It has been a busy week with ten different presentations starting with the Maine Homeland Security Conference on Tuesday and ending with a presentation at Southwest Minnesota State University on Saturday.  I had a blast with my keynote Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters and four breakout sessions for the Maine Emergency Management Agency in beautiful Augusta, Maine, and had many thought provoking questions from graduate students during my final presentation of the week this Saturday. 

I truly feel blessed to be alive, lucky to be able to do what I love each and every day, and am honored to be able to meet so many amazing people in my travels.  I feel fortunate to be able to see so much of our amazing country and to periodically have the chance to see other parts of the world.  On this trip, I had the opportunity to work once again with Pat Hinckley from the Maine Department of Education and Dwane Hubert with the Maine Emergency Management Agency.  Dr. Tanya McCoss-Yerigan, author of the recently released book No Ordinary Son A Journey Through Death and Living Again, and her husband Tim were kind enough to allow me to stay at their beautiful home while I was presenting five more times in Minnesota on Friday and Saturday.

A number of my colleagues have been on the road as well.  My son Chris just returned from Ketchikan, Alaska after spending almost three straight months on the road.  He left for another two weeks of school security assessments in Washington D.C. this weekend and has two more trips to Alaska next month.  Dr. Shepherd just returned from six weeks working in Florida after spending two weeks in Nigeria and is preparing for a trip to the Dominican Republic. 

People often ask us if we tire of the constant travel.  Though I do find it to be demanding at times, I still prefer this lifestyle to the four to five hour round trip commute when I worked for the Georgia Office of Homeland Security.  As with every job I have been fortunate to have, this role has plenty of challenges but also offers me opportunities to experience so many interesting things.  Most importantly, the work of our center allows me to continue to collaborate with amazing and impressive people who care deeply about the safety of our campuses just as my previous public safety positions did. 

Whether you fly a lot, work in the same setting every day, or operate out of a police car or fire truck for a living, you will find amazing people in service to others everywhere if you just take the time to look for them. 

While a five person team of school security experts has been working diligently to conduct research for and to edit the new book Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters, the award winning Safe Havens International video crew has been filming and editing a series of powerful and informative school security training videos that outline research based concepts such as mental simulation, pattern matching and recognition, and the window of life. 

As part of our non-profit mission Safe Havens is making the results of this $250,000 video project available to schools at no cost via the Safe Havens International website.  Just click on the book cover on the home page and you will be taken to the Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters companion video page.  With run times between three and ten minutes each, these captivating videos will make an excellent staff development tool.  The videos that have been posted are still being edited to correct some technical issues such as sound quality and transitions, and additional videos will be posted soon. 

Please take a few minutes to watch one or two of these videos and we believe you will decide to view most of them.  We would also appreciate your assistance in helping to spread the word about these awesome videos so more people can learn to stay alive and survive deadly encounters.

Our video crew did an outstanding job in developing a companion infographic for the Twenty Strategies to Safer and More Effective Schools that was released by the Department last week.  Our public information intern is working on another infographic based on a new paper Relative Risks of Death in U.S. Schools written by Steve Satterly.   

Click here to download the full report created for the Maine Department of Education (1.5MB)     Click here for the infographic for this report (2.8MB)

Safe Havens has released a revealing new report – Relative Risks of Death in U.S. Schools.  While report author Steve Satterly found a scarcity of reliable national data for several key areas such as fatal accidents not related to vehicles and deaths from medical emergencies, the data he found was very revealing. 

Of particular interest was the data he found relating to on-campus student suicide.  I was personally quite surprised that these types of events were so statistically prevalent in relation to violent school deaths.  While we have emphasized the need to devote increased attention to this, I did not realize how common these events are in relation to school homicides.  This evaluation is the first that I have seen that utilized a strict adherence to the United States Department of Homeland Security definition for active shooter incidents providing a clearer picture of the relative risk of different types of school violence as well as the likelihood of student and staff deaths from violence in relation to school-related traffic incidents.  While we often see much higher numbers listed for active shooter incidents, these typically include active shooter incidents in higher education settings, targeted acts of violence that do not meet the U.S.D.H.S. criteria for active shooter incidents and other types of incidents.  In contrast to these types of compilations, Steve provides the definition used, lists his sources and lists the incidents counted to derive the total number of active shooter incidents counted for the fifteen year time span covered.  This should be helpful to school and public safety officials as well as the media as we have had many calls from those sectors who have noted the widely varying numbers lack of a formal definition and a inadequate documentation on for active shooter incident deaths that are frequently quoted.

We feel this report will be helpful for school and public safety officials who want to take care to devote resources to the prevention, preparedness for and response to different types of incidents.  For example, the report shows the need to focusing efforts for school suicide and domestic violence incidents on campus in relation to the efforts relating to active shooter incidents.  If deaths from student suicide are as prevalent as government data cited in the report suggests, it makes sense to focus resources on this far more common form of student and staff death on school property as well as on less common but very real risks from active shooter incidents.   

We are deeply appreciative for the willingness of Steve Satterly, Chris Dorn, and other analysts to perform the many hours of work on this project on a pro bono basis.  We hope you will find this report to be helpful in your work.

The Maine Department of Education released a new guide Twenty Simple Steps to Safer and More Effective Schools.  The first document of its type developed as part of a statewide school security assessment, the guide focuses on relatively easy to implement strategies with little or no budgetary impact that are applicable to most public and non-public schools. 

We are deeply proud of the Safe Havens analysts who agreed to perform the work for this project without any monetary compensation.  From our staff photographer Rachel Wilson to adjunct analysts Rod Ellis and Steve Satterly, a team of eight Safe Havens analysts worked diligently to produce this helpful free resource.  We are also grateful for the efforts of Karen Ouellette from Maine who kindly proofread the document for spelling, capitalization, and grammatical errors on a short deadline. Please take a look at the guide and forward it to anyone who might find it be useful in making schools safer.

Click here to download the report “Twenty Simple Strategies for Safer and More Effective Schools” produced for the Maine Department of Education along with an accompanying infographic.