Our analysts have been working on school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness projects almost every week since the tragic school shooting at Newtown Elementary School. As Safe Havens assists more schools with school security audits than any organization in the world we are aware of, our analysts have learned a great deal about what is and is not effective when conducting school security audits.
Since our analysts first began conducting school security audits many years ago, we have been increasingly impressed with the need to look beyond the basic school security approaches that are the focus of most school security audits. We have worked many school shootings and other school security incidents in schools where limited scope school security audits were conducted and simple and easy to implement opportunities to prevent tragedies were missed. Often, these opportunities have been overlooked due to an over-emphasis on security hardware and technologies without also addressing the human behaviors of students and staff that often have a role to play that is at least if not more important to these school security approaches.
Of the more than 5,000 public, private, independent, parochial, charter and other schools our analysts have assisted in clients in assessing, most of the most important opportunities for improvement involve a combination of security and emergency preparedness hardware combined with improvements in practices of students and staff that we observe when conducting school security audits.