Armed guards to patrol Diocese of Pittsburgh schools

Four security supervisors and six armed guards soon will patrol Catholic schools in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, a move slated to kickstart plans to modernize security for the 13,000-student community, diocesan officials announced Thursday.

The supervisors, who the diocese hired Jan. 3, will be assigned to four zones, three of them region-based and one for the dioceses’ high schools.

The armed guards will be divvied up in the same manner said Wendell Hissrich, the diocese’s director of safety and security. The zones were created as part of the 2016 regionalization effort.

Officials said they did not know what specific schools the guards will serve.

All of the supervisors have more than 20 years of experience as state troopers, county police and with other law-enforcement agencies, according to Hissrich, an FBI veteran and former Pittsburgh public safety director.

“We have a lot of schools and we have to start somewhere. This is the building block,” Hissrich told TribLive. “Safety and security are not cheap. Not doing it would be more costly.”

Hissrich said he interviewed staff at three dozen diocesan schools before drafting the security plans. He expects the six armed guards, who have been interviewed but not yet hired, to go on duty in about three to four weeks.

The 10 new positions dovetail with a “significant investment” in diocesan security, which funds emergency health management such as defibrillators, and fights data breaches and ransomware attacks, he said.

The investment comes on the heels of the diocese’s five-year regionalization plan, which was launched in 2019 and shuttered several schools, amid struggling enrollment, to create the four zones.

Hissrich said the program will grow — both over the summer and during next school year.

He plans to hire additional armed guards and officers, each of whom would be experienced in relationship-building and serve as “role models for the students.”

The diocese’s new security plan was modeled, in part, on what Shawn Brokos — like Hissrich, an FBI veteran — developed for Jewish schools and synagogues through the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, Hissrich said.

Hissrich declined to provide financial terms of the diocese’s investment in safety and security.

Kim Daly attended Seton LaSalle High School, a private Catholic school in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, before the pervasiveness of school shootings, an era christened April 20, 1999 when two student gunmen stormed Columbine High School and killed 13 people.

A receptionist and single mother of six, Daly said her daughter, Mallory, a Seton LaSalle senior, is surprised when playing basketball at schools like Woodland Hills High School, where she needs to pass through metal detectors.

“That’s kind of foreign to my kids,” said Daly, 51, of Brentwood.

Daly likes it that way.

The former Beechview native has no concerns with the armed-guard plan and feels Seton LaSalle has done a good job insulating its students from dangers faced in city neighborhoods with higher crime rates.

“The Catholic schools … feel like a safer place,” she said. “They’re very close-knit and these teachers, they really care about my kids. It’s not just a job for them.”

Though “the hot-button issues is violence in the schools,” Hissrich and diocesan Superintendent Michelle Peduto stressed the 2024 school report released Thursday is much broader in scope.

Peduto said the diocese’s smaller class sizes and individualized attention from more than 1,000 diocesan teachers ensure that “schools are thriving,” with recent standardized test scores showing area Catholic school students outpacing national standards.

Iowa Assessment test scores for students in 35 diocesan elementary schools in 2023 outperformed national benchmarks for their grade level by 19% to 27% in English, and by 12% to 22% in math, Peduto said. The diocese says it boasts a 100% graduation rate.

“We answer to a higher calling — we take this very seriously,” she said. “And I think that has people going the extra mile for these kids.”