Well-intentioned but emotional reactions that are driving large numbers of smart, well-educated and experienced people to overemphasize mass casualty school shootings.  This deadly overemphasis has been resulting in preventable deaths in our schools since the mid 1990’s. 

The utterly shocking scale of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School has intensified this deadly phenomenon.  As school children continue to die in significant numbers from lightning strikes, most schools still do not purchase $300 lightning strike detectors that could prevent many of these deaths.   We lose roughly the same number of children each year in fatal playground accidents as were killed in our third most deadly school attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  As a result, schools are expending considerable amounts of time and money training staff in concepts that have often not been validated by external review for threats that are extremely rare though catastrophic. 

While the media focuses intently on mass casualty acts of violence, the far more common tragedies that claim many young lives go quietly unnoticed.  While we expend millions of dollars on concepts which are not only as of yet not proven to work, and which very well may prove to increase danger, we often ignore free and low-cost approaches that have demonstrated success. 

For example, thousands of school teachers attend two-day training programs on active shooter response that has never been validated, while they are not provided training in research-based de-escalation techniques.  Similarly, school systems purchase millions of dollars in security camera technology only to have security camera footage provide evidence in civil actions that staff have not been properly trained in simple techniques to improve student supervision that would prevent the very incidents recorded by the cameras.

School safety efforts should be driven by careful evaluation rather than speculation.  While active shooter incidents do occur with enough frequency to demand our attention, more school children die from other causes which should also demand appropriate attention.  I in no way intend to imply that proven measures should not be employed to address active shooter incidents in schools.  However, far too many preventable deaths in our schools when we focus on rare but catastrophic events while ignoring more common lethal events that we could easily prevent.

I had the pleasure to keynote a school safety conference in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania today.  More than 200 educators, public safety officials and other school safety advocates turned out for the event.  I have been truly blessed to have found great weather and awesome people for my school safety presentations and projects in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Montana, Minnesota, and New Jersey in recent weeks. 

I have also been fortunate to have the chance to interact with many other school safety experts who are practitioners, researchers and school safety consultants from across the country this fall and feel truly blessed.   At the same time, it has been challenging to meet all requests for school safety assistance.  I have only taken about two weeks off work counting holidays and weekends since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary school.  Most of our full-time staff have also had very few days off.  While we have chosen to serve and feel honored to do so, our dedicated school safety experts have their physical limits just like anyone else.

There is a significant interest in school safety right now and we are still getting an astounding number of requests for assistance from across the nation and abroad.  We have requests from Kenya, Thailand and Nigeria as well as a steady stream of requests for school safety expert services from across the nation.  We have added more than a dozen adjunct analysts to the Safe Havens team over the past year to meet the increased demand for school safety services.  However, we have still had to decline dozens of keynote requests, school security assessment projects and one massive national school safety consulting project.   We beg patience when it occasionally takes us a day or two to respond to requests for school safety assistance.  We work diligently to emphasize quality of service and this periodically results in some delays in responding.

I look forward to two student school safety presentations tomorrow morning, to the presentations and school safety assessment visits in the coming months and most of all, for the opportunity to interact with so many dedicated school safety experts from across the nation and abroad.

I was honored and truly blessed to be allowed to present a plenary session at the Seventh Annual Montana Crime Prevention Conference in Bozeman today.  I have been fortunate to present on school security at a number of professional conferences in Montana.  I have always found the folks in this beautiful state to be straightforward and down to earth.  Though a sparsely populated state with a relatively low violent crime rate, there are many positive school security and emergency practices in place in Montana such as the state’s robust school drill requirements.

We discussed pattern matching and recognition and I delivered my motivational presentations Weakfish – Bullying Through the Eyes of a Child and Dream Catchers – Succeeding and Surviving in the Helping Professions.

It was truly a pleasure and an honor to return to big sky country and interact with so many outstanding advocates for the children.