A Providence school went into lockdown in May. Now a former U.S. Attorney is investigating

PROVIDENCE — Former U.S. Attorney Robert Corrente is reviewing a lockdown this spring at the Nathanael Greene Middle School in which school leaders waited for 80 minutes to notify police after they thought a gun was found on the property.

Victor Morente, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, confirmed Thursday that Corrente, who served from 2004 to 2009 with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Rhode Island, is “conducting a review related to Nathanael Greene Middle School.”

He declined to comment further because the investigation is ongoing.

Corrente represents the ILO Group, the controversial multimillion-dollar education contract that the McKee administration awarded last year.

On May 26, school administrators suspected that there was a gun at the school at 1:10 p.m., but didn’t notify police until about 2:30 p.m., despite two officers being assigned to the school that afternoon, according to a police memo.

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Mayor Elorza subsequently called for the principal’s resignation, calling the delayed notification an egregious mistake.

The police memo provided the following timeline:

At about 2:30 p.m., Jason Menard, the district’s director of operations, got a call from Nathanael Greene Principal Demetri Sermons, who said he was placing his school on lockdown because he believed a student had a gun.

Prior to that, “no call had been placed to [the Providence police],” Wheeler wrote in the memo.

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A police lieutenant who was with Menard immediately contacted a sergeant and told him to go into the school and assess the situation. Because of a recent spate of fights at dismissal, the Police Department had assigned two officers to the school.

When no gun was found, the students were later dismissed.

“In this type of scenario, minutes and even seconds matter," Elorza wrote in a letter to state education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. “It is unacceptable that it took so long to act and that the first call was not to the Police Department but to a school administrator.”

More: Elorza seeks middle-school principal's firing over failure to notify police of gun scare

The mayor, in his letter, also urged Infante-Green to make sure administrators call 911 immediately if they believe there might be a weapon in a school building, retrain all administrators on lockdown protocols and share video evidence with police immediately in these types of scenarios.

In a joint statement with the Providence Teachers Union, the school district said it sharply disagrees with the mayor's characterization of events.

At the time, school department spokesman Nicholas Domings said that the principal had the strong support of his staff and the administration was reviewing the incident.

Linda borg covers education for the Journal.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Nathanael Greene Middle School lockdown is under investigation