By Thane Grauel

WESTPORT — Nashville is about 900 miles away, but the latest school shooting to jar the nation was on the minds of those discussing next year’s school budget here Tuesday.

The Education Committee of the Representative Town Meeting voted to recommend that the full RTM pass the schools’ $ 136,287,710 budget for the coming fiscal year, plus debt service of $7.7 million and several other minor expenditures. The budget, as recommended by the Board of Education in January, is roughly 5.2 percent higher than current spending of $129.5 million.

The full RTM has final say on the spending plan.

Funding aside, the discussion was dominated by school security and the worries parents here, like those across the country, have when sending loved ones off to learn.

“In light of the recent events that have happened once again, I am very worried,” Long Lots Elementary School parent Jessie Tuttle told the committee, referring to the Monday shooting at a Nashville school that claimed the lives of three children and three staffers.

She asked if any funding could be reallocated to make schools safer.

“I know it’s on a lot of parents’ minds,” Tuttle said. “I’m very concerned and I think it’s important that we come and speak our piece and get some feedback about how things are going to progress.”

Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice thanked her for comments.

“For me, it’s the déjà vu thing,” he said, mentioning earlier school shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Parkland, Fla., and Sandy Hook.

“I’ve been a superintendent for 12 years, and the sixth month on the job, it was Sandy Hook for me,” he said of the massacre at the Newtown school where 20 students and six staffers were killed in 2012. “There are probably significant interventions outside of schools that can change a trajectory of what we’re experiencing. But internally, if this is reassuring, I am very confident after 12 years in the field that we have very good protocols.”

He said recent security incidents have been handled well, and that the schools and first responders debriefed after them.

“It is not perfect, and I would never, ever project a false sense of security, because of the world we live in and quite honestly the access to guns that we have in our society,” Scarice said.

“I’m a father of children in public schools as well and I share your concerns in general, but I have a lot of confidence and faith in what we’re doing here,” Scarice said.

Andrew Colabella, RTM member in District 4, said that what the school district and the police have done since Sandy Hook was “phenomenal.”

“Every single type of security measure that you can imagine being put into a public school or a secondary school is there,” he said.

Candace Banks, District 6, also responded to Tuttle’s concern.

“I just wanted to tell that I worry, worry every day,” Banks said.

“I’ve stopped having tough conversations or even vaguely controversial conversations when I drop my kids off in the morning,” she said. “I just want to make sure that we’re all good when I drop them off for school.”

“I know that I’m not the only parent that operates that way in the morning,” she said.

She added that when she’s out for lunch and sees emergency vehicles go by, she watches to see if they’re turning to go toward the high school.

“It’s on my mind all the time, and why, as an American this is our life, what can I tell you?” Banks said.

Scarice, in response to Colabella’s comments, said he’s worked in six school districts in his career, and has never experienced such “an unparalleled relationship between the Police Department and the school system.”

Thane Grauel, executive editor, grew up in Westport and has been a journalist in Fairfield County and beyond for 35 years. Reach him at editor@westportjournal.com. Learn more about us here.