by Robert Lynch; October 1, 2025
The fire marshal had set the room’s limit at 49 people. I counted 48 seated as the Ithaca Board of Education met there Tuesday night. Had Board President Sean Eversley Bradwell and member Erin Croyle not then been excused, the room would have been over limit.
Ignore the (low-tech, round-faced) clock having been set an hour too fast. Obviously, the Board of Education’s district office conference room hasn’t been used much lately. But it was used that night. And it will likely be used again and again for some time to come.
Prompted implicitly by a September 26 multi-district threat of an imminent school shooting, a short-lived scare that law enforcement later determined to be “non-credible,” the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) this week abruptly and hastily moved its September 30th meeting and all scheduled future voting sessions away from the board’s customary convening place, the High School’s more spacious York Lecture Hall, and into a somewhat more secure—though definitely more cramped—district office conference room across the lawn.
Meeting attendees at the new venue now must first “buzz-in” at the door to enter the building. They’ll then find a clerk seated in the hall, serving as a gatekeeper of sorts. She’ll advise visitors to sign an attendance log. Once you clear each of those limited obstacles, good luck finding a seat.
“If you look at the long history of Board of Education meetings, my time at York was a bit of a time out,” School Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown tried to explain when his time to speak came up at Tuesday’s session. In his initial remarks, Brown never directly addressed the previous Friday’s incident. He didn’t have to. The inference was clear. And it was also clear that Dr. Brown and fellow administrators had orchestrated the sudden relocation.
“I learned that the Ithaca City School District was the last school district I was able to find that had open access to its board of education meetings without anyone signing in, without being buzzed in, whatsoever,” Brown told the Board. The superintendent related conversations he’d had at a regional superintendents meeting. “So what you’re seeing now is us making some attempts to respond to best practices and frankly to respond to some of the requests we’ve had around accessibility and access to our meetings,” Brown said.
“I was here when all of our buildings had open access,” Brown recalled, “and we had parents and families, including myself, who would just walk through buildings throughout the day. Things have shifted and changed.”
But one cannot escape the timing of the latest, sudden alteration. First notification of it came one day before the Tuesday meeting. It came Monday, September 29, when the session’s agenda got posted online. It was the Monday following the Friday scare.
“Beginning September 30, 2025, all Board of Education voting meetings and committee work sessions will be held in the ICSD Board Building, 400 Lake Street,” the District’s terse, one-sentence advisory stated.
Asked as to why the new procedures had been so suddenly put in place, the meeting’s hallway monitor Tuesday night directed inquiries to the ICSD’s Communications Department, which as of midday Wednesday, October 1, had yet to issue a formal statement or news release.
For their part, Ithaca Board of Education members said little at the September 30 session about the change in venue.
“I want to commend the Board to being open to the evolution of the best practices and recommendations from folks who advise us on where to meet,” Dr. Brown stated during his report. “Thank you for your inclusiveness. Thank you for your responsiveness. Thank you for your thoughtfulness when it comes to how to conduct a public meeting in a way that can engage a community in the best way.”
That stated, what’s happening now challenges public “engagement” more than just a trifle. York Lecture Hall had ample stadium seating with desks at every chair. Now if you go to a board room meeting and plan to write, better bring a clipboard or place your laptop on… well… your lap. When attendees are many, you’ll be crammed into chairs all-too-tightly or forced to stand in the doorway. And for video streaming, the board room cameras are ancient and grainy, akin to those still employed for Ithaca Common Council meetings.
That said, security at York was truly minimal. Building entrances remained unlocked and unmonitored whenever the Board of Education met. Visitors, if they chose, could roam the halls of “K-Building.” About the only “accessibility” problem confronting York was that to get to the meeting room, you had to walk down either of two flights of stairs.
Dr. Brown left the meeting place discussion suggesting that even yet another location might later be found, one either on or off the Ithaca High School campus. “I know this may be temporary,” Brown said of that night’s meeting space.
So much for the move in meetings. Now to the fallout from the September 26th fortuitous false-alarm.
“Once again, the absence of timely communication from the ICSD to its educators and parents as this situation unfolded is unacceptable and shows what I feel to be another example of a lack of care ICSD administrators have for their staff and students,” Jeffrey Ames, husband of an Ithaca teacher, told the school board. Ames was the first of several who exercised their floor privileges that night.
Ames alleged—and ICSD officials never refuted—that when the “non-credible” email threat came in Friday, ICSD administrators communicated only among themselves, not with anyone else.
A same-day report September 26 by 14850 Today indicated that not only Ithaca’s schools, but also districts in Dryden and Lansing, as well as the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga BOCES had “received an email threat indicating the possibility of a school shooting at an unspecified school in the county,” according to a statement credited to TST BOCES administration.” “Law enforcement agencies have deemed the threat non-credible,” the credited BOCES statement assured.
At least one of those school systems, Dryden’s, had imposed a district-wide lockout. But Ithaca did not.
“While some of those districts acted out of an abundance of caution,” Ames told the Ithaca Board, “ICSD chose to only communicate information to members of their administration. Employees and parents received nothing,” he said, “instead learning of the threats through word-of-mouth or the press.”
“Credible or non-credible, ICSD’s failure to communicate with the staff and parents is unacceptable,” Ames insisted.
The Ithaca Board of Education plowed through a weighty agenda, discussing cell phone bans and unsettled teachers’ talks—topics best left here for later reporting—when after more than two hours’ time, Superintendent Brown and Board members circled back to that Friday afternoon close-call, the tragedy that never happened. What Brown said could leave many confused. Yet the Superintendent did reveal that authorities purportedly “know the address” from which Friday’s multi-district threat originated, adding that “we’re getting close to determining the source.”
“We do daily threat assessments,” Dr. Brown acknowledged. Some are credible, others not, he said. Drawing the line, Brown explained, gets done on a “case-by-case basis,” perhaps with the assistance of law enforcement. “There’s not a perfect science to it,” Brown admitted.
“We have very tight protocols about how to look at death threats, and we take every one of them seriously,” the Superintendent assured. That even includes the five-year old warning “I’m going to get you, or I’m going to blow the school up,” Ithaca’s chief administrator stated.
But then came the maddening, seemingly-arbitrary hair-splitting that may anger those like that school teacher’s husband.
“We don’t communicate to the community about non-credible threats,” the Superintendent told the Board. “That can create an environment where it makes people unsafe. It can feed rumors and misinformation. And frankly, as I’ve seen even the last week, communicating about a non-credible threat can (lead) some families not sending their babies to school.”
“However,” Dr. Brown quickly added, “there have been times we’re communicating about non-credible threats, particularly when it’s been reported in the media, and social media is a frenzy, and people want to hear about something.” Last weekend’s unrealized action fell into that latter category, the Superintendent determined. ICSD reportedly sent out an email that Sunday.
“When they’re not credible, we’re not communicating to folks for the reasons I’ve said,” Brown summarized. “However, there are cases when we do communicate about non-credible threats for various reasons.”
That distinction truly takes a while to understand.
Attempting clarity, school board member Garrick Blalock asked whether exercising restraint avoids amplifying the wrongdoer’s voice and otherwise playing into his hand. The Superintendent agreed.
“Amplifying their voice can lead to more of it happening,” Brown cautioned. It can also, he said, “create misinformation and rumors in the community. It can create fears for folks who may have fears already.”
Board colleague Jacob Shiffrin felt equally dismayed. “It can be a damned if you do and damned if you don’t communication,” Shiffrin acknowledged.
Teaching spouse Jeffrey Ames never got the opportunity to respond publicly to Superintendent Brown’s finely-parsed protocol. But it’s doubtful he’d have much good to say about it.
“I’m 33, which means I’ve grown up alongside some of the worst school shootings in history,’ the attendee said hours earlier as he addressed the Board. “A small part of me fears the worst every single time my wife leaves for work in the morning, knowing that if my biggest nightmare comes through, she would do anything in her power to protect her students, which means she might not come home.”
Welcome to the painful reality of post-Columbine 21st Century America. Being packed in like sardines to attend a school board meeting becomes the least of our worries. Even in Ithaca.
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