There are people saying that the school lockdown is a failed concept that is outdated and in dire need of replacement.  This argument has not been established as a fact.  This assertion is hotly contested by most leading experts in the field of school safety.  When pressed for examples of where lockdown has failed in schools, proponents of abandoning school lockdown usually cite four instances:

• The library at Columbine High School which was actually never locked during the attack.
• The Virginia Tech shooting where lockdown was not in place as a protocol, practiced by the faculty and most rooms did not even have locks.
• The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting where we do not even know the key facts of the case at this point and will not know them until the official report is released this summer.
• The Red Lake Reservation School Shooting which I worked as an expert witness finding no evidence of concept failure.

When evaluating school lockdown, we should be especially careful not to confuse application failure with concept failure.  For example, if an aggressor is able to attack victims in a room because there is no viable lockdown protocol, staff do not have a key to the room they are teaching in, lockdown drills have not been conducted, etc.  The cause can be and usually is from a failure to be able to apply the concept of school lockdown rather than a failure of the concept itself. 

We respectfully submit that most of the problems we have seen with school lockdown do not indicate that this is a faulty concept, but instead that there is much evidence that many school staff are not properly prepared to apply the concepts under the stress of actual incidents.

For nearly a decade, we have been tracking a series of horrible mass casualty shootings, stabbings, fire attacks, and other mass casualty attacks in schools in the People’s Republic of China.  While people in the United States as well as in China have been deeply interested in mass casualty shootings in American schools, the horrific attacks which have left hundreds of Chinese students and educators dead or seriously injured have been largely ignored by the media in both China and the U.S.

In one recent March attack, a knife-wielding attacker killed two relatives and then slashed eleven people including six school children outside a school in China’s commercial hub of Shanghai.

These numerous and deadly attacks demonstrate that even a country with a swiftly applied death penalty for possession of firearms and strict regulation of large knives, school shootings and other mass casualty weapons assaults are a very real threat. 

These incidents also demonstrate that school officials should plan, train and prepare for mass casualty weapons assaults using edged weapons, fire, explosives, chemicals, and other weapons that have been utilized for mass casualty attacks in other countries and in some cases in the United States.  The two most lethal school mass casualty attacks to date in the United States involved fire – (95 murdered) and explosives (more than 40 killed).

I had the opportunity to present a session at a conference for attorneys at the Walter F. George School of Law this week.  The session was focused on how the Sandy Hook tragedy is likely to impact school safety liability.  We discussed the potential for increased civil liability exposure from a number of increasingly popular yet theoretical approaches to school safety such as the lockout/lockdown approach to school lockdowns and efforts to teach students and staff to attack gunmen in active shooter situations. 

While lives will likely be lost from these types of approaches, we feel that most litigation will still center around traditional school safety incidents such as accidents, medical emergencies, sexual assaults and other situations that occur far more often than school shootings.  Since most serious injuries and deaths in American K12 schools do not involve acts of violence, it is important for school officials to use a comprehensive approach to school safety.

The presentation also reviewed how ineffective it can be for school officials to make major changes in school safety without a comprehensive school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness assessment.  The need for due diligence when selecting school safety experts and products was also an important part of the discussion.  It was great to have the opportunity to interact with so many attorneys who were interested not only in reducing the exposure of civil liability for schools, but in improving school safety as a primary means to do so.