‘Let our team at Quincy Public School District 172 do their jobs’

QUINCY — Wednesday’s Quincy School Board meeting didn’t have anyone from the public comment on the events of the week where multiple schools have been in “soft lockdown” or “secure mode”, but one board member decided he wanted to clear the air on the subject.

Jim Whitfield, who has been on the Quincy School Board since 2015, said he believed most people could agree that safety is the number one priority of the students and children of the community and the district takes “any threat very seriously.”

“We have great safety measures and security in place. We have a great security team. We have security guards at every single building. We have a threat assessment team, not just district wide, but at every single building,” Whitfield said. “I also want everyone to know that our security team and our security guards, we’re not just sitting around waiting for something to happen. We are proactively always on top of every type of piece of information that comes our way if there’s ever any type of security incident or any type of breach, let our superintendent, our building principals are building leaders do their job.”

Whitfield said Tuesday’s incident, which led to Quincy High and Baldwin Elementary Schools going into “secure mode” came from an IP address in a foreign country through a student’s Snapchat account that had been hacked.

Whitfield said the flood of phone calls coming into all buildings and the text and social media messages coming in and out of schools during the school day don’t help the situation.

“If we can’t do our job to find out what the information is, we’re not going to piece meal and put out something that is wrong,” he said. “The Internet, believe it or not … not every single thing you read on the internet is 100 percent factual. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X, Snapchat, whatever it may be … be your own gatekeeper find out if you feel that this is 100 percent factual.”

Whitfield then gave multiple examples of misinformation regarding the situation at the schools over the last few days.

“There was a rumor that two students had been detained for making a threat … not true,” he said. “There was a rumor that students had been arrested on campus with knives. Again, not true. There was a rumor that students had been arrested on campus with guns. Not true. There was a rumor that four students were driving around Quincy with a bag of guns. There was no evidence of that whatsoever.”

Quincy Superintendent Todd Pettit, who did not discuss the events during the regular meeting, told reporters afterward the district has to determine the balance of information given out during these types of events.

“Trust our experts and security that we are blessed to have in the district, but also our administration, that we are making the best decisions possible, and we are sharing the information that we could share in the moment, because any information that we share cannot compromise an investigation or our safety within the school,” Pettit said.

Pettit said the district used its Skyward alert system to get information to teachers and students’ families as events unfolded.