EDITORIAL: Fencing off school grounds is the responsible thing to do these days

School custodian Paul Tafoya went to Kennedy Middle School last summer like he always had.

In the early morning hours of June 23 of last year, the 48-year-old janitor of Albuquerque Public Schools of five years saw several people on school grounds who shouldn’t have been there.

Tafoya did the conscientious thing, he stepped out of the front office of the school near Lomas and Eubank NE and asked them to leave the property. It wasn’t even 6 a.m. yet. They had no reason to be there at that hour.

The two boys and girl became combative.

Tafoya again did the right thing, reaching for his phone to call for help. But one of the boys quickly knocked the cellphone out of his hand and began to hit him. A 17-year-old boy allegedly pushed him to the ground, pulled out a gun and fired three shots while standing over him, striking Tafoya twice.

The three teens ran away, leaving Tafoya gunned down like a dog, with bullet fragments in his neck and back.

Tafoya had to crawl for his life. He dragged himself to the road, where he was thankfully soon discovered and taken to the hospital with a shattered spine and shoulder and a collapsed lung. The 17-year-old boy was subsequently located and faces charges including attempted murder.

Tafoya will probably be recovering the rest of his life — just for doing his job on that fateful June morning.

Months later, APS Superintendent Scott Elder said the assault was “still unnerving.” We can only imagine.

Tragically, it could happen to any school employee these days who dares to shoo off kids or others from campus in the early morning hours.

Recently, neighbors living near La Cueva started asking questions about why the track and tennis courts at the high school had been fenced and locked after school hours.

“Our property taxes allow us access. We don’t need exercise opportunities taken away. When will it be unlocked?” asked one SpeakUp! writer.

Unfortunately, the truthful answer is probably never.

And it’s not going over well with some neighbors.

“I personally like to walk the track, and use the tennis courts that our tax dollars have paid for,” said another SpeakUp! writer. “I will no longer support or purchase any items that students sell.”

That’s a bit of an overreaction. The kids didn’t lock down the campus.

On the other hand, other neighbors want more order — like the woman who lives next to a baseball field and who came to a recent school board meeting with a bag of stray baseballs that had been hit or thrown near her house by kids playing outside of school hours.

In a guest column published in the April 21 Sunday Journal, APS Police Chief Steve Gallegos and APS Chief Operating Officer John Dufay explained the situation. And we give them credit for that. Neighbors had legitimate questions and concerns, and Gallegos and Dufay addressed them head-on, without any sugar coating.

Gallegos and Dufay explained that our schools are being overrun by vagrants at night — plain and simple.

Gallegos and Dufay said finding syringes on playgrounds and fields has become common. They said school staff were having to sweep the grounds every morning and pick up drug paraphernalia. The homeless have been taking refuge on school property — totally illegal by the way — and school staff have been asking them to leave in the morning.

Who wants that job?

Then, there’s the typical graffiti on the walls. Except now it includes things like swastikas, racial slurs and other vile messages children should not be subjected to when they get off the bus in the morning. Damages were reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars.

And, of course, there are the time-tested lawsuits from people who injure themselves on school property and then go after APS’ deep pockets. A city bus soliciting your litigation business from a personal injury attorney should go past your home soon.

The school district really had no choice but to take action, securing its facilities after hours.

“As much as we wish it wasn’t so, this is the world we live in today,” Gallegos and Dufay wrote on April 21. “It has forced us to take steps to safeguard our schools, playgrounds, and fields in order to keep our students safe and protect the substantial investment our community has made in these facilities.”

La Cueva is just the start. The school district plans to fence off more and more of its campuses.

“As you can imagine, it has been a major undertaking with more than 140 school sites,” Gallegos and Dufay continued. “The recent fencing of one high school campus sparked criticism from some people who live in the area and are upset that the track and tennis courts situated within that campus are now locked.

“We understand where they’re coming from, but we want to stress that we didn’t do it to be mean, to punish anyone, or simply because we could. We’re responding to health and safety concerns across our district. We’re dealing with vandalism. We’re trying to mitigate real liability issues. And, ultimately, we’re trying to keep our students safe.”

A few points need to be clear: APS has a fiduciary responsibility to maintain its taxpayer-funded facilities and grounds; and all APS facilities are for the kids, not the neighbors.

Access for neighbors is a privilege, not a right. The band room has never been open to local rappers working on their demos. There's too much equipment to safeguard.

While outdoor facilities have traditionally been open to the public, the baseball fields, the tennis courts, the track and everything else have also been built for the kids.

With that said, we encourage every building principal to work with neighbors to try and find accommodations for the public at large. Perhaps a two-hour window on alternating school nights after the bell is workable? Or maybe opening up the track and tennis courts on Saturday mornings and closing them in the late afternoon could work out?

Fortunately, APS appears to be on board with such compromises.

“We’re open to exploring potential solutions because we don’t like the idea of having to lock up our facilities either,” Gallegos and Dufay concluded.

That’s good, because APS will no doubt want some of that goodwill returned the next time there’s a bond election.

The fencing of school properties is unfortunate and sad. Most people who run the track at night or play tennis on school courts on the weekends do so with little to no impact on school property. But we also can’t allow our school grounds to become an open space for campers or a Woodstock of drug use.

APS is moving in the right direction. We just hope they’ll tread carefully while moving along the path of enhanced school security.