Two Prairie Crossing Elementary students will not get expelled for bringing a knife to school last Friday, Benton Community School Corp.Superintendent Destin Haas said Thursday.
The student who was given the knife to hold was suspended four days from school, as was the student who brought the knife to school, Haas said.
Hass said the object was neither a pocket knife nor Boy Scout knife. However, it was equipped with two 4.5-inch blades.
A student reported the knife to a teacher, Haas said.
School Planning and Management just released the digital edition for this month with a cover story by Steve Satterly on recovery planning for school crisis events. Looking beyond lockdowns and fire drills, Steve provides an excellent primer on school disaster recovery planning.
The article After the Storm – Recovery Planning for Disasters at Schools makes some excellent points and is a must read for folks who are interested in the topic of business continuity planning for schools. Steve is an excellent writer, an experienced school safety practitioner and a deeply caring school safety advocate.
The article uses examples from school tornado strikes and includes photographs Steve took after a storm in Henryville Indiana earlier this year. School and emergency management officials in the community agreed that Steve could tour the site to see firsthand the devastation of this incident. Steve is a top expert on school tornado preparedness and has worked hard to help others create safer schools. Steve has written some superb articles on the topic of school safety.
Congratulations on making the cover of this excellent magazine Steve!
Lockdowns have been lifted at Harrison Middle School and Adobe Acres Elementary.
At noon, deputies were called to the 1400 block of Santa Rosa SW for reports of shots fired in the area. Upon arrival, deputies discovered a man in his mid 40s who’d been shot to death.
Police said they locked down the schools as a precaution while looking the suspect.
Once deputies searched the school grounds, the lockdown was lifted with deputy supervision.
One way for school organizations to create increased exposure to civil liability is to fail to properly complete school safety projects that have been started. For example, if a school district received a Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) grant at some point but still does not have a written prevention and mitigation plan or a written mental health recovery plan, they are much more vulnerable to honest and convincing attack during litigation if anyone has been injured or killed in a preventable school safety incident.
Though the argument may at times be less compelling, it is still valid for both public and non-public schools who have never participated in a REMS grant project because much in the way of free information, learning resources and free technical assistance is available to any K-12 school organization in the United States, particularly since 2003 when the U.S. Department of Education released it’s first school crisis planning guide and began to develop and dispense a wide array of high quality free resources for schools.
In addition, other federal agencies as well as countless local, state and not for profit organizations have offered valuable high quality free resources for school crisis planning to school officials. Developing school crisis plans and not following through to completion of a proper four phase plan can be very clear and convincing evidence that reasonable steps were not taken to protect human life in a variety of situations. Failing to address clear indications of risk that have been uncovered in a school safety assessment or audit is another common example of how a school organization can increase it’s exposure to civil liability relating to school safety.
Most importantly, failing to reasonably follow through on school safety projects can increase the exposure to school safety liability because people are more likely to be seriously injured or killed. If we keep our eye on the ball and work hard to develop good school safety policies, practices, plans and procedures, we reduce the risk of harm to students, staff and visitors and can thus receive a reduction in exposure to school safety litigation as a bonus to the more important benefit of improved life safety.
Americans by and large are a media driven culture. This has been both one of our nation’s greatest strengths and a tremendous weakness. For example, the serious problem of school shootings was largely ignored in the United States for decades. The intensive media coverage of a school shooting at Pearl High School in Mississippi changed that. Unfortunately, the overemphasis on this one very rare type of event has resulted in many other deadly threats not being properly addressed as prevention and even more so, emergency preparedness measures are often out of balance with the actual problems faced including those relating to active shooter situations.
Having worked closely on seven of these incidents in U.S. and Canadian schools has made it very clear to me that quite a bit of inaccurate information on these incidents is reported in the media and then becomes ingrained in training programs, school crisis plans etc.
This phenomenon is not new. As an example of how out of balance people can become when basing their actions on media accounts we can go back to 1897 for a great example. The Seattle Post – Intelligencer ran a story on July 17, with a headline of Gold! Gold! Gold! accompanied by a story that claimed that more than sixty men had found large quantities of gold in the Klondike. Even though explorers had in reality found only a few ounces of gold, the story spread like wildfire through the newspapers around the country.
Since this news came in the middle of a depression, tens of thousands of men rushed to the area in search of gold, most of them losing everything they had while never even completing the difficult journey.
We are privileged to have a free press. Our press organizations are often for profit businesses that must deliver what we want to stay in operation. This means that it is up to each of us to consider and question what we read and hear in the media to sort out factual and reliable information from that which is less accurate. This is incredibly important when it comes to life and death issues like school safety.
We should all try to avoid gold fever when addressing school safety concerns.
I had a great conversation with a university police officer from Pennsylvania this afternoon. He has been tasked by his department’s police chief to help the university emergency manager update their crisis plans, and wanted to see if we had any resources that might be of help to him in this assignment.
We discussed campus emergency preparedness concepts and how he can draw upon the strengths from his lengthy career in the field of law enforcement to help non-public safety personnel understand that campus employees should be ready to think and act quickly to respond to a wide array of crisis situations. This is in contrast to the popular focus on active shooter situations.
He was a very open minded law enforcement professional who understands that emergency planning that is focused too heavily on any one type of threat will be less effective for any and all threats that might arise.
It is always a joy to work with a true professional who can look beyond their own discipline to see the importance of the viewpoints of those from other disciplines who also have a lot to offer to protect human life.
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