Campus Safety East Conference 2016

June 6, 2016 by

CampusSafety EAST 2016

Campus Safety East Conference

My son Chris and I used to present together frequently. Now that Chris lives in Oregon and both of our schedules have gotten even busier, we rarely have the opportunity to co-present.   We are very excited that we will have the opportunity to present together for a full day at a special pre-conference school emergency preparedness workshop at the Campus Safety East conference being held in National Harbor Maryland on July 25th 2016.

Over the years, I have found the Campus Safety conference events to be great events with a diverse array of topics, presenters, vendors and networking opportunities. Chris and his video crew have been working on a series of new school weapons incident scenario videos and they will be developing a series of custom school crisis audio scenarios for this event.   Campus Safety plans to make these audio scenarios available for attendees and we will be providing each participant with a copy of our latest book Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters.

This information-packed and dynamic session will cover a variety of hot school safety topics including:

  • Weapons Concealment and Detection
  • When Young Lives are at Stake – Practical and Proven Approaches to School Emergency Preparedness
  • Look Who’s Talking – Critical School Safety Communications Before, During and After a Crisis
  • Innocent Targets – When Terrorism Comes to School
  • Know the Drill – Improving Survivability for School Crisis Situations Using Enhanced School Emergency Drills

The workshop is a K12 education track while higher education has its own pre-conference session on the Clery Act. For those in higher education interested in emergency preparedness, you will still find our workshop engaging and most of the concepts we will be discussing apply to the college environment as well.

Chris and I hope to see you at the Campus Safety Conference East this July!

For more information and to register, please visit the Campus Safety East homepage:

http://campussafetyconference.com/east

For more information on the pre-conference workshop by Michael Dorn and Chris Dorn:

http://www.campussafetyconference.com/east/program/d1

 

Filed Under: Chris Dorn, Michael Dorn, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Evaluating & Managing Anonymous School Threats

May 26, 2016 by

Evaluating and Managing Anonymous School Threats

This past Monday across the United States there was an array of anonymous school threats, including messaging indicating that school bombings or other types of school violence would occur. Thousands of students were evacuated from their schools, and in a number of cases, schools were closed. We have seen a series of these situations in the United States over the past three years. We are also seeing these in our work in other countries. During our recent project in India, thousands of students were evacuated from numerous schools in the suburbs of New Delhi after three students called in a series of anonymous school threats from a classroom using a watch with a SIM card.

During our assessment visits to schools in Trinidad-Tobago a few months ago, we found that there had been similar incidents there as well. In one case, military personnel provided security for a high school after anonymous threats of violence were communicated.

The recent events of the greatest concern in the U.S. have involved coordinated anonymous school threats against multiple school districts in various regions on the same day. Threats similar to those made against New York City Schools were communicated to the Los Angeles Unified Public School System on the same day. As you may recall, the LAUSD decided to close all of its schools for the day. Monday’s threats appeared to involve an even greater number of threats than past incidents.

With the increase in terrorist activities in Europe and the United States combined with repeated warnings by FBI Director James Comey about significant limitations in our ability to monitor persons of concern for terrorism involvement, we have clear indications of an elevated risk of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Recent polls show that Americans are very concerned about the potential for terrorist attacks. These factors in turn make it easier for individuals and organizations to exploit fear through anonymous threats of violence involving schools. Though the school year is coming to an end in most areas of the country soon, we anticipate more problems of this type will recur next school year.

Here are a three potential action steps that school and public safety officials may wish to consider implementing over the summer to prepare for threats of violence, including anonymous school threats:

Emergency_Response_Plans_Staff_Reviewing__Rachel_Wilson_1934_Thumbnail

  1. Work with local or state emergency management/homeland security officials to run a series of short tabletop scenarios where a multi-disciplinary team has to review and quickly develop a response plan for each scenario. With proper structuring, a team could run through 6-12 scenarios in a few hours. By running the scenarios in a short time frame, school and public safety personnel can practice working together in real-time fashion to make decisions with limited time and information just as they will often have to do if they receive anonymous threats. Security Director Guy Grace and his district’s crisis team have been running different anonymous threat scenarios several times each year to practice for these challenging situations.
  2. Consider developing improved surge capacity for security and police personnel and increased security posture on short notice. This can afford school officials increased options that may allow them to keep schools open when threats are received.
  3. School officials should consider meeting with local, state and federal law enforcement officials to see if there are any opportunities to improve the speed and quality of information sharing relating to investigations once a threat has been received. This type of collaboration can be the difference between suspects being identified and prosecuted or not.

There are other ways to address these increasingly problematic situations, but these three action steps can improve the ability of school and public safety officials to respond to anonymous threat of school violence.

For additional information on bomb threat management, which can be applied to anonymous school threats as well, please check out Bomb Threat Basics at:

http://safehavensinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/bombthreatbasics-SafeHavensIntl.pdf

Filed Under: Michael Dorn, Safe Havens Blog

School Safety and Security in Trinidad – Tobago

March 29, 2016 by
Safe Havens International Executive Direct presented at a national conference on school violence in Trinidad-Tobago

National conference on school violence in Trinidad-Tobago

Safe Havens International Executive Director Michael Dorn presented at a national conference on school violence in Trinidad-Tobago last week and wrote this blog while on the road. We are posting it this week since we recently did a web redesign and had a delay in making new posts.

I have had a wonderful experience the past few days working in Port of Spain, Trinidad.  I had the honor to serve as the keynote speaker for the first national conference on school safety and security held in Trinidad – Tobago today.  The Ministry of Education and the CORE Foundation were able to arrange for a Trinidad Police Officer assigned to my security detail and the Director of the CORE Foundation to accompany me for site visits of two area high schools that have had recent security incidents.  These incidents included a double homicide where two victims were killed as they left their high school at the end of the school day.  I had been provided with quite a few news articles as background information prior to my arrival.  As we have seen in many cases in the U.S., the news articles turned out to be alarmist and highly inaccurate.  Trinidad – Tobago has a national homicide rate of 28 victims per 100,000 people in contrast to the U.S. rate of only 3.2 per 100,000 and has intensive gang activity.  In large cities like Port of Spain, it is not uncommon to see police officers patrolling in groups of three while carrying fully automatic tactical rifles and sub-machine guns.  At the same time, no one I have spoken to during this trip could provide any examples of anyone being murdered on school property.  As with many cases in England, Vietnam, South Africa and a number of countries where schools are typically completely fenced in, students have been murdered as they left the front gate of their schools at the end of the school day.

While I am not trying to imply that these types of murders are anything but tragic, it is almost astounding to me that to-date at least, no student or intruder has murdered anyone on a K12 campus property.  While it is likely that these types of incident will occur in Trinidad in the future, it is noteworthy that there have not been a number of such incidents already.   As with alarmist media and social media descriptions in the U.S., media accounts in Trinidad paint a picture of absolute chaos in K12 schools.  While schools in Trinidad – Tobago, like their counterparts in many other countries, have their share of violence, bullying, vandalism and other social ills, the media accounts appear to be just as inaccurate and inflammatory as those in the U.S. press.

There are striking differences in the way schools in Trinidad operate in relation to their U.S. counterparts.  For example, teachers rotate to different classrooms in contrast to the U.S. where students move between locations during passing times.  We have observed this practice in other countries such as Vietnam.  While U.S. school officials face challenges with student supervision during passing times, students in classrooms in Trinidad – Tobago are often left unattended by an adult as teachers rotate between their rooms.  This has resulted in some upsetting portable phone videos of students being assaulted in their classrooms by other students.  We recently observed a similarly troubling video where a child was severely beaten in a Vietnamese school.  Of course, there have also been many similarly troubling videos of students being attacked in U.S. and British schools.  As we have said many times, school safety challenges occur in every country our analysts have visited.

The CORE Foundation, the Ministry of Education and other sponsoring organizations did a superb job of planning for the event.  They also arranged for site visits to schools so I could become more familiar with how schools in Trinidad – Tobago operate to help me tailor the presentation so the information would be more practical for participants.  I found that there are some excellent practices and success stories in Trinidad – Tobago.  I was deeply impressed with the other presenters who all shared very pertinent and current strategies.  I also found the many professionals I had the opportunity to interact with were caring, competent and passionate advocates for the children.  I have already been asked to present again in Trinidad – Tobago, and feel honored and blessed to be asked to return.

Safe Havens International Executive Director, Mike Dorn presented at a national conference on school violence in Trinidad-Tobago

Safe Havens International Executive Director, Mike Dorn presented at a national conference on school violence in Trinidad-Tobago

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