U-46 crime reporting policy annoys Bartlett

The Elgin Area School District U-46 board last week voted to extend its agreement on criminal reporting and records to include the village of Bartlett.

For the U-46 board, approving the agreement was a simple extension of a policy already in place in nine other communities, district attorney Pat Broncato said.

A tainted history has put a different taste into Bartlett village officials' mouths.

"The policy has been a source of great irritation for us," said Bartlett Police Chief Dan Palmer.

The policy requires schools to promptly report criminal offenses committed by students to local police departments.

It came about, Palmer said, after a student set fire to a Bartlett High School mobile classroom in 2004.

Specific rules about how and what records to transfer and what incidents to report seemed like a wise idea, Palmer said.

In 2005 and 2006, the village of Bartlett and U-46 worked together for more than 18 months to develop a policy ensuring "cooperation and communication between police and school officials," Palmer said.

The U-46 board later rejected the agreement because it did not include other U-46 communities.

Just a month after they rejected the agreement with Bartlett, the U-46 board approved its own, similar policy.

"It's not the fact that they rejected our policy, but that they turned around and passed their own a month later," Palmer said.

The offenses schools are supposed to report include gang activity, possession of weapons on school property, selling or possessing drugs, drinking, vandalism, fighting, and committing state or federal crimes on a school campus.

Equally, local police departments must report to schools offenses that are committed by a student off school grounds.

The policy doesn't always work perfectly, officials say.

Elgin High officials could have been warned about 16-year-old Angel Facio, who on Jan. 18 attacked teacher Carolyn Gilbert with a steak knife, Kane County State's Attorney John Barsanti told the Daily Herald in February.

Before the incident, police say Facio raped his 8-year-old Elgin neighbor and attempted to abduct a 13-year-old Larsen Middle School student.

Because Facio was not promptly charged with either crime, school officials weren't notified of either incident until after the attack on Gilbert.

As a result, Kane County prosecutors now are researching a way to inform schools if a student is a crime suspect, Barsanti said.

There could be a method to alert school officials of potentially dangerous students without violating state juvenile privacy laws, he said.

"When (Gilbert's attack) occurred … he was not known to be a dangerous offender at that time," Barsanti said. "Maybe there's some way we can get some information out."

U-46, Broncato said, would "be all for" such a new information policy. Still, Broncato said, "it's hard to tell if any of this extra information would have stopped the attack. How can you determine something like that in hindsight?"

Besides Bartlett, the only U-46 community that does not have a policy in place is St. Charles, because of the low number of students that attend district schools, Broncato said.

To begin using the policy at U-46 schools in Bartlett, village officials must also approve the policy on their end. The Bartlett village board will vote on the policy in June.