Penn Hills School District police supervisor Keith Lazaron resigns

Penn Hills School Board accepted the resignation of school police supervisor Keith Lazaron at the Jan. 26 school board meeting.

Lazaron was hired in October of 2022 on a five-year contract to run the safety programs at all of the districts schools. The district utilized a $323,000 grant through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency in order to spearhead the hire.

“He tendered his resignation, and I understand that he went back to his former position,” said district superintendent Nancy Hines. “Despite Mr. Lazaron’s resignation, we remain committed to continued collaboration with our local Penn Hills Police Department and expect to continue our multi-tiered approach to school safety and security, whereby Youth Engagement School Specialist (YESS) staff remain the first and primary interface with our K-12 students.

“Similarly, our private security-contracted officers may serve as a back-up to our YESS staff; however, their main focus is to monitor surveillance cameras, to help support morning check-ins of our students, and to help screen those attempting to visit onsite during the school day.”

The board is looking at all options moving forward as they consider whether or not to replace Lazaron, but the district also utilizes active-duty Penn Hills police officers to help support as back up to the district’s YESS staff, private security and school administration, with a primary purpose of building relationships with the district’s students and families.

“The biggest component of our model that we know that we want to maintain no matter what is our relationship with our local police department. We see so many positive things with them; building a sense of community, having the kinds interact with somebody in a uniform, not feeling threatened, and their main goal, and they’ve lived up to this, is to guard us from threats to the outside,” Hines said. “Certainly, a police officer who is trained, has arrest powers and carries a weapon, they’re going to intervene if they need to, but we have a really strong understanding that we’ve built over time that we don’t want them interacting with students in that manner unless it’s absolutely necessary, and it does not happen often at all, and that’s ideal for us.”

In fact, the model that Hines has in place along with Penn Hills Police Chief Ronald Como has been so successful that they were recently invited to the University of Pittsburgh to present it in front of the ACLU.

“Their position was when you have people with weapons and police powers and the power to arrest, they’re going to intervene more often,” Hines said. “But our local police and our district are of the mindset that every incident in school is not a police matter, so having a police officer get involved officially is our absolute last resort.”

Plans to install school driveway booths as an added security layer are on track to be completed by May 31, with the project intended to limit vehicle access to the district’s buildings while school is in session.

The school board also accepted the resignations of paraprofessionals Lynn Kutcher, Sandie Bodie and Jasmine Leonard in addition to the resignation of Cyrene Bey, who was the associate principal at Penn Hills Elementary.