School Safety Keynote Presentations – Connecticut School Safety Conference Extends the Deadline for Registration

April 26, 2013 by

The Hartford Regional Educational Council CREC has decided to accept out-of-state guests for its statewide school safety conference to be held on May 1 in Hartford Connecticut.  Due to the overwhelming response, CREC has decided to extend the April 25th registration deadline.  I feel truly honored to be allowed to keynote this very special school safety conference. 

Lt. Paul Vance from the Connecticut State Police will be the opening presenter for the conference. I had the good fortune to present at another conference in Connecticut with Lt. Vance several years ago and he is an excellent presenter and as anyone who has watched him on the news this year can tell, a very competent PIO. 

This school safety conference will emphasize evidence-based, research-backed and assessment-based approaches to improving school security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness.  School access control and bullying will also be addressed.

I have recently presented for a couple of dozen major school safety conferences around the country and have keynotes at more school safety conferences in the coming months.  Last week, I keynoted for a record crowd of 650 people at the Indiana School Safety Specialists Academy advanced level conference.  I was honored to keynote a school safety conference held at St. Francis University in Pennsylvania, two conferences in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for Utica National Insurance and at a school safety conference for architects in Atlanta for Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood, a top 20 architectural firm specializing in designing safe schools.  These were both awesome school safety conferences where I had the chance to meet some amazing people. 

I was privileged to present with some of the nation’s top school safety experts like Gregory Thomas and Bill Modzelleski at the Tennessee Department of Education school safety conference and will be keynoting another school safety conference for the Department on May 6th.  This comprehensive school safety conference was filled to capacity with school superintendents and law enforcement executives.  I am very excited to present for the first time at the Kentucky Department of Education School Safety Conference later this spring.  It was a very personal honor to keynote for the annual program for PhD candidates for the education leaders program at my alma mater – Mercer University. I am equally excited to be able to present next month for our The Georgia School Board Attorney’s state conference at the Mercer University School of Law in May.

To me, it is a very personal and exciting experience to be allowed to present on school safety in any setting.   Whether I am presenting to six people or six hundred, it is truly a huge personal honor to be selected to present on the critical topic of school safety.  I feel truly blessed to be allowed the privilege of doing so.

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School Security Expert Tip – Thoughts on School Safety and Gun Control, Arming Teachers, Training People to Attack Gunmen in Schools and Other Hotly Debated Approaches To School Shootings

April 8, 2013 by

One trend we have noted that started with the deadly attack at Columbine High School, continued with the horrific Virginia Tech shooting and has returned with the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut is that people often rush out seeking simple solutions to age – old problems of school safety. 

Though these horrific incidents shock us we should recall that mass casualty attacks at schools pre-date much of what is being discussed today.  A dangerously mentally ill school board member murdered more than 40 people in Bath Michigan in 1927 with explosives and the most lethal attack at an American school to date claimed the lives of 95 victims.  The first mass casualty attack at a school in America took place in 1764 in a one room school house in Pennsylvania and only one student survived the brutal attack.

As we debate a variety of measures including arming teachers, gun control and teaching students and staff to attack an active shooter, we should remember that we should take care to implement efforts that have been proven to work while we debate those that we think might help.  Such debates are healthy in a free country and are certainly important.  At the same time, we are ignoring many tried and true strategies in most school in our nation while we spend a great deal of time and energy talking about concepts that are not yet proven to work.  While we our nation’s experts and system of government work on ideas that may help to address the highly complex issues of school safety, let us avoid the trap of seeking simple solutions while ignoring life-saving concepts that have worked for decades. 

Having helped perform school security assessments for more than 5,000 public and non-public schools as well as having worked after the fact for hundreds of school crisis incidents, our analysts feel strongly that there is no one simple solution that will effect a dramatic reduction in the homicide rate in our nation’s schools.  Many of the proven concepts that have been implemented over the past 30 years have helped to reduce the school homicide rate dramatically yet are still not being utilized by the majority of U.S. public and non-public schools. 

We urge people to adopt what we know will help reduce death in our schools while we continue the important debates relating to school safety.

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School Security Expert Tip – Controlled Testing During School Security Assessments Demonstrates Deadly Disconnects

March 18, 2013 by

I apologize for my lack of blogs over the past few weeks, we are still working seven days a week trying to keep up with demand.  We have been working on more than two dozen school security assessment projects, keynoting conferences each week and working on many other short notice school security projects. 

As mentioned in an earlier blog, our analysts having been noticing some disturbing trends during our school security assessments since the tragic school shooting in Newtown.  We have run hundreds of one on one school crisis simulations using video and scripted scenarios since the Sandy Hook school shooting and are continuing to see some reactions of great concern.  The effects of stress in crisis situations are well documented and are often observed in these simulations.   We are continuing to see school staff react by stating that they would attack or otherwise try to physically disarm individuals who are brandishing a weapon but who are not depicted as an active shooter.   Test subjects have chosen these options for a student holding a gun to his head and threatening to kill himself, scenarios where they have been posed with a scenario of a man with a gun approaching the school and seventy five yards from the building and in a number of other instances where it would clearly make the situation worse to confront the aggressor.  

We encourage our clients to observe the crisis simulations during our school security assessments and they typically opt to do so.  They are continually amazed at what they see during this critical portion of the assessment process.  Concepts that may look fine in a training session or during drills where the administrator provides the instructions to take action, often fail under actual field conditions.  Improving the ability of individual staff members to make appropriate life and death decisions quickly and without waiting for approval from a supervisor may be one of the best opportunities we have to reduce mass casualty loss of human life in our schools.  Take the time to use valid testing  methodologies to evaluate what your employees are likely to do under stress rather than what we might assume they would do.

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