Back to the Future: School Safety at a Pre-Columbine Climate?
School safety budget cuts, educators distracted with academic reform, and skewed school safety policy and funding are creating a “deja vu” feeling for some school safety specialists who were around prior to the 1999 Columbine High School attack. As I recall, the focus on school safety in the months and years before the shootings in Pearl […]
Can Your School Staff Communicate in a Crisis?
School campuses are often very large with multiple floors and even have multiple buildings on one campus in some districts. Two-way radios are commonplace in many of our nation’s schools as a tool for administrators, security personnel, and key staff to communicate on security and supervision issues. Not only are they helpful with day-to-day security issues, […]
Gunman at TN School: Do You Want Police or a Climate Survey?
A 62-year-old gunman pointed a .380 semi-automatic gun in a Tennessee Principal’s face yesterday. The School Resource Officer (SRO) drew her gun and shielded the Principal’s body with her own. The principal, Melanie Riden, was able to flee the area. The SRO, Sheriff’s Deputy Carolyn Gudger, lured the gunman into the empty high school cafeteria — a more contained […]
Fear mongering article? America’s real school-safety problem
Good theory, perhaps, but clueless in understanding School Resource Officers (SROs), school security, and so-called “zero tolerance.” This is my take on America’s real school-safety problem, an article posted Sunday on salon.com. The article is mostly a Q&A with Aaron Kupchick, author of “Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear.” He spent two years researching “zero […]
Pipe Bombs & Shooting Threats: Violence or Incivil Behavior?
High-profile school security incidents this week included: A pipe bomb disabled at a Los Angeles school. A teen arrested for a mass schooting plot at a school. Texas schools on the Mexican border preparing for stray bullets from Mexican drug cartel wars. Is this violence? Or is it a manifestation of bullying, harassment, and “incivil” […]
Schools Are Under-Funded & Under-Prepared for Disasters, Feds Say
Schools and communities are neglecting children due to a lack of funding and lack of a national strategy to address the needs of children in disaster planning, according to a report by The National Commission on Children and Disasters, a commission created in 2007 by the President and Congress. “Children are 25 percent of our […]
REMS School Emergency Planning Grant Lessons Learned
Good school safety consultants learn from every project and client school district. If not, they’re not very good consultants. My colleagues and I have consistently received positive feedback from our work with school districts receiving federal Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) grants. We have provided training for crisis teams and administrators, emergency planning assessments, […]
Engaging Support Staff in School Emergency Planning
School bus drivers, secretaries, food service staff, and custodians are on the front-lines in schools. But are they on the front lines in school emergency preparedness training and planning? School bus drivers are the first and last school employees to see many students each school day, and face the challenges of managing the behavior and […]
How to Protect Elementary Students from Harm
An unusual student disappearance, unexcused student walk-away, or a stranger on an elementary school campus creates anxiety, fear, and often panic in a school-community. The case of Kyron Horman, a second-grade Oregon student who has been missing since June 4th, 2010, has generated intense attention and discussion on elementary school security issues. The seven-year-old never […]
School Safety Leader: Marie Waldrop
A school principal is often referred to as the “captain” of his or her ship. When a principal is new, sometimes you hear it said, “There is a new sheriff in town.” But rarely do you find the principal (new or a veteran administrator) actually is also really a deputy sheriff. Unless, of course, Marie Waldrop […]