I just finished our last onsite meeting as part of a school security assessment for the Granville Public School System in North Carolina.  I am now in Charlotte to start a school security assessment for an independent school there.  Safe Havens has been honored to perform school security assessments for dozens of North Carolina school systems, parochial and independent schools.  We have also had the privilege of training hundreds of North Carolina educators and public safety officials to perform school security assessments.  Safe Havens analysts have performed school security assessments for six public school districts and two independent schools in North Carolina this year and as in years past, have typically found North Carolina schools to be proactive and progressive in terms of school security practices. 

Conducting forty school security assessment projects this year has been challenging even though we now have more than 30 analysts.  At the same time, it has been a rewarding year as we have had the opportunity to interact with many true advocates in North Carolina as well as in almost every other region of the country.   I am proud of our client’s efforts to make their school safer.  I am equally proud of our dedicated analysts who are often on the road more days than they are at home with their families.  It has truly been an inspiring experience.

I had a rather unpleasant phone call from a school security consultant last week.  As he has done on several occasions in the past, he attacked me and our non-profit center in a rude and rather unprofessional manner. I remained polite and tried to address his concerns but he became even more agitated and then abruptly hung up the phone after accusing me of being a coward after when I refused to agree with his conclusions relating to a particular school security incident.  This same consultant was involved with a series of very unethical actions as part of what can only be described as an internet smear campaign a few years back.  He apparently lost his school safety position with a public school district over his involvement in the scandal. 

While there are many highly qualified school security consultants, the field is by nature largely unregulated.  As a result, many different types of people engage in work in the field.  School security consultants vary widely in quality, credentials and in some cases, credibility.  While I have met many great school security consultants, there are definitely a few consultants who are more focused on money than in making schools safer.  One example of this can be seen in how the topic of school security assessments is often approached.  While some firms insist that only a school safety consultant can perform a school security assessment, there are a number of government and private sector school security experts who feel that there are instances where school officials and local public safety personnel can and should be trained to conduct their own school security assessments.  As few school districts can afford to have an outside firm conduct school security assessments on an annual basis, internalizing this capacity makes sense to many school safety practitioners.  

Having conducted school security assessments both as part of a government school safety center and on behalf of the world’s largest non-governmental school safety center, I have many of the same viewpoints on how they should be conducted now as I did when I performed them for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency – Office of the Governor (GEMA).  Members of the School Safety Project then and the analysts from Safe Havens International now think of school security assessments as an approach that should be performed on an annual basis rather than as a one-time project.  

This is one reason we encourage school districts that are having school security assessments performed by outside vendors to require the vendor to provide training to local public safety officials and schools staff to train them how to conduct their own school security assessments.  Safe Havens has now trained more than 2,000 school security consultants, school employees and public safety officials to conduct school security assessments.  We have also helped with state-wide school security assessment training programs in five states.  While some for profit school security consultants have become vocally upset by this practice, our role as a non-profit center is to make schools safer and this is one way for us to do so.    Though we have been criticized and harassed on numerous occasions by several school security consultants, Safe Havens will continue to bid our school security assessment projects at rates far below what for-profit firms charge.  Though we have upset some school security consultants by the practice, we will also continue to train local teams in school security assessment processes.  To us, school safety is about kids, not revenue generation.

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.