School officials sometimes pay $10,000 or more for school security assessments when the most experienced evaluators in the nation regularly conduct more comprehensive school security assessments for far less money.   While our analysts have assisted with school security assessments for more than 5,000 public, charter, parochial and independent schools, we have never billed a client that much for even the most comprehensive assessments. 

We recommend that schools and school districts seek multiple competitive bids for school security assessment projects.  School officials should also conduct due diligence in selecting vendors from what is an almost totally unregulated field.  While a medical doctor or attorney can lose their ability to practice for severe misconduct, there is no such mechanism for school security consultants.

While there are many solid school security experts, the lack of regulation in the field combined with the massive demand for services has resulted in a proliferation of school security experts who have serious skeletons in their closet such as a felony arrest for theft, or who lack appropriate relevant professional qualifications to perform proper school security assessments.    

Here are a few tips that can help school officials determine the most qualified school security experts while also reducing costs of a school security assessment project by as much as 70%:

• Bid the project widely.  A proper bid circulation can result in 20-30 competitive bids.
• Make cost count for at least 25% of the decision-making for the project.  While weighting costs too heavily can increase the exposure to civil liability in future school security litigation, bidders for school security assessment projects should have incentive to keep costs down.
• Require and verify at least six to twelve references for K12 school security assessment projects. 
• Require bidding vendors to list any client who has fired the firm or terminated a contract for services. 
• Require vendors to list all open records requests they have filed, protests and litigation involving clients can be most revealing.
• Make falsification of credentials or untruthful answers to any of the above requirements grounds for immediate termination of the contract.  As with applications for employment, you should retain the ability to address any situation where a vendor is untruthful.

These simple steps can help you weed out problematic vendors while making the cream rise to the top.  The closer you look, the better the most qualified school security experts look.

There are people who purport 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 and 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 many 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 only evidence 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. 

As an analogy, if I attempted to fly an F-22 Raptor jet, I would not be successful because I have not been trained or had the chance to practice flying one.  This would not mean that the F-22 is a bad jet; it would simply mean that I am not properly prepared to fly one.  After World War Two, military pilots were dying needlessly until the United States Air Force conducted an exhaustive study on ejection failures.  By thoughtful study, the Air Force was able to determine why pilots were often unable to use the features of their aircraft to eject in time to save their lives.  With a combined approach of modifications in plane design, training and practice, the Air Force was able to improve the application of emergency ejection and did not abandon the concept. 

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.