PITTSBURGH — Eric Baldinger spent 27 years with the Pittsburgh Public School District, first as a security guard and then as a school police officer.
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He retired two years ago after suffering serious injuries while breaking up a fight at Carrick High School.
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Chief Investigator Rick Earle spoke exclusively with Baldinger this afternoon.
Baldinger told Earle he was not surprised about the stabbing at Carrick.
“A matter of time. It was bound to happen,” said Baldinger.
Baldinger told Earle that the district gutted the school police force from 26 officers just five years ago to less than a dozen today.
He said a handful of school board members didn’t want police officers in the schools and they made that quite clear.
“They did everything they possibly could to tell, to relay that message to everybody that they don’t want school police officers in their buildings no more and you know they thought they were protecting these kids, and stuff like this is happening to where they’re not protecting these kids,” said Baldinger.
Baldinger was assigned to Carrick at one point during his career, but now he says the officers are used as roving patrols, traveling from school to school, and responding when needed.
The district also has approximately 60 security guards. They are assigned to every building. Carrick has four to five security guards.
The district has also used metal detectors for at least 20 years.
So, how did a student get a knife into the school?
Baldinger offered some possible scenarios.
At times, he said, teachers are forced to monitor the metal detectors.
Baldinger: They put teachers on these metal detectors that are not trained.
Earle: So, they may have missed something?
Baldinger: Yeah, they’re not trained.
Baldinger also told Earle that there have been occasions when students opened side doors and had weapons or other items handed to them.
Twenty years ago, he said a student at Schenley High School entered the building after school hours and took a knife from a home economics classroom, hid it in a bathroom, and used it the next day to stab a student in the arm.
“Every school I ever walked into, it was at the home economics room that these knives are available. I was like, these need to be locked up,” said Baldinger.
He also believes there was a big benefit to being inside the schools every day.
He said he managed to build a rapport with many of the students and he would often hear about potential problems. He said he would occasionally be able to stop the problem before it ever happened, just because of the relationships he built with students over the years.
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