I had the pleasure to keynote a school safety conference in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania today.  More than 200 educators, public safety officials and other school safety advocates turned out for the event.  I have been truly blessed to have found great weather and awesome people for my school safety presentations and projects in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Montana, Minnesota, and New Jersey in recent weeks. 

I have also been fortunate to have the chance to interact with many other school safety experts who are practitioners, researchers and school safety consultants from across the country this fall and feel truly blessed.   At the same time, it has been challenging to meet all requests for school safety assistance.  I have only taken about two weeks off work counting holidays and weekends since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary school.  Most of our full-time staff have also had very few days off.  While we have chosen to serve and feel honored to do so, our dedicated school safety experts have their physical limits just like anyone else.

There is a significant interest in school safety right now and we are still getting an astounding number of requests for assistance from across the nation and abroad.  We have requests from Kenya, Thailand and Nigeria as well as a steady stream of requests for school safety expert services from across the nation.  We have added more than a dozen adjunct analysts to the Safe Havens team over the past year to meet the increased demand for school safety services.  However, we have still had to decline dozens of keynote requests, school security assessment projects and one massive national school safety consulting project.   We beg patience when it occasionally takes us a day or two to respond to requests for school safety assistance.  We work diligently to emphasize quality of service and this periodically results in some delays in responding.

I look forward to two student school safety presentations tomorrow morning, to the presentations and school safety assessment visits in the coming months and most of all, for the opportunity to interact with so many dedicated school safety experts from across the nation and abroad.

I was honored and truly blessed to be allowed to present a plenary session at the Seventh Annual Montana Crime Prevention Conference in Bozeman today.  I have been fortunate to present on school security at a number of professional conferences in Montana.  I have always found the folks in this beautiful state to be straightforward and down to earth.  Though a sparsely populated state with a relatively low violent crime rate, there are many positive school security and emergency practices in place in Montana such as the state’s robust school drill requirements.

We discussed pattern matching and recognition and I delivered my motivational presentations Weakfish – Bullying Through the Eyes of a Child and Dream Catchers – Succeeding and Surviving in the Helping Professions.

It was truly a pleasure and an honor to return to big sky country and interact with so many outstanding advocates for the children.