The Security 100 Summit in Tucson last week was a truly impressive school safety conference.

Security100Summits K12 event was dynamic, vibrant and extremely useful

I had the chance to participate in a truly amazing international school safety Summit in Tucson this week. The inaugural Security100Summits K12 School Safety event is hosted by Focus Media Events. Hosted at an amazing resort in Tucson, Arizona, the Summit was held in one of the most beautiful conference centers I have ever presented in. Having presented at the Honolulu Country Club and many other wonderful venues, it takes a lot to impress me in this regard.

Focus Media has coordinated a series of these types of security events for higher education, stadium and arenas, hospital and other sectors, and has a stellar reputation for putting on intimate, content rich events with carefully screened attendees and vendors. Unlike the majority of events I present at, the Security100Summits are designed for a focus of guided interactive discussions between attendees rather than traditional presentations. These events create an unprecedented level of interaction and networking between attendees and subject matter experts as well as between vendors and partner sponsoring agencies and organizations.

Safe Havens International was proud to be a sponsoring agency and I was honored to serve as a keynote session speaker along with Michelle Gay from Safe and Sound a Sandy Hook Initiative and Dr. Stephen Sroka. The number of attendees was capped at around forty school safety directors and key school administrators from public, charter, independent, vo-tech and parochial schools across the United States and Canada. Similarly, the number of vendors was restricted.

I have keynoted on school safety and motivational topics at between thirty and a hundred professional conferences each year for more than twenty years now and have never participated in an event that created such intensive and productive interaction between so many participants. I had the opportunity to learn about cutting edge offerings from a wide array of school safety vendors that will enable our analysts to better serve our clients. For example, one vendor provided an exceptional ten minute demonstration of their school safety detection K-9s that was truly amazing. As a former gun detection dog handler, I was truly amazed that dogs are now trained to detect a person carrying a gun or a small explosive device in a crowded pedestrian environment such as a well-attended football game.

About a dozen of our clients attended the event and every one of them told me the event was of great value to them. Several of our clients who have been in the field for many years told me that this was the very best school safety conference they have attended.  I have already been asked to present at the Security100Summits K12 next December and am very excited about the event.

If you have interest in attending as a K-12 executive for the 2015 Security100Summit K-12, please contact Chief Community Builder, Lisa Carroll by email to lcarroll@focusmediaevents.com. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Nicole Bognar by email to nbognar@focusmediaevents.com . You can also visit their website at www.security100summits.com

Bibb County, Georgia Campus Police Officer John Wilson recently received the Peace Officers Association of Georgia’s (PAOG) Officer of the Year for Valor Award. Wilson was honored for his role in the prevention of a mass casualty school shooting. Officer Wilson interrupted an imminent school shooting at his high school in Macon, Georgia last year. Officer Wilson intercepted a former student who was armed with a handgun and more than 170 rounds of ammunition. The aggressor came to the school and was preparing to open fire on a group of students. Officer Wilson drew his service pistol and was able to persuade the youth to drop his weapon after a tense standoff. Bibb County Public School Police Officers have successfully averted more than a dozen planned weapons assaults over the past 25 years. These prevented incidents represent just a handful of the many success stories from across the nation each year. It has been our experience that more planned school attacks are successfully averted than are carried out. Studying these successful interventions should be at least as much of a priority of our analysis of the attacks that are carried out.

More School Shootings are Prevented than Take Place

While the media and many experts focus intently on school shootings that take place, relatively little time, energy, study, and discussion is devoted to the far more numerous success stories where school shootings are prevented.   For example, from 1989 to 1999, the Bibb County Public School System in Macon, Georgia successfully averted six planned school shootings. Most of these events involved gang members. These cases were otherwise imminent events and resulted in convictions in superior or federal court. During the same time period, the district also averted one planned school bombing, a planned double suicide, and five attempts by adults to come to elementary schools with loaded handguns to either take a child by force or to shoot a child or staff member.

Lack of School Shootings was not by Chance

These tragedies were not prevented by luck. Officer Kenneth Bronson stopped an imminent shooting of a school bus at McEvoy Middle School because of the exceptionally high degree of staffing, training, equipment, and empowerment of the Bibb County School System Police Department. Though the school district is located in a community with very high rates of gang activity, homicide and aggravated assault, it is the only school district of its size in the state of Georgia that has never had a student shot on school property.

An Externally Evaluated Model for the Prevention of School Shootings

The Bibb County Model was highlighted by the United States Department of Education and was the only promising program for the prevention of school shootings that survived evaluation by the Hamilton Fish Institute as part of United States Attorney General Janet Reno’s Gun Violence   Reduction Task Force. Many of the individual strategies first fielded in Bibb County are now commonly practiced around the nation, many public and non-public school organizations still do not utilize them.   For example, many schools and districts still do not utilize the multi-disciplinary threat assessment process developed in Bibb County in the early 1990’s. This proven approach is relatively easy to implement and apply but is but one of the success stories from around the nation that should be more widely adopted more than two decades after it was used to stop not just one, but several planned school shootings. Perhaps if we spent as much time discussing concepts that have proven to be effective as we do tragic acts of violence, we would have fewer of these troubling incidents.