Eight Victims Stabbed in Canadian School

February 27, 2016 by Michael Dorn

Safe Havens International Stock Photo

School Violence in Canada

The attack occurred at Dunbarton High School. Like their U.S. counterparts, Canadian K12 schools have experienced significant problems with violence in recent decades. Canadian schools have experienced a number of shootings, edged weapons attacks and other acts of violence in relation to the nation’s population of approximately 36 million. With a population of 223 million people, acts of violence in U.S. schools, it is difficult to contrast American rates of school violence with countries that do not tally school homicide in the same manner as U.S. schools where school mandatory reporting of school homicide data has been in place since the late 1990’s.

School Violence Abroad

In our work in Canada, we have found that while the nation has lower per capita homicide rates overall than the United States, Canadian schools often face similar concerns relating to school violence, weapons incidents and gang activity. Safe Havens has been receiving an increasing number of requests for assistance from schools in other countries in the past two years. Typically, our overseas clients have been concerned with school shootings, edged weapons assaults and acts of terrorism. While many Americans perceive mass casualty school attacks to be a problem unique to U.S. schools, our experience has been that school and public safety officials have been concerned about school weapons attacks in every country where we have worked.

Filed Under: Michael Dorn, Safe Havens Blog Tagged With: Canada, school, violence

The Security 100 Campus Summit

February 8, 2016 by Michael Dorn

Held at the beautiful Starr Pass Resort and Spa in Tucson, Arizona, the Security Summit 100 Campus Event is a high-level invitation only event attended by less than 50 carefully selected invitees. The Resort is surrounded by beautiful scenery that made for a peaceful setting for this year’s event.

I had the opportunity to deliver the opening keynote address at the 100 Higher Education Security Summit in Tucson, Arizona this week. I had the pleasure of keynoting the K12 Security Summit event in Scottsdale in December as well as the last year’s K12 Summit in Tucson. The Summit 100 events are invitation only summits for less than 50 participants selected to attend each event. Focused primarily on providing many peer-to-peer and panel discussions for school security decision-makers and school safety vendors, I have found the Summit events to be meticulously planned and coordinated.

In addition to a variety of peer to peer sessions, this week’s summit also features a forum on race and campus law enforcement. This session was facilitated by Gerald Summers and Sue Anne Hartig. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Gerald and Suzie but unfortunately was not able to stay to see their session due to other commitments. I understand that their presentation was well received.

As I read the short CVs for each attendee, I was deeply impressed with the vast experience and expertise of not only the other presenters but of the participants as well. As is the case with the K12 Summit events, the attendees are typically highly accomplished veteran school safety practitioners and subject matter experts in a variety of areas.

It was truly a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to participate in this impressive school security event.

Filed Under: Michael Dorn, Safe Havens Blog Tagged With: security, Summit

School Violence in Trinidad

February 2, 2016 by Michael Dorn

News headlines portray an epidemic of school violence in Trinidad. As with American media, alarmist and frightening reporting can make it difficult to determine the real extent of the problem of school violence. Safe Havens has been asked to help develop practical solutions to address school violence in Trinidad.

I have the honor to present at a national conference on school violence in Trinidad this March. The conference is being held in response to incidents of school violence in the small Caribbean nation. In newspaper covers and television news stories provided by my client for background on the topic, I noted repeated references to an “epidemic” of school violence and headlines regarding gang activity in schools. While the news stories detail recent school homicides, the focus of the reporting appears to center on a large number of very serious fights among groups of students as well as increasing gang activity in schools. A number of these incidents involve groups of students who gang up and beat individual students severely. There has been at least one similar type of attack on a school teacher. Viral videos of these types of attacks have become increasingly more graphic, popular and apparently more frequent.

High Homicide Rate affects School Violence

With a per capita murder rate of 28.3 per hundred residents, Trinidad has been experiencing a stout
homicide rate in recent years. Criminal gangs have often had no difficulty in obtaining semi-automatic
and even fully automatic weapons. Special police units equipped with heavy body armor and
sub-machine guns patrol high crime areas and have had numerous gunfights with gang members. It
should not be surprising that school violence would be an issue in schools serving these communities.
For contrast, the U.S. homicide rate typically runs between three and four victims per hundred
thousand.

Contrast with schools in the U.S.

Most of the topics of interest to attendees parallel issues with school violence in the United States. I will be addressing areas such as preventing school weapons assaults, effective school resource officer programs, student threat evaluation, techniques to prevent fights in schools, bullying prevention, student supervision practices, and effective emergency preparedness measures for school violence. I have found past engagements in other countries to be an excellent learning opportunity. Our analysts have learned valuable lessons working in Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Rwanda, Bolivia, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, France, Switzerland, Vietnam, the U.K. and other countries. I am sure this experience will be no exception.

Travel, learn and share

I look forward to my visit to Trinidad and will post another blog to share what I learn during the trip. When I was originally invited to present for the conference, I had to decline due to a previously scheduled trip to Argentina the same week. I was very disappointed that I would not be able to present because my schedule was in conflict. The conference organizers were willing to move the conference date so I could present. I am grateful for their efforts to accommodate my schedule and will do my best to make their efforts worthwhile. I also look forward to the challenges of trying to come up with success strategies to help make schools in Trinidad safer. Every time we have the opportunity to work in another region of the world, we learn and gain a new perspective. I feel truly blessed to have this opportunity to learn and to share a different perspective on school violence.

Filed Under: Michael Dorn, Safe Havens Blog Tagged With: Emergency preparedness, Gangs, Homicide, murder, police, Safe Havens, safety, school, school safety, School security, school violence, Staying Alive, students, Travel, violence

Tackling Mission Creep in School Operations

January 27, 2016 by Stephen Satterly

School Tragedy

On Tuesday, January 26, Susan Jordan was struck and killed by a school bus. The Principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School in Lawrence, IN, was supervising her students as they boarded buses at the end of the school day. The school bus reportedly jumped a curb, and Mrs. Jordan was pushing students out of the way when she was struck and killed. Two students were taken to the hospital with serious, but not life-threatening injuries.

This information is still developing, so the the purpose here is NOT to be critical of anyone. After a traumatic incident such as this, it is very easy to act on our emotions. Terror Management Theory tells us that feelings of vulnerability are normal, as are our desires to change things so that we can avoid a similar trauma. Making this change should be done in a thoughtful, systematic manner. As always in emergency management, the first step is identifying risk.

In the report, Relative Risks of Death in K-12 Schools, the number one cause of school-related fatalities was found to be school transportation-related incidents. Buses weigh around 33,000 pounds each, and drop off and pick up times has a large number of students and staff near these behemoths. A slight lapse of supervision or care can have tragic consequences.

This chart compares various causes of fatalities. Note that school transportation-related fatalities make 40% of the total.

Schools have developed procedures for getting kids off of, and onto their buses. These procedures were made for a reason, hopefully to meet a goal of student and staff safety. Therefore we do not want to change procedures related to school transportation based on the emotions of the moment. Experience tells us that such decisions often have unintended consequences. We need to make our decision-making deliberate and contemplative. That leaves you with the un-answered question, “What can I do?” One thing you can do is look for ‘mission creep’.

Mission Creep

‘Mission creep’ is, “The gradual broadening of the original objectives of a mission or organization.” Each school has in place various procedures, each with their own goals. As time goes on, things happen which may alter those goals, or cause goals to be forgotten altogether. This is ‘mission creep’ in action. For example, a dismissal procedure may call for parents to park in a certain area to get their children, to keep them away from the buses. Over time, a parent may request to get closer for some particular reason, then another, then another, and before you know it, cars are interfering with bus traffic.

So what can you do to combat mission creep?
1) Assess what you are currently doing.
2) Gather information. Without having all the information, it is hard to change what your doing, and know that you are doing the right thing.
3) Re-identify your goals, then assess whether you are meeting them or not. Has mission creep occurred? Take care of what you should be doing, then you can address whether you should be adding a level of complexity to the current procedure.
4) Identify whether what happened was a system failure, or a failure of application.
a) A systems failure, where what you are doing is not meeting your stated goals, can be fixed by amending, or replacing
the procedure.
b) Application failure requires training and practice to correct, but does not necessarily require a change in procedure.

Has mission creep occurred in your procedures? If what you are doing is not meeting your original goals, plan on how to change them. Do so in a deliberate, thoughtful way. Reassure yourself, your staff, your parents and your students that you are doing the right thing. That can help allay their fears.

Be wary of ‘knee-jerk’ responses leading to changes that have not been properly vetted. There is much at stake.

Filed Under: Stephen Satterly Tagged With: mission creep, school bus, Susan Jordan, system failure, terror management theory

Arapahoe High School Shooting post-incident review: Additional Thoughts

January 26, 2016 by Michael Dorn

This article has be made into a page and is now redirecting to the Resources section.

Filed Under: Safe Havens Blog

Safe Havens International Releases Report on Active Shooter Incident at Arapaho High School

January 18, 2016 by Michael Dorn

Safe Havens International Releases Report on Active Shooter Incident at Arapahoe High School

This memorial to Arapahoe High School Student Claire Davis stands in Clarity Commons, located in front of Arapahoe High School. This memorial should remind us that advancements in school safety can help reduce the need for more memorials like this across America. This report outlines important and common gaps in school safety that should be addressed before tragedy strikes.

Purposes of this Active Shooter Post-Incident Review

On December 13, 2013, an aggressor who was at that time a student at Arapahoe High School (AHS) of Littleton Public Schools (LPS) in Colorado entered the school via an unsecured entrance and fatally shot seventeen-year-old student Claire Esther Davis before killing himself. Like other school attacks, this incident caused immense emotional suffering for many people.

In an effort to gather lessons that LPS and schools around the nation can study to further improve the safety of their schools, and at the request of LPS, the Safe Havens International (SHI) leadership team approved an independent review of this incident as a pro-bono effort for the District. The District not only authorized but actually encouraged SHI to broadly disseminate this report with full knowledge that many of the findings in the report would reflect negatively on their district. LPS personnel indicated that they were willing to accept the potential for additional criticism if it could help prevent future school attacks in other schools.

Eleven SHI analysts and one support staff member agreed to donate their time, talent, and energy to perform this evaluation without any compensation. These analysts are from a variety of disciplines with extensive experience working in the K12 school environment. We selected this as one of this year’s major pro bono projects because the review presented a unique opportunity to further the cause of school safety. We were able to bring the skills of eleven school safety experts with national and international expertise from a variety of relevant specialty areas into this review, which would normally be cost prohibitive for a normal case review.

Lessons Learned from the Arapahoe High School Active Shooter Incident

The report will help school safety practitioners better understand how a major incident of school violence can occur in spite of significant prevention measures. This report demonstrates how sharing of information, student threat evaluation process, anonymous reporting systems, student disciplinary approaches and law enforcement intervention can be crucial the school violence prevention.

Just as importantly, this report illustrates how rapidly students, school employees and school resource officers can take protective actions to minimize casualties in active shooter incidents. The report demonstrates that the aggressor’s attack plan essentially failed because of the quick reactions of AHS custodian Fabian Vidrio Llerenas, head librarian Tracy Murphy, other AHS staff and students, as well as Deputy Englert of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.

While this incident involves a K12 public high school, there are important lessons that have significant relevance to institutions of higher learning as well as other campuses and facilities.

The Release of the Report

In most cases, we perform this type of incident review as part of a legal case such as a lawsuit by the victim’s family against the district. In this case, the review is being done as part of an arbitration brought by the family of Claire Esther Davis with the purpose of improving school safety through lessons learned. The arbitration is resulting in three separate independent reports, including this one. At the direction of the arbitrator, SHI has publicly released our independent report today. The two other groups of experts are also scheduled to release their reports today as well. Along with the authors of the two other reports, I will be providing a live briefing of the Safe Havens report for the LPS School Board on January 21^st, 2016. Each group will provide another live briefing their report of findings to the Interim School Safety on Youth in Crisis on January 22^nd, 2016 at the Colorado State Capitol.

Gratitude

Eleven SHI analysts and one support staff member agreed to donate more than 1,000 hours of staff time to review nearly 10,000 pages of documents to help the LPS determine opportunities for improvement as well as strengths in how the district was addressing school security at the time of the incident. I would like to express my gratitude for the selfless service of the following SHI team members who assisted in this effort:

Phuong Nguyen	William Miller
Steve Satterly	Chris Dorn
Dr. Sonayia Shepherd	Tod Schneider
Dr. Tina Brookes	Russell Bentley
Rod Ellis	Ulric Bellaire
Rachel Wilson

These individuals worked tirelessly without any compensation to review this case, conduct research and prepare our report of findings. We also appreciate the cooperation of personnel from LPS throughout this process.

Download the Arapahoe High School Active Shooter Post-Incident Review here

Filed Under: Safe Havens Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: active shooter