A Northeast Kingdom school district will receive a $317,000 federal grant to upgrade its safety infrastructure.
Danville School District educates just over 300 students from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade in a single building. The money will fund three projects: upgrading and adding security cameras, replacing classroom door locks and replacing the school’s 30-year-old PA system.
The oldest part of the Danville School building was constructed in 1937, and the most recent addition dates back to 1989, elementary school principal Sarah Welch said.
The building has long needed these safety upgrades, but the work felt out of reach given the district’s small tax base, Welch said in a recent interview.
“Without this grant, it wouldn't be accessible this quickly,” Welch said. “We would have to pick and choose what we can do, while also making sure that we're having money to support other infrastructure needs.”
Welch and high school principal Natalie Conway are most excited about the new PA system. The current system doesn’t cover the entire school. Conway pointed to her office as an example — the room was previously a storage closet, so there’s no speaker in it.
“So if there's an announcement and my door is closed, I won't know exactly what that announcement is,” Conway said.
The upgrades will take about 18 months to complete. The funds come from a school safety grant program that’s administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
The state has made smaller grants for school safety available in the past. Danville School District received funds to upgrade some security cameras and install key fob entrances for all the external doors, Welch said.
In the aftermath of what authorities say was an averted school shooting in Fair Haven in 2018, Vermont tracked threats to schools. But the Vermont Intelligence Center no longer collects that data because the reporting of threats was inconsistent, said Adam Silverman, a spokesperson for the Vermont State Police.
In early 2019, there were 35 school threats reported in about six months. Only 10 of those incidents resulted in prosecutors filing criminal charges.
Vermont also passed a law in 2023 that required certain safety requirements for all schools, including developing emergency operation plans, conducting drills and using "behavioral threat assessments" to address potential threats.
