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.

People who have seen me keynote conferences over the past five to six years are familiar that I often run through a series of mass casualty school attacks involving edged weapons.  I have blogged on this topic several times in recent years because we have noted a pattern for these types of attacks.  My officers worked two multiple victim edged weapons assaults committed by students during my ten-year tenure as a school district police chief in Bibb County, Georgia.  Having been attacked with edged weapons on a number of occasions and having been cut once with a box cutter, I have had a deep respect for what someone can do with a blade. 

One of our concerns about the intensive focus on active shooter incidents in schools in recent years has been that this often results in school and public safety officials failing to prepare for events like the attack that took place in a Pennsylvania high school. The majority of school crisis plans in this country have no relevant protocol for this type of attack or even the far more typical edged weapons assaults. 

This week’s tragic attack should be a stark warning to us all that focusing intently on active shooter incidents is not a balanced approach.  We have noted other attack patterns such as those involving fire as a weapon in school attacks that are still frequently overlooked in many school security approaches.  While it is not possible nor even perhaps logical to attempt to address every possible attack methodology, we should learn from past incidents over a long time span and with a global perspective.  As this week’s incident shows, international patterns can become a local issue very rapidly and with significant outcomes.  This week’s attack follows hundreds of serious injuries and deaths in K12 schools from incidents involving mass casualty edged weapons attacks in other countries.  We felt this was such a significant pattern that we discuss it in the introduction for our new book Staying Alive – How to Act Fast and Survive Deadly Encounters.  

When we started writing more than a year ago, we decided to include several references to mass casualty attacks involving edged weapons and fire. We continue to urge educators and their public safety partners to be sure they are using the all-hazards approach to school crisis planning.