With ever tighter budgets and time pressure for effective staff development, custom school safety training videos can be the least expensive and one of the most effective ways to provide training for staff, students and parents relating to school safety, security and emergency preparedness. Safe Havens is well known in the field for producing the most frequently viewed, interesting and effective school safety videos in the world.

With training videos in use in more than 30 countries as well as by the FBI, United States Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Education, Safe Havens has more experience in this arena than any other organization.  The dozens of standard and custom videos we film, edit and produce have been utilized by the Israel Police, British Intelligence services and thousands of public, private, charter and independent schools because they are memorable and effective learning resources that convey practical and effective solutions in short time blocks.  This makes it easy for building administrators, department heads and supervisors to address the topics that are most relevant to their schools, students and personnel in a much more flexible manner than with traditional training programs and web courses.

Safe Havens is the only school safety firm in the United States that has extensive experience in all traditional training methodologies including training, keynoting, train the trainer, instructor trainer, podcasting, distance learning, webinars, video podcasting, web training, standard and custom video training. This experience along with an internationally experienced video crew with three film studios and an array of videography and editing equipment, allows us to meet client needs with solid content, a high degree of watchability and state of the art filming and editing techniques.

For more information about our video production crew, visit our info page.

School security and safety assessments help school officials identify potential vulnerabilities, as well as strengths relating to security and safety for students, staff and visitors. Safe Havens analysts have considerable experience in conducting security and safety assessments for public school systems, charter schools and independent schools.

We typically assess…

• Evaluation of the neighborhood
• Access points to the campus
• Perimeter access control for building(s)
• Visitor screening procedures
• Security camera systems
• Alarm systems
• Interior access control
• Management of space
• Student supervision
• School climate
• “Body language” of the building
• Body language of the staff and students
• Bullying abatement strategies
• Antiterrorism measures
• Opportunities to increase the use of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)
• How well the written policies, plans and procedures match actual practice.
• Effective documentation of security and safety procedures
• Opportunities to reduce civil liability
• Emotional security measures

School safety, security, climate, culture, and emergency preparedness assessments can be an excellent way to improve school safety efforts while also enhancing the ability of teachers to teach and students to learn.  Safe Havens has a solid reputation with our clients for focusing on no-cost and low-cost ways to improve safety, security and emergency preparedness while helping schools create more pleasant, professional and effective learning and work environments.

Our analysts have coordinated or assisted our clients in conducting school safety assessments for more than 6,000 school facilities and have trained more than 2,000 school and public safety personnel to conduct their own school safety assessments.  Safe Havens analysts have also developed state-wide school safety, security, climate, culture and/or emergency preparedness assessment approaches for the states of Georgia, Indiana, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Maine and Wisconsin.

As the leading international non-profit school safety center, we are focused on helping school officials develop sustainable safety, security and emergency preparedness strategies that work in the unique environment of K-12 schools. The extensive experience our analysts have working with school systems across the United States, our work experience in more than two dozen countries, as well as what we have learned authoring and co-authoring more than thirty books on school safety give us a broad perspective on current best practices in school safety. Our analysts have published more books, produced more training videos, authored more web courses and have work experience in more countries than all the consultants for any ten school safety consulting firms in the world combined.

Our analysts are very skilled in helping schools to integrate the advantages of today’s exceptional security and emergency preparedness technologies while also understanding that students and staff must be an integral part of making these technologies reliable and effective.  Our personnel understand how and when security cameras, metal detectors, access control and visitor management systems are appropriate but they also understand how student supervision, human connectivity, communications and decision making can be improved to enhance school safety, culture and climate.  Safe Havens regularly works to help schools improve learning processes by creating school cultures that embrace safety, security and emergency preparedness practices that produce results.

Our assessments utilize evidence-based approaches to how the human brain works under the pressure of life and death stress.  Save Havens was the first organization to utilize scripted and video crisis scenarios to evaluate individual as well as organizational crisis decision-making.   Even the most highly developed school client organizations have found ways to significantly improve human performance under the stress school crisis situations through the findings of our structured emergency preparedness interviews with representative samplings of school staff.

These school emergency preparedness assessments are one of the most effective ways to identify significant gaps in crisis planning before an incident reveals them with chronic plan failure. These gaps are commonly not revealed during traditional school drills, table top exercises, functional exercises and full-scale exercises due to the inherent lack of opportunity for independent decision making for these types of drills and exercises. Chronic plan failure has occurred in a number of school organizations after they have expended millions of dollars on preparedness only to have plans with simple gaps that should have been identified.

The results of our assessments are typically presented to the client organization through individual assessment reports for each assessed building as well as a master strategic report for the district. Both types of reports will include photos taken from the assessments for illustration of key findings when appropriate.

While the individual school reports provide assessment findings specific to each school, the master strategic report provides an overall picture of the safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness at the district level.  Our reports also include recommendations for improvement that need to be conducted at district level.

We can also present our findings in person instead of or in addition to written reports depending on the needs of the client.  We can also provide a companion video report with a concise and informative summary overview of the assessment findings for school superintendents, heads of school and cabinet or board members who may not have time to read a detailed fifty to one hundred page report.

School organizations can face challenges evaluating the quality of school safety consultants and firms.  As schools and school districts can and have been successfully litigated for failure to conduct due diligence when selecting consultants, it is important to take the time to properly vet firms to see if they have the credentials and experience to not only hold up as experts in a court of law but more importantly to deliver high quality and effective services to help make schools safer and more productive learning environments.

Formed in 2000, Safe Havens International (Safe Havens) is the world’s largest and leading non-profit school safety center. With 8 full-time and 12 part time and adjunct personnel along with additional volunteers and interns, we have a staffing and experience level that allows us to perform work of high quality and considerable depth. We have K-12 experience that is unmatched in the private sector. The work experience of our full-time analysts in Mexico, the U.K, Canada, Israel, South Africa, Vietnam, Bolivia, the Congo, Honduras and in almost every state in the nation will provide a perspective unlike that of any for-profit firm, particularly firms who do not specialize in work with K-12 schools. Over the past three years, Safe Havens has served as a crisis management advisor for more than eighty clients representing more than one hundred different school districts and systems, including independent, private and charter schools.

Safe Havens offers a level of expertise, real-world work experience and credentials of analysts that is unparalleled in the private sector.  Our analysts have worked in more countries, written more articles and books, authored more web courses and filmed, edited and produced more school safety training videos than all of the consultants currently working for any ten other firms in the world combined.

Our experienced analysts have unparalleled experience and expertise in the field of school safety consulting.  Our experience working in 46 states and two dozen countries and in authoring 27 topically related books along with our work with thousands of public, private, charter, parochial and independent schools affords our clients an unmatched depth of expertise in school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness.