Recently in the Masters community, five students from Dobbs Ferry High School snuck onto the campus a few moments after the lunch period had ended to enjoy a nice Masters meal.
Though it was sometime after lunch, a few teachers in the dining hall at that time had their suspicions that the five kids didn’t belong to the Masters community. This resulted in them being led off of campus. A few teachers involved in the incident were willing to speak a bit more about the situation.
Adam Gimple, a college counselor and the administrator on duty during lunch, received a phone call stating that there were a few kids lingering in the dining hall after most kids had gone to their classes and that they weren’t believed to be Masters students.
While on the call Gimple said, “I’m going to come to you right away, to address it. In the meantime can you also call the dean of students office to see if Mr. Carnevale is available?” From that point, Gimple and Jeff Carnevale, Dean of Students, made their way up to the dining hall, and upon entering they could both tell that none of the five students attended Masters.
Gimple had a lot of different emotions about this incident but one thing was how open our campus is to the general public.
Gimple said, “ One thing I’m pretty consciously aware of is how porous our campus is, there are a lot of points of entry, we don’t have a fence around campus, we don’t have a security gate that we need to check in at, and we have key card access to all of our buildings but we have very friendly students that hold the door for people.” Carnevale had the same feelings towards our campus stating, “It was surprising that we’re a school, close campus, and the Dobbs kids know we’re close campus so it was surprising that they would come here for lunch.”
The dining hall is used by every grade on campus so it’s hard to know everyone who attends and every student in every grade. Gimple thought that it was no surprise that something like this would happen.
Though Gimple didn’t address the students directly he was sure that the kids knew that what they were doing wasn’t right. He said, “I’m pretty certain they knew they were doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing.”
Gimple also believed that their actions weren’t meant to be malicious in any way and it wasn’t terribly shocking about how it all went down. He thought they genuinely did just come to try the food that the Master staff provides. Though he could see why it would be alarming on the security side and that we should be a bit more cautious.
Jeff Carnevale, the Dean of students, had also been called in to handle the situation. Like Gimple, Carnevale had received a similar phone call from faculty saying that there had been kids in the dining hall and they weren’t sure if they were Masters students. Once Carnevale got to the dining hall he was certain that he didn’t recognize the kids.
Being the Dean of students Carnevale said, “I know our student body pretty well as the dean of students, I can recognize most people and I didn’t recognize any of them, that’s how I knew.” Carnevale believed that they didn’t have any bad intentions and had just come for lunch because he was aware that they go to town usually but instead thought they could come to Masters.
Carnevale had also believed because our food is good, that’s why they did it. He said, “ I mean our food is awesome and so it’s possible they have some friends who go to Masters and said the food was great, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.” Though Carnevale said that in all of the time that he had been here, he hadn’t experienced anything like this, which is also what added to his surprising feelings. He had never heard of Dobbs kids doing something like this before and that they knew we don’t have outside visitors. His main concern in this situation was also our security because they want to be able to do what they can to ensure our safety and make sure that we as a community feel safe. We really just have to be particular about the security inside the buildings.
To get a look at how security felt about the situation, Victor Seguinot was generous enough to speak his thoughts. The reason Seguinot felt they got it was because people that attended the school spoke very highly of the food and they wanted to see for themselves. Holding the same feelings about our open campus he stated, “It’s an open campus, that’s why security, you see us mostly around students in the dining hall, coming out the middle school, when parents are picking up their kids, or events.”
Seguinot believes it’s good to be within the mix of the student body to make sure we’re safe and the campus is safe. The security staff has a website that allows them to see who is swiping their card and trying to get into the buildings to allow them to keep track of our safety. On top of that Seguinot states, “ My thing is as a supervisor, that my guards are interacting with the community. We just can’t be sitting inside a car all day long or stand in the same corner.” He continues, “ We want them to walk around, walk into the buildings, visit each floor, look into each classroom, say hello, say goodbye, and Talk to the students.”
From each perspective, we can deduce that the students that got into the campus had no malicious intentions of any kind and just came here to enjoy a nice meal. Alongside that, we as a community can also be a little more cautious about holding open doors because we don’t know everyone and we don’t want something like this to happen in the future. Everyone is doing their best to keep our community, our student body, and our campus a safe space but there are a few things we can improve on to ensure that safety.