the age of the students.
"We really have a fairly good pulse on the building," she said. "And you have to remember, when the little kids are walking the hallways, they’re walking with a teacher. So, it’s only our sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders walking in the hallways unsupervised, but they’re supervised by teachers standing in the classroom doorways. So it’s much different in a college or high school situation."
Open lines of communication help Cranbury protect itself from students who may be at risk of violently lashing out against teachers or fellow students, she said. Any students exhibiting violent tendencies or psychological problems are dealt with through meetings with parents and, in serious cases, the school can require the student to meet with a psychiatrist to certify that he or she is healthy enough to attend Cranbury School, she said.
"We have easier ways of handling that because the children are younger here," she said. "So, the teachers constantly give us feedback on a child and we’re able to stay on top of that."
The recent shooting has not made teachers at Cranbury School fearful about the possibility of a similar incident happening in the building, Ms. Malouf said.
"Since Columbine, we’ve been doing security drills," she said. "It’s just like doing fire drills. It’s just part of our overall mode of operation here and it is just taken as one of those things that we do. Maybe it makes the teachers more vigilant about strangers in the building, but we’re good about that."
Any non-student who enters the building during a school day is forced to enter through the main office and is required to sign in and wear a guest pass throughout his or her visit, she said.
Ms. Malouf said she cannot say how the Virginia Tech shooting has affected Cranbury School students, but said it likely has had more of an impact on the upper-grade students.
"We did a moment of silence and the kids were all respectful and knew what it was about," she said.

