The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently released a new free online training program titled IS-360: Preparing for Mass Casualty Incidents: A Guide for Schools, Higher Education, and Houses of Worship.  Part of the 2013 White House School Safety Initiative, the course focuses on mass casualty events such as active shooter situations.  The course is offered to focus on three unique areas: K12 schools, Institutions of higher learning and places of worship. The courses were developed in response to the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and other incidents.

Safe Havens personnel Michael Dorn, Steve Satterly, Chris Dorn, Dr. Sonayia Shepherd, Phuong Nguyen and Gregory Thomas helped write the content for this series of courses.  The courses are designed for those who want to learn more about preventing, preparing for, responding and recovering from active shooter situations. 

Regular readers know that we routinely suggest books, articles, manuals, videos, and other learning resources related to school safety.  In the past, we have highlighted Dr. Gary Klein’s excellent book Sources of Power – How People Make Decisions from MIT Press as a valuable school safety resource. 

For those school safety experts and practitioners who are concerned with life and death decision making in the prevention, as well as preparedness and response arenas, I also highly recommend his book The Power of Intuition – How to Use your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work which is published by Doubleday.

Klein is a brilliant researcher who does a superb job demonstrating how we can make more effective decisions when we learn to trust our intuition.  Klein maintains that intuition is really much more than a gut reaction because our intuition is based on our factual life experience.  This book is an especially valuable resource for people who need to train others to be able to spot signs that a person could be dangerous and/or to be able to rapidly make life and death decisions. 

I read The Power of Intuition while conducting research for our new book Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters which is due out in bookstores on May 14, 2014.  I recommend The Power of Intuition for all who seek to carefully research the field of school safety. 

Five members of the Safe Havens International team have been selected to write a groundbreaking book for Barron’s, the highly regarded publisher.  While our school security experts have already published nearly 30 books on school security, safety and emergency preparedness, this is book designed to address security and emergency preparedness in any setting. 

The working title for the book is Staying Alive, How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters.  The book will be combined with more than a dozen web-delivered companion videos which are designed to be utilized as training vignettes.  The book will focus on evidence-based, assessment-based, and research-based approaches that can help people spot and react to indications of danger in time to prevent deadly situations as well as to survive those they cannot avoid. 

At this point, it appears likely that the companion videos will be available through the Barron’s and Safe Havens website at no cost. 

The school security experts co-authoring the book will outline the approaches that have been proven to improve school security as well as those that have been proven to work in other settings.  Our experience has been that many school security approaches are more advanced than what we often see utilized in other settings.  By sharing these proven school security concepts with the general public, we hope to be able to reduce the loss of human life in other settings as has already been accomplished by American K12 schools.  American K12 school security, safety and emergency preparedness measures, combined with improvements in emergency medical care and better public safety response approaches, have successfully reduced the per capita rates of death from a range of causes such as homicide, heart stoppage and lightning strike.

The Safe Havens International school security experts working on this book feel honored to be selected by one of the nation’s most respected publishers to write this groundbreaking book.  Safe Havens analysts have already served as authors for books published by Mcgraw Hill, Prentice Hall, and Jane’s.

The co-authoring team and research lead will be discussing the work of a number of the nation’s top experts from various fields including Dr. Gary Klein, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Gavin de Becker, Dr. Michael Roberto, Gregory Thomas, Dr. Caroline Mears, and Amanda Ripley in a format that is heavily cited yet easy to read.  Staying Alive will be available in bookstores on May 14, 2014 and is expected to become a leading book on the topic.