I apologize for not blogging more often, but our summer schedule has been rather hectic.

In August I visited a rural province of Mozambique.  The Zambeze Delta region is as remote a location as I have ever visited.  It was a wonderful and informative experience.  Schools in the area I visited typically have dirt floors, no power and no running water.  A school often consists of a simple thatched roof, a blackboard and hard wooden benches and a crude dirt soccer field. Yet children can and do learn.

In this part of Mozambique, lions, hyenas, crocodiles, cobras, hippos and cape buffalo are unique hazards that claim many young lives.  The mortality rate for young children is so high that parents in the region typically do not name their offspring until their fifth birthday.  Once children reach the age of five, they are more likely to survive malaria and have learned more about spotting the many types of wildlife that often can and do attack people.  Though I was there for only two weeks, I had a couple of close calls including one instance where I sat down for a moment only to be told that a cobra was only five paces away.  My inability to spot the snake could have been a lethal error had someone familiar with local hazards not been there to spot the danger.

The region I visited is one of the last truly wild regions left on the Dark Continent.  Through private efforts, the region I visited has truly amazing populations of wildlife that cannot be seen outside of national parks in places like Kenya where poaches have wiped out most of the countries’ wildlife.  Though the trip had a few tense moments, it was one of the most wonderful trips I have been blessed to experience.  The trip provided a stark contrasts relating to school safety we sometimes see around the globe.  This contrast reminded me just how fortunate American children, parents and school officials can are to live if a place where we see the deaths of young children as an anomaly rather than a routine fact of life.

Another campus attack involving a knife demonstrates that multiple victim knife attacks do occur. In the latest attack in a Houston high school, one student was killed and three injured by a knife wielding aggressor.  I have personally worked two multiple victim knife attacks when I was a school district police chief, one in an elementary school and one in an alternative school.  These attacks were thankfully not fatal but they were pretty bloody incidents.  One incident involved a little girl armed with a butcher knife.  I have seen this dynamic repeatedly working as a school security expert not only here in the U.S. but in Asia and other parts of the world as well.

We constantly discuss this in our school security assessments and in our school security keynote presentations.  The research by our school security experts has found that mass casualty edged weapons attacks are more common in countries with harsh penalties for possession of a firearm like Japan and the People’s Republic of China.  Keeping in mind that offenders use a wide array of weapons to attack people in schools can help remind us that school security measures need to address not only school shootings, but the range of school security incidents that do not involve guns.  Our team of school security experts all types of weapons assaults should be considered in school security efforts.

Dekalb County Police Officers are reporting that one man is in custody after brandishing a gun at McNair Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia.  It is unclear at this time if any shots were fired but school officials are now indicating that no students have been injured.  The incident was initially reported as an active shooter incident based on a statement by a school board member.  Our school security experts regularly work school weapons incidents and are concerned that people have become conditioned to think of active shooter incidents as the most common school security incidents when they are in fact rare events.