VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. The acronym describes a rapidly changing environment in which it is difficult to analyze, prepare for, respond to, and prevent. It also describes school safety in 2024 — and most likely in 2025, as well.
While a detailed analysis could easily fill a book chapter or two, a few standout observations from 2024 include:
- School threats triggered panic and anxiety in school communities. The “contagion effect” following high-profile school shootings accelerated threats across the nation. We still have a good deal of work to do in 2025 to better support school leaders in what I call, “Assess and then react, not react and then assess.”
- School cell phone bans became the fad in 2024. I truly believe our nation’s legislators and governors went to a conference, heard a presentation, and rushed back to their state to pursue school cell phone ban laws. I offer no argument that student use of cell phones brings several woes ranging from added stressors upon the students themselves to adding fuel to rumors and chaos during an actual threat or critical incident. But there are also valid arguments to allow students to have cell phones for a variety of legit purposes before and after school. This “polarity management” challenge leaves school administrators trying to balance a challenge where the genie is already out of the bottle and it will be a very tight squeeze to get it back inside at this point.
- “Buyer’s Remorse” reared its head as school districts that abruptly removed their School Resource Officers (SROs) from schools following the George Floyd murder are now struggling to figure out how to return SROs to their schools. This illustrates how school safety decisions need to be made using critical thinking, not based upon knee-jerk and political whims.
- School emergency plans continued to grow in length and content, many being useless to school staff. Most schools have plans but fewer and fewer staff seem to know what is in them. The plans do provide fodder for some plaintiff attorneys who try to use them against school officials during school safety lawsuits.
- Security hardware, product, and technology vendors spent 2024 marketing their wares on steroids, some of them fueled by private equity, and more who now engage lobbyists to influence legislators to mandate and/or fund what they sell.
We see all kinds of other schemes and scams including:
- More vendors hosting their own school safety conferences rather than trying to buy access by exhibiting at other education and school safety conferences. This way they can exert greater control over the messages on the stage rather than veiled attempts to influence well-intended educators attending other school safety and education conferences.
- Vendor-driven “non-profit” organizations worked to influence the education community. One spat between a security vendor and the non-profit it was a member of exploded into a public battle in 2024 with the vendor withdrawing from the non-profit and questioning its credibility and motivations.
- Add “Retired” onto their job titles to enhance their credibility, such as “School Security Director (ret.)” when they only worked a couple of years as an actual school security director. We also see former educators using their previous job titles (such as “assistant superintendent”) when, in reality, they are security hardware or tech salespersons. (If they can’t be honest with their titles, what also are they misleading people about?)
- Using “DHS SAFETY Act” label to imply federal government endorsement when the DHS SAFETY Act is not an endorsement.
- In what appears to be largely driven by security vendors and consultants, with a glaring absence of participation by education associations and educators in general, ASIS International introduced the first international “school security standard.” Heavy on physical security and “shall” statements (versus “should”), the standard was criticized by veteran school security consultants. It is likely ASIS will continue to try to ram this through, although it is unlikely that schools will be interested or able to adhere to the extreme “shalls” and skewed focus of the standard. Vendors, however, will likely exploit this for lobbying legislators for new regulations, laws, and funding.
Meanwhile, school leaders and school security directors are at risk of being thrust into exploitation by the vendors who dangle opportunities for visibility, travel, conferences, and status for those they target to help establish credibility for their organizations and efforts to indirectly promote physical security and technology their associates sell.
- The “wild west” of weapons detection saw big bucks from educators but also ended the year with the implosion of one of the leading AI weapons detection companies selling millions of dollars of their products to schools. The federal government filed a complaint in federal court that the company agreed to settle (but admitted no guilt) on allegations of misleading marketing claims. The CEO and CFO were out within weeks of one another. At least one other federal investigation is reportedly underway and discussions of shareholder lawsuits have been stirring. IPVM, an independent testing and publishing organization focused on the security industry, had investigated and reported on this company repeatedly. Numerous school security specialists repeatedly raised questions about fidelity of implementation concerns in schools and the shifting of risk to other areas as school leaders try to implement weapons detections programs. Meanwhile, the head of another weapons detection company selling to schools told a reporter that the field was like, “The wild west.”
- State legislators over-legislated school safety with unfunded/under-funded mandates that are unimplementable and/or questionable as to whether they can be implemented with fidelity.
- Evidence clearly points to the importance of human factors – people, policies, procedures, training, communication, systems gaps. However, time for training of school administrators, teachers, support staff, and other stakeholders continues to diminish. Perhaps this trend points to the final following 2024 observation…
- …An uptick in school safety civil litigation appeared to continue in 2024. While the facts and merits of each case vary, the common thread is allegations of failures of human factors, not allegations of failure of security hardware, products, and technology. In short, school safety is about people!
A few expectations for 2025 include:
- COVID funds gone and school safety cannot sustain when schools approach it as a “grant-funded luxury.” Watch to see how school leaders who exploited COVID funds and state grants to fund school security hardware, products, and technology to solve short-term political/school-community relations problems now try to figure out how to sustain the ongoing costs of the software, tech, and shiny objects they purchased with money from outside their local operating budgets. It is likely they will not be able to sustain the costs, will end up having to cut back, and then will have to explain how they got in this position to their school communities (especially after security incidents strike their schools and sent parents in an outroar).
- Expect security products, hardware, and tech vendors to try new techniques for marketing their products and services now that COVID money is gone and state grants are one-time shot-in-the-arm funding sources. I expect more vendors to host their own school safety conferences to control the messages given to educators and school safety leaders in attendance.
- States have slowly been shifting school safety offices from state education departments to state public safety/ homeland security departments. Expect to see more of a criminal justice/law enforcement/target hardening approaches to state school safety policy and funding. If this happens without a strong balance of influence from the education side of the house, expect school security incidents to continue to grow. Schools are unique and while public safety partners are critical to school safety, having them drive policy and funding may result in the opposite outcome (continued problems, skewed rather than balanced policies/funding) than what is intended by this shift.
- Anticipate more “unknown unknowns” security incidents that do not follow the emergency plan scripts (even in the 100+ page documents some schools have). We need a new approach for approaching today’s challenges and training staff. Stay tuned.
- Anticipate continued growth in school safety lawsuits against schools.
- School leaders will continue to experience “unintended consequences” such as upticks in fights and other behavioral incidents in other areas of the school after shifting school staff to operate weapons detection systems at the school main entrance. When you introduce new elements (equipment, human, other) to your systems, you alter the overall system. School leaders and safety officials must employ critical thinking, anticipate potential unintended consequences, and take tactical pauses before introducing new security products, technology, programs, etc. into their existing system. It’s not a simple “plug and play” solution.
- School and safety leaders will slowly face the reality that quick fixes don’t work and when security works it is because of people. When it fails, it is because of people. You can’t solve behavioral problems with technology-only solutions.
Focusing on human factors should be the 2025 shift in school safety. But whether it actually will remains to be seen!
Happy New Year!
Dr. Kenneth S. Trump is President of National School Safety and Security Services
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