6 times • DECEMBER 10, 2015 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.qns.com BY KELLY MARIE MANCUSO [email protected] @KellyMMancuso Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood was placed on a temporary soft lockdown on the morning of Dec. 4 as a precaution following a vague, non-specific threat made by a student. According to Capt. Mark Wachter, commanding officer of the 104th Precinct, the threat was expressed by one student to another through a text message. The student, described as a special needs child with a history of medical issues, was upset after being asked to leave a basketball game on the school’s premises the day before. “It was one kid that was expressing his frustration,” Wachter explained. “He texted his friend: ‘don’t come to school tomorrow because I’m going to go in there and hurt a lot of people.’” The student who received the text message told school administrators, who then alerted the authorities. The precinct mobilized their School Safety and Counterterrorism units, as well as extra uniformed officers to the school, as a precaution. “There was no viable threat; just a kid who ranted to another kid,” Wachter added. “The school was never in any danger. We put extra resources to school just in case he would show up.” According to Wachter, the student never arrived at school. Officers from the 104th Precinct and the Counterterrorism unit were deployed to the child’s house where they found him. The student was brought to the school for q u e s t i o n i n g and then taken to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation. False reports swarmed social media on Friday morning regarding the situation at the school, prompting many parents and local residents to fear the worst. Wachter refuted rumors of police helicopters circling the school. He stated that a large-scale response or emergency services were not required, as the police had not only determined the student’s location, but deemed the threat non-viable. According to Wachter, the helicopters people reported seeing were actually news copters and not the NYPD. According to school administrators, the school is getting back to business after the eventful morning. “Parents came to pick up their child or just to see that they were fine,” one source at the school explained. “All is good and back to normal now.” Wachter insisted that Grover Cleveland was never in any danger. “We knew where student was, so the school was never in any immediate threat,” he explained. “He had no means of doing it, and no access to weapons or firearms. It was just one kid ranting to another kid in class. We definitely get involved, but an arrest is not warranted. The kid just needed medical help.” By Anthony Giudice [email protected] @A_GiudiceReport One Ridgewood street will be the focus of its own storytelling, book and dance project thanks to a community arts grant from the Queens Council on the Arts (QCA). The project, “Inside Norman Street,” is a neighborhoodbased storytelling, dance performance and book project that brings together residents of Norman Street to write and share their stories, which professional street and stage dancers will bring to life through movement and music during a live performance on Dec. 11. Performance poet and Norman Street resident, Libby Mislan, applied for the community arts grant from the QCA to see how a community-based arts project could bring the people of Norman Street together. “I teach poetry and creative arts, and I found I have this powerful experience in the class with memoir work and performance art,” Mislan said. “I wanted to see how that would work in the community and see how it could bring the community together.” Mislan went door to door on Norman Street to recruit 12 residents to participate in her project. The participants range in age from 17 to 74. Together, the group represents countries including Nepal, Poland, Puerto Rico, Kyrgyzstan and Jamaica, as well as New York City and Ridgewood. “It’s a really wide range of people,” Mislan said. “A few people have been involved in the arts, while some had no experience with art. It’s cool to see because they are really diverse in age and from all over the world. They appreciate their own diversity.” The group gathered for an eight-week creative writing workshop during October and November. During the workshops, participants wrote and shared stories about their relationships, overcoming fears, where they feel most at home, and what they hold sacred. “We had a different theme we were working on every week. We wrote about places we feel most at home, relationships, first times, overcoming fears, sacred objects, falling in or out of love and life circumstance,” Mislan said. “They were designed to get people to tell their stories. Sharing is also a big part of the project and a lot of the real community building happened during those times of sharing.” During the final performance, the participants will read their stories, which have been compiled into a book, while the four dance performers interpret their words through movement and musicians will play to their stories. “I’m just really excited to see how it’s going to affect life on the block after the performance,” Mislan said. “I’m interested to see how the art-making made the community come together.” The project culminates in a one-night-only live performance at Outpost Artist Resources, located at 1665 Norman St. on Friday, Dec. 11, at 8:30 p.m. Ridgewood school placed on temporary lockdown following threat Photo courtesy Libby Mislan Libby Mislan and the participants in the “Inside Norman Street” project. Ridgewood’s Norman Street featured in art project
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