I had a rather unpleasant phone call from a school security consultant last week.  As he has done on several occasions in the past, he attacked me and our non-profit center in a rude and rather unprofessional manner. I remained polite and tried to address his concerns but he became even more agitated and then abruptly hung up the phone after accusing me of being a coward after when I refused to agree with his conclusions relating to a particular school security incident.  This same consultant was involved with a series of very unethical actions as part of what can only be described as an internet smear campaign a few years back.  He apparently lost his school safety position with a public school district over his involvement in the scandal. 

While there are many highly qualified school security consultants, the field is by nature largely unregulated.  As a result, many different types of people engage in work in the field.  School security consultants vary widely in quality, credentials and in some cases, credibility.  While I have met many great school security consultants, there are definitely a few consultants who are more focused on money than in making schools safer.  One example of this can be seen in how the topic of school security assessments is often approached.  While some firms insist that only a school safety consultant can perform a school security assessment, there are a number of government and private sector school security experts who feel that there are instances where school officials and local public safety personnel can and should be trained to conduct their own school security assessments.  As few school districts can afford to have an outside firm conduct school security assessments on an annual basis, internalizing this capacity makes sense to many school safety practitioners.  

Having conducted school security assessments both as part of a government school safety center and on behalf of the world’s largest non-governmental school safety center, I have many of the same viewpoints on how they should be conducted now as I did when I performed them for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency – Office of the Governor (GEMA).  Members of the School Safety Project then and the analysts from Safe Havens International now think of school security assessments as an approach that should be performed on an annual basis rather than as a one-time project.  

This is one reason we encourage school districts that are having school security assessments performed by outside vendors to require the vendor to provide training to local public safety officials and schools staff to train them how to conduct their own school security assessments.  Safe Havens has now trained more than 2,000 school security consultants, school employees and public safety officials to conduct school security assessments.  We have also helped with state-wide school security assessment training programs in five states.  While some for profit school security consultants have become vocally upset by this practice, our role as a non-profit center is to make schools safer and this is one way for us to do so.    Though we have been criticized and harassed on numerous occasions by several school security consultants, Safe Havens will continue to bid our school security assessment projects at rates far below what for-profit firms charge.  Though we have upset some school security consultants by the practice, we will also continue to train local teams in school security assessment processes.  To us, school safety is about kids, not revenue generation.

Our analysts have been working on school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness projects almost every week since the tragic school shooting at Newtown Elementary School.  As Safe Havens assists more schools with school security audits than any organization in the world we are aware of, our analysts have learned a great deal about what is and is not effective when conducting school security audits. 

Since our analysts first began conducting school security audits many years ago, we have been increasingly impressed with the need to look beyond the basic school security approaches that are the focus of most school security audits.  We have worked many school shootings and other school security incidents in schools where limited scope school security audits were conducted and simple and easy to implement opportunities to prevent tragedies were missed.  Often, these opportunities have been overlooked due to an over-emphasis on security hardware and technologies without also addressing the human behaviors of students and staff that often have a role to play that is at least if not more important to these school security approaches.

Of the more than 5,000 public, private, independent, parochial, charter and other schools our analysts have assisted in clients in assessing, most of the most important opportunities for improvement involve a combination of security and emergency preparedness hardware combined with improvements in practices of students and staff that we observe when conducting school security audits.

For many months now, there has been much speculation about what did and did not take place at during the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut.  Some of this speculation has been harmful in various ways.  For example, parents of children at the school and educators in the region have expressed to me that inaccurate information about the incident has been painful to them.  I have heard this many times before with past school shooting events.  Inaccurate conjecture and speculation about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has also had a noticeable and adverse impact on how prepared educators are to respond to school crisis events.  Our analysts have noticed a distinct increase in missed action steps and of even greater concern, dangerous action steps during our controlled school crisis simulations since the school shooting in Newtown.

Hopefully, the Connecticut State Police report will provide us with a clearer picture of what did and did not take place at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  At the same time, we must understand that there will almost assuredly be some unanswered questions even after the report is released.   Having worked seven active shooter incidents in K12 schools, my experience has been that even when you review thousands of pages of police reports, depositions and other documents, there will be some things about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that we simple will not be able to determine with certainty.

As with past active shooter incidents, many people will focus on a few aspects of the incident while some of the most critical lessons we can learn will be largely ignored.  This has definitely been my experience with several mass casualty school shootings I have worked including the Thurston High School Shooting in Oregon, the school shooting in Tabor, Canada and the Red Lake Reservation school shooting in Minnesota.  Some of the most important lessons learned from each of these tragic school shootings have still not been addressed in many school systems and non public schools in the United States and Canada.

Much of the public discourse following this tragic event has been relatively unproductive creating fear, anger and disagreement over what might have worked while we often ignore many things that are proven to work to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from school shootings.   Our hope is that we can learn some key lessons from the Connecticut State Police report on the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School so the tragic loss of lives in Newtown will not have been totally in vain. 

I found this interview with the bookkeeper who did such a superb job in de-escalating the extremely tense hostage situation at a Dekalb County Georgia elementary school to be an excellent example of how well school employees can perform under dire conditions.   This interview helps to demonstrate how important it is to remember that not all aggressors armed with guns are active shooters.  Had this school employee attempted to attack and disarm this aggressor, a far more deadly incident would likely have occurred.  Though the various approaches to train school employees to attack an active shooter as a last resort would not advocate that she attack the aggressor in this situation, our controlled simulations have revealed that many people who view training videos or complete training programs of this type frequently misapply the concepts and do respond to such scenarios by saying they would attack the aggressor when it is clearly dangerous to do so.

While we do not suggest remaining passive when trapped in an enclosed space with an active shooter, we feel that more comprehensive training approaches are needed to reduce the significant danger that people will misapply the concepts being taught.

School security has been a major topic in Connecticut.  Connecticut school officials have been bombarded with marketing materials, calls by sales people and other contacts by people and organizations trying to sell them safety since the tragedy.  While this has been occurring in all fifty states, education leaders report and frequently lament intensive activities of this type in Connecticut.  During a trip to work with three Connecticut school districts a few weeks ago, several educators and public safety officials expressed anger that a school safety consultant had even rushed to Newtown from another state to do media interviews.  While they understand the need for expert commentary, they felt that giving the appearance that he had been summoned to the scene was both misleading and insensitive.  There have also been a number of instances of reporters approaching the houses of parents who had lost children with microphones concealed in bouquets of flower to ambush parents with surprise interviews, these types of events have generated considerable stress, pain and sensitivity to what one school official referred to as profiteering.  Many people feel they have been victimized all over again.  One administrator told me this week that a school employee who lost a loved one in the incident had decided to retire because of the relentless barrage of media interview requests.

School and public safety officials appreciate and understand that the media can and must report the news.   They also understand and appreciate that there are people and organizations that can help them make their schools safer.  At the same time, many people in the state have expressed that they have grown weary of efforts that they sometimes perceive to be unprofessional, opportunistic and in a few extreme cases, disturbingly predatory.  Though we have not made a single unsolicited phone call nor sent any mail to solicit school security work in Connecticut or any other state in the wake of the Sandy Hook incident, our school safety experts have been very busy providing services to Connecticut schools this year.  While we gladly respond to requests for information and services, we simply do not feel that it is appropriate to solicit work no matter how intense the interest in the subject.    

Responding to requests, our dedicated team of school security experts has had the privilege of keynoting conferences for thousands of people and have conducted numerous school security assessments in Connecticut.  Educators, students, parents, public safety officials, elected officials and members of the public have discussed and debated an array of approaches to try to address the fear generated by the nation’s third most deadly school attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Gun control, arming teachers, metal detectors, security cameras, armed security officers, school resource officers, ballistic laminates, school design, mental health services and many other measures have been discussed at length in an attempt to improve school security in Connecticut. 

When the Connecticut State Police release the much anticipated report outlining the results of their investigation, the airways will again be awash with stories about the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Educators and public safety officials will again be assailed with relentless requests from reporters as is to be expected in a country with cherished and often highly critical freedom of the press.  Citizens of Connecticut will speak their mind in sometimes emotional, emphatic and passionate discussions as can and must occur in a country with a right to free speech unprecedented in world history.  But sadly, school superintendents, headmasters and school board members will be inundated with another round of sometimes insensitive sales pitches.   

I have had the privilege to interact with several thousand educators, public safety officials, elected officials, students, parents and concerned citizens in Connecticut to discuss school security this year.   Though many vendors have been respectful, reasonable and utterly professional as they attempt to conduct business in the state, some have not been so thoughtful.  We urge those who offer services and products relating to school safety and security to be respectful in their efforts to make Connecticut schools safer.  

I apologize for not blogging more often, but our summer schedule has been rather hectic.

In August I visited a rural province of Mozambique.  The Zambeze Delta region is as remote a location as I have ever visited.  It was a wonderful and informative experience.  Schools in the area I visited typically have dirt floors, no power and no running water.  A school often consists of a simple thatched roof, a blackboard and hard wooden benches and a crude dirt soccer field. Yet children can and do learn.

In this part of Mozambique, lions, hyenas, crocodiles, cobras, hippos and cape buffalo are unique hazards that claim many young lives.  The mortality rate for young children is so high that parents in the region typically do not name their offspring until their fifth birthday.  Once children reach the age of five, they are more likely to survive malaria and have learned more about spotting the many types of wildlife that often can and do attack people.  Though I was there for only two weeks, I had a couple of close calls including one instance where I sat down for a moment only to be told that a cobra was only five paces away.  My inability to spot the snake could have been a lethal error had someone familiar with local hazards not been there to spot the danger.

The region I visited is one of the last truly wild regions left on the Dark Continent.  Through private efforts, the region I visited has truly amazing populations of wildlife that cannot be seen outside of national parks in places like Kenya where poaches have wiped out most of the countries’ wildlife.  Though the trip had a few tense moments, it was one of the most wonderful trips I have been blessed to experience.  The trip provided a stark contrasts relating to school safety we sometimes see around the globe.  This contrast reminded me just how fortunate American children, parents and school officials can are to live if a place where we see the deaths of young children as an anomaly rather than a routine fact of life.