Congress and the Biden Administration do not need to reinvent the wheel to improve safety in America’s PreK-12 schools.  They need only do some homework to find multiple meaningful federal programs created in a bipartisan effort by Congress and the Clinton Administration following the 1999 school shooting attacks at Columbine High School that resulted in the deaths of 12 children and 1 adult. These programs were slowly eliminated leading up to the Sandy Hook school shooting in December, 2012, in which 20 children and 6 adults were killed.

“School safety, security, and emergency preparedness programs created by Congress after the attack at Columbine High School more than two decades ago provided a more comprehensive, balanced federal policy and programs to make schools safer.  Unfortunately, subsequent sessions of Congress and Presidential administrations chipped away at those budgets and eventually eliminated the programs that made a difference,” said Ken Trump, a three-decade national school safety expert who has testified four times to Congress on school safety policy.

Programs administered by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice were created after Columbine to support prevention, school security, and emergency preparedness.  These programs were eliminated as a part of a downward spiral in federal school policy and programming that took place over multiple sessions of Congress and multiple Presidential administrations.

Programs put in place by Congress after Columbine included:   

• Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) grants in the Department of Education that were exceptionally effective in helping schools prevent, mitigate, protect, respond, recover and otherwise manage emergencies including, but not limited to, school shootings;
• Secure Our Schools (SOS) programthat provided grants for security equipment, security assessments, and training from the Justice Department’s Office of Community-Oriented Policing;
• Safe Schools, Healthy Students grant program that provided schools with resources for mental health, violence prevention associated needs as jointly funded through the collaboration of the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice;
• COPS in Schools programs for school-based policing in the Justice Department’s Office of Community-Oriented Policing; and
• Safe and Drug Free Schools program, and the actual office itself in the Department of Education, that supported violence and drug prevention, training school security personnel and School Resource Officers, and other school staff.

The Project SERV (School Emergency Response to Violence) program, also in the Department of Education, was a part of a reasonably comprehensive approach to provide short-term resources such as additional security and mental health services to schools that experienced a school shooting or other major act of violence or trauma including school shootings, 9/11 terrorist attacks, and other critical incidents.

Ken Trump says Congress and the Biden Administration can go beyond current discussions narrowly focused on the target hardening of schools by restoring these programs for a more comprehensive approach to school safety that deals with the human factors that are often responsible for serious safety incidents slipping through the cracks.

“Any security technology is only as strong as the weakest human link behind it,” Trump said.  “Research and experience shows that focusing on training and other human factors prevents violent tragedies,” he added.

Ken Trump is the President of National School Safety and Security Services  

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