William E. Tolman High School - Security Issues

Security Issues

Security at Tolman High School was greatly scrutinized in the fall of 1996 when a Providence teenager blindly fired a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol in the school cafeteria following a fistfight at a school dance. A ban on outsiders at school dances and an increase is police officer presence at the school was enforced by the superintendent following the shooting. A proposal for a requirement for all students to wear photo ids during regular school hours was another major policy brought forth shortly after the event. Student ids were issued for a number of years, but were discontinued due to funding issues. Weeks after the shooting, the suspect was arrested at a Dunkin' Donuts in Johnston, Rhode Island, after a detective learned he was in the doughnut shop and preparing to flee the state.

In March 2001 a student allegedly threatened a teacher saying that he had a .22 pistol at home with bullet with the teachers name on it.

On December 10, 2002, a student was jumped outside of the school by a group of students he accidentally bumped into in the hallway in which the student received 65 stitches and suffered numbness and scarring. The attackers were identified using a school yearbook and four students were charged with assault and expelled for the rest of the school year. The student's father said that there were other outbreaks of violence in the Pawtucket school system and alleged that school administrators were keeping them quiet. He also demanded that police officers be posted inside Pawtucket school buildings. School Committee members voted unanimously to commission the Blue Ribbon Violence Committee, headed by former Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse, in response to the outrage. In legal papers, the student said that the assault "took place as a result of the city's failure to provide adequate supervision and security" in the public schools and demanded $100,000, the statutory limit for damages in a municipal liability case.

In May 2003 a student was suspended for carrying a weapon similar to brass knuckles in school.

In September 2003 a task force on school violence said that school violence is going unchecked because students who are most likely to commit acts of violence are students prone to academic failure, and the Pawtucket school system has few programs to help those students.

On January 12, 2005 nine young men were arrested for fighting outside of Tolman. Police were forewarned about the fight but it took 10 police officers to break up the fights because every time they would move the group a fight would break out around the corner. Two of the people arrested weren't residents of Pawtucket.

In the spring of 2007, a suspicious looking object resembling a pipe bomb caused the evacuation of Tolman High School. The state's fire marshal's bomb squad was called in after a teacher spotted the object in a second floor locker. The bomb squad applied a small explosive charge to destroy the object. When a second larger explosion did not occur, the fragments were sent away for testing to learn more about the object. It was concluded that it was in fact part of the school's circa 1927 pipe organ that was decommissioned during renovation of the school's auditorium. Two students later confessed they stuck the piece of organ into a locker for safekeeping.