After Special Town Hall-Style Meeting, Tuckahoe School Board Votes To Hire Armed School Guard

The Tuckahoe School Board, at a special meeting on Monday night, August 22, unanimously approved hiring retired Southampton Town Police Officer Eric Plum as an armed school guard for the upcoming school year.

The district had planned on hiring Plum to serve as a school guard but held the special town hall-style meeting to take the community’s temperature on the question of whether or not Plum would be armed with a gun in his capacity as school guard.

Whether or not school security guards should be armed has been a hotly debated topic across the country in recent years, particularly in the wake of mass school shootings. But there was no debate in the Tuckahoe School cafeteria on Monday night at a meeting that had much higher attendance than usual.

Parents and teachers who were in attendance expressed overwhelming support for hiring Plum as an armed guard.

Many of them referenced an incident that occurred on June 10 — less than three weeks after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas — when the school was hosting its outdoor field day festivities. There was a report, which later turned out to be inaccurate, of a dispute between two individuals in close proximity to the school, in which one person was reportedly brandishing a gun.

In response, the school was sent into a lockdown, with teachers needing to call on training from several drills they’d done in the past, ushering students and several parents in attendance into the building, where they were forced to hide under desks in some instances, in locked classrooms.

The incident was over in minutes, with the police quickly arriving to tell them that there was no threat and they were clear to go back outside.

But, according to accounts shared by some parents at the meeting on Monday night, it was a frightening experience that left an impression.

One parent who spoke said that if the question of whether or not to arm a school guard had been brought up prior to June 10, she’s not sure how she would’ve answered. But she expressed her support for the measure on Monday night, and said it was directly because of what she’d experienced at the school that day.

“It only lasted a few minutes, but the heaviness of the moment lasted a lot longer,” she said.

Several other parents spoke after that in support of arming Plum, adding that they thought that doing so was a “no-brainer,” and expressing their faith in Plum in particular.

Plum was on hand at the meeting and spoke to the group of parents, sharing his expertise in the law enforcement field and in firearms training.

Southampton Town Police Lieutenant Sue Ralph was also on hand to speak in support of Plum. The East Quogue resident has served as a school resource officer for several area districts, including Tuckahoe, and his experience in that department in particular is part of the reason why Tuckahoe Superintendent Len Skuggevik was eager to hire him and open to the idea of having him armed while on the job.

Skuggevik pointed out that several parents had reached out to him over the course of the past few years, expressing their desire to have an armed guard in the school, but he said he was not ready to make that move until he “had the right person.”

“It’s an enormous responsibility,” Skuggevik said at the meeting.

He elaborated on that point in an interview on Tuesday morning. “[Plum] has been in the school for five years now, and I got to know him and his personality and I got to understand how he feels about children and how he feels about law enforcement and protecting people,” Skuggevik said. “Once that trust was built, and there was a full understanding of who he was, I felt comfortable.”

Skuggevik admitted that he was surprised that no one spoke up in opposition to having an armed guard in the school, given the divisive nature of the gun debate in the country generally speaking. When asked if he thought the broad support was a result of the fallout from the incident on June 10, he said he could not guess what was in the minds of other people, but said, “When people are put in uncomfortable positions and in a position where something might have happened, you do start to think about all the possibilities and how to better protect yourselves and the kids.”

Skuggevik said the board chose to host the town hall-style meeting as a way to hear from people on all sides of the issue. Ultimately, one side was clearly represented, from the parents in attendance, to the board members and administration, and the representatives from the teachers union.

The union reps said that while the teachers “had more questions than answers” when they were initially made aware of the possibility of hiring an armed guard, they were, generally speaking, “supportive of whatever is best for the children,” and felt confident that the board would make the right decision with that in mind.

Skuggevik said he has yet to be contacted by anyone in the district expressing direct opposition to arming Plum.

In speaking to the parents and community members who were there on Monday night, Plum said he was happy to take on the new role. He pointed out that he’s been a DARE instructor for many years, a job he said he loves, and that he’s enjoyed working in schools precisely because he enjoys building relationships with students. Those are other benefits he will bring to the job, he said, in addition to the obvious.

“I’m going to work for my money and engage with students,” he said. “And, God forbid something happens, you have a highly trained individual on hand.”