School Shooting at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville Reminds us that Violence can happen at Public, Private, Parochial, Charter and Independent Schools

March 7, 2012 by

March has been a busy month for school safety incidents.  The shock of the tragic school shooting in Chardon, Ohio has caused a larger number of school violence incidents to be reported in the media than is normally the case. As with other many other tragic high profile multiple victim school shootings, many incidents that do not ordinarily garner attention in the national news are making headlines.  The positive side of this increased media coverage is that it does help to remind students, parents and parents that school safety is an important topic and that we should all do our part to avert tragedies.  All the same, these incidents are a bitter pill for those that have to endure them.

One report that received national coverage today was a terrible murder suicide at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Florida.  Early reports indicate that a Spanish teacher returned to the school with a semi-automatic rifle concealed in a guitar case and shot the school’s headmistress fatally before taking his own life after he was terminated this morning.  Over the years there have been a number of homicides, sexual assaults, hostage situations, deadly fires and other major crisis events in non-public schools around the nation.  The deadly shooting at an Amish School in Pennsylvania is one of the more well-known examples. 

These tragic situations serve more than adequate notice that non – public schools must also consider all four phases of school crisis planning as relevant and important to their successful operation.  Though it is truly sad that any educators must contend with these types of hazards, it is a reality in education across the globe. 

Our hearts go out to the members of the Episcopal High School family in their time of difficulty.

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Recent Tornado Strikes Provide Clear Evidence that Schools Should Focus Appropriately on Tornado Preparedness

March 4, 2012 by

The deadly near miss in Indiana this week should provide a clear warning to all school and public safety officials. Tornadoes are deadly and no school in a region where they can occur should ignore them. As a number of states where tornadoes occur regularly still do not require tornado drills, there are still many schools without a written tornado sheltering procedure where no tornado sheltering drill has been conducted in years.

We have seen this many times in our school hazard and vulnerability assessment projects. In the last two years, we have had client districts in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Virginia that not only did not have written tornado sheltering procedures in place, but where some central office administrators also objected to the recommendations for tornado drills to be added. They felt that these types of drills would take up too much class time in relation to the likelihood that a tornado would hit an occupied school. Tornado strikes occurred near schools in all three regions within a year.

While most schools in tornado prone regions do have written plans and conduct tornado drills, we have seen more than one instance where a school district has conducted an active shooter full – scale exercise while tornadoes, hazardous materials incidents and earthquakes have been virtually ignored as a threat. We have seen many more instances where school officials were using gymnasiums or other open span areas for tornado shelters. We recommend that school administrators ask area public safety officials to visit their buildings and evaluate the shelter areas they are using.

The advanced planning and decisions by administrators in Henrysville, Indiana clearly saved many young lives this week. The results would not have been the same had they not taken tornadoes seriously.

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Good School Safety, Security and Crisis Planning Ideas Abound

March 2, 2012 by

One of the cool things about what we do at Safe Havens is that we get to see so many different approaches to school safety, security and emergency preparedness as we visit schools across the United States and abroad. I have seen better school security practices in some schools I visited by donkey drawn cart and dugout canoe in the Mekong Delta than I have seen in some public and independent schools in of the most affluent parts of the country. That said, American schools generally do tend to do a better job in many areas of school safety in contrast to what we see in South Africa, the U.K., Canada, Bolivia and other places we have worked.

While schools in the U.K. typically have far better access control than the majority of their U.S. counterparts billions of dollars of federal funding, research, a steady stream of frightening media coverage following major incidents like Monday’s deadly school shooting in Chardon, Ohio have created a lot of positive change in American school safety. Sadly, we see dangerous situations in schools on a daily basis and still encounter the pervasive “it can’t happen here” mentality from school employees, students and parents”. While people in reality know deep down that a major school crisis event such as a tornado, fire, earthquake or active shooter situation could occur in their community, they often do not seem to face these types of risks as part of the reality of possibilities on a more practical day to day. This is why we so often see such massive changes in safety, security and emergency preparedness after an event occurs. Once injuries and deaths have actually occurred, people typically begin to assign a much greater priority to safety than they did prior to the incident, regardless of how much they had in place prior to the event.

One big advantage we have in the United States, Canada and in a number of other developed countries is the ability to see what our neighbors are doing to improve school safety to get ideas for improvement. It is extremely common for us to find an exceptional practice in one school system or non-public school that is not in use ten miles away at another school in a nearby town. With public school systems, it is extremely common to see a practice in place in one school that would benefit all schools in the district if it were implemented at those schools. This can even crop up in litigation when a school safety expert witness points out that a practice that is in place in several schools in the district would likely have averted a tragedy had it been also used in a school where an incident has not occurred.

Taking the time to visit other schools in the region can help spread new and effective ideas effectively. Many of these ideas are inexpensive, practical and effective school safety solutions.

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