I had a rather unpleasant phone call from a school security consultant last week.  As he has done on several occasions in the past, he attacked me and our non-profit center in a rude and rather unprofessional manner. I remained polite and tried to address his concerns but he became even more agitated and then abruptly hung up the phone after accusing me of being a coward after when I refused to agree with his conclusions relating to a particular school security incident.  This same consultant was involved with a series of very unethical actions as part of what can only be described as an internet smear campaign a few years back.  He apparently lost his school safety position with a public school district over his involvement in the scandal. 

While there are many highly qualified school security consultants, the field is by nature largely unregulated.  As a result, many different types of people engage in work in the field.  School security consultants vary widely in quality, credentials and in some cases, credibility.  While I have met many great school security consultants, there are definitely a few consultants who are more focused on money than in making schools safer.  One example of this can be seen in how the topic of school security assessments is often approached.  While some firms insist that only a school safety consultant can perform a school security assessment, there are a number of government and private sector school security experts who feel that there are instances where school officials and local public safety personnel can and should be trained to conduct their own school security assessments.  As few school districts can afford to have an outside firm conduct school security assessments on an annual basis, internalizing this capacity makes sense to many school safety practitioners.  

Having conducted school security assessments both as part of a government school safety center and on behalf of the world’s largest non-governmental school safety center, I have many of the same viewpoints on how they should be conducted now as I did when I performed them for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency – Office of the Governor (GEMA).  Members of the School Safety Project then and the analysts from Safe Havens International now think of school security assessments as an approach that should be performed on an annual basis rather than as a one-time project.  

This is one reason we encourage school districts that are having school security assessments performed by outside vendors to require the vendor to provide training to local public safety officials and schools staff to train them how to conduct their own school security assessments.  Safe Havens has now trained more than 2,000 school security consultants, school employees and public safety officials to conduct school security assessments.  We have also helped with state-wide school security assessment training programs in five states.  While some for profit school security consultants have become vocally upset by this practice, our role as a non-profit center is to make schools safer and this is one way for us to do so.    Though we have been criticized and harassed on numerous occasions by several school security consultants, Safe Havens will continue to bid our school security assessment projects at rates far below what for-profit firms charge.  Though we have upset some school security consultants by the practice, we will also continue to train local teams in school security assessment processes.  To us, school safety is about kids, not revenue generation.

Our analysts have been working on school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness projects almost every week since the tragic school shooting at Newtown Elementary School.  As Safe Havens assists more schools with school security audits than any organization in the world we are aware of, our analysts have learned a great deal about what is and is not effective when conducting school security audits. 

Since our analysts first began conducting school security audits many years ago, we have been increasingly impressed with the need to look beyond the basic school security approaches that are the focus of most school security audits.  We have worked many school shootings and other school security incidents in schools where limited scope school security audits were conducted and simple and easy to implement opportunities to prevent tragedies were missed.  Often, these opportunities have been overlooked due to an over-emphasis on security hardware and technologies without also addressing the human behaviors of students and staff that often have a role to play that is at least if not more important to these school security approaches.

Of the more than 5,000 public, private, independent, parochial, charter and other schools our analysts have assisted in clients in assessing, most of the most important opportunities for improvement involve a combination of security and emergency preparedness hardware combined with improvements in practices of students and staff that we observe when conducting school security audits.

For many months now, there has been much speculation about what did and did not take place at during the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut.  Some of this speculation has been harmful in various ways.  For example, parents of children at the school and educators in the region have expressed to me that inaccurate information about the incident has been painful to them.  I have heard this many times before with past school shooting events.  Inaccurate conjecture and speculation about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has also had a noticeable and adverse impact on how prepared educators are to respond to school crisis events.  Our analysts have noticed a distinct increase in missed action steps and of even greater concern, dangerous action steps during our controlled school crisis simulations since the school shooting in Newtown.

Hopefully, the Connecticut State Police report will provide us with a clearer picture of what did and did not take place at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  At the same time, we must understand that there will almost assuredly be some unanswered questions even after the report is released.   Having worked seven active shooter incidents in K12 schools, my experience has been that even when you review thousands of pages of police reports, depositions and other documents, there will be some things about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that we simple will not be able to determine with certainty.

As with past active shooter incidents, many people will focus on a few aspects of the incident while some of the most critical lessons we can learn will be largely ignored.  This has definitely been my experience with several mass casualty school shootings I have worked including the Thurston High School Shooting in Oregon, the school shooting in Tabor, Canada and the Red Lake Reservation school shooting in Minnesota.  Some of the most important lessons learned from each of these tragic school shootings have still not been addressed in many school systems and non public schools in the United States and Canada.

Much of the public discourse following this tragic event has been relatively unproductive creating fear, anger and disagreement over what might have worked while we often ignore many things that are proven to work to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from school shootings.   Our hope is that we can learn some key lessons from the Connecticut State Police report on the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School so the tragic loss of lives in Newtown will not have been totally in vain.