What Time Are Newtown Schools in Session?
This is in accord with Sandy Hook Elementary principal Dawn Hochsprung’s September 2012 pronouncement of the school’s new security system where
[d]oors will be locked at approximately 9:30 a.m. Any student arriving after that time must be walked into the building and signed in at the office. Before that time our regular drop-off procedures will be in place. I encourage all parents to have their children come to school and return home on the bus and to remain in school for the entire school day. The beginning and ending of our school day are also important instructional times and therefore we want all our students to reap the benefits of full participation in our program.Such a statement follows the established story line–that Sandy Hook began it’s school day at 9:30AM, a time shortly after which Lanza arrived to mete out the horrific carnage.
Yet at no point following the massacre did law enforcement authorities, public officials, or journalists actually highlighted or questioned the routine time Newtown schools open their doors or commence classes. It is common knowledge, however, that few public schools in the United States start classes as late as 9:30AM. If recent screen captures of the Newtown School District‘s individual websites provide any indication this is the exact case for Newtown, most of which cite a classroom start of 9:05AM or earlier. Perhaps for some reason the school district began classes later in 2012, yet no query has been put forth in this regard and there is no way of confirming a 9:30 class time because historical access of Newtown school webpages on the Internet Archive data bank has been uniformly blocked as of at least April 13, 2013.
With a parent drop-off time of 7:10AM, the Newtown
Middle School class start time is likely much earlier–somewhere around
8:00AM. Nevertheless the 9:30AM school start time was not only suggested
by authorities and in major corporate news media, but also by pillars
of the local community sharing their personal experiences of when the
school day began. For example, a well-known attorney and Newtown
resident Joel T. Faxon, who also serves on the town’s five-member police
commission prominently advocating for stricter gun control measures,
explained to the Connecticut Law Journal how he was driving one
of his three children to Newtown Middle School on the morning of
December 14th. Faxon makes no reference to the fact that, based on the
suggested time sequence by which the shooting took place, he is dropping
his son off to class at least one half hour late.
As noted, for most Newtown schools the school day
begins at 9:05AM but parent drop off at Newtown Middle starts at 7:10AM.
According to Faxon’s account, as he approaches the middle school’s
front doors, he receives a text message that all the town’s schools are
on lockdown. The official timeline suggests that this must be no earlier
than 9:40AM. “I told my son, ‘Okay, something’s going on. Let’s get out
of here.” Returning to his vehicle with his child Faxon sees
the chief of police in his official car, headed to the Sandy Hook school, and I looked at my son and I said,”‘Oh my God, there must have been a shooting.” The chief doesn’t respond to anything other than a very serious incident. Within a minute of that time, I got a news report text from the Hartford Courant, that said police were responding to incident on Dickenson Drive [sic], and I thought, “There’s only one thing on that street. And that’s the school.”Faxon pulls over to the side of the road. “At that point, literally 50 state police and Newtown police cars went by us, and they all went to Sandy Hook Elementary School. I knew there had been some kind of a catastrophe there,” Faxon recalls.
If the magnitude of response is as great as Faxon describes then this must be at least 15-to-20 minutes after the initial 911 call of 9:35AM, or close to 10:00AM. The attorney then claims to text Bridgeport police captain James Viadero, who he works on the police commission with. “He was filling me in on what was happening, in real time.”[2]
If there were qualifying circumstances on the morning of December 14th
where for some unusual reason classes began a full 25 minutes or more
later than normal, why would federal, state, and local law enforcement
authorities and political leaders fail to explain this important point
to the American people? This clear lacuna in the official storyline is
one of many suggesting an intent to mislead the public on an event of
immense significance.
Alongside Newtown and Connecticut state officials
recent scramble to prevent public disclosure of important evidence that
would confirm the Sandy Hook shooting took place as reported, such an
anomaly should prompt political leaders with some measure of integrity
and devotion toward their constituencies to demand a genuinely rigorous
independent investigation of what may be, alongside the “Fast and
Furious” scandal that the Justice Department has failed to come clean
on, a direct attempt to swindle the American people of yet another
Constitutionally-protected right.
Notes
[1] “Principal Outlined New Security Procedures at Sandy Hook Elementary,” Hartford Courant, December 14, 2012, 8:25PM EST.
[2] Thomas B. Scheffy, “Joel Faxon Has Been Part of the Gun Debate in His Hometown,” Connecticut Law Tribune, December 21, 2012.
Jennifer Lake contributed observations and information for this article. She blogs at jenniferlake.wordpress.com
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