Safe Havens analysts have been rather busy keynoting dozens of school safety conferences around the nation. Our analysts have keynoted conferences on a variety of topics including school security conferences for architects, engineers, and school planners. This week was truly a great experience for me. I felt truly honored to present a keynote and two breakout sessions for the Kentucky Center for School Safety on Monday. They had a great turnout with a number of very relevant sessions and highly regarded speakers to provide Kentucky educators and law enforcement officers with current information on school security.

Yesterday, I keynoted for the first time at Texas Tech University in Lubbock where we had a very diverse group of architects, engineers, school administrators, and law enforcement officials. The conference was put together by Parkhill, Smith & Cooper, a large and highly respected firm of architects and engineers that build schools across the nation as well as in Europe, Asia and the Pacific Rim. 

This is the fourth conference focused on school security design issues I have keynoted this year and I have another keynote for the CEFPI conference the Monday after next in North Carolina. Discussing how to incorporate security and emergency preparedness strategies into 21st century design schools and other challenging but productive topics made for a great day.

I have been in a different city almost every day for the past seven days; the great people I have been privileged to meet make the constant travel more than worthwhile. I still have not had a single day off since Christmas day and it can be tough for all of our staff to keep up with our travel schedules. The amazing people you meet along the way make it all worthwhile. It is a constant inspiration to me to meet so many bright, dedicated and highly motivated advocates for school safety whether I am presenting in Florida, Connecticut, New York, Minnesota, Indiana, Kentucky, or Texas.

Safe Havens International has been selected to perform several dozen school security assessments impacting more than 400 hundred public, parochial and independent schools in more than two dozen states this year.  Our analysts have helped conduct school security assessments for more than 5,000 K-12 school facilities over the years and feel honored to be selected for this latest project in Farmington, New Mexico.  With requests coming in to help conduct school security assessments for schools across the nation as well as in the Middle East, our analysts are working seven days a week to assist school and public safety officials.

Our approach of evaluating school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness with a comprehensive approach affords a much broader depth than assessments focused solely on security technologies and policies.  The revenues raised by our for fee projects help us provide a wide variety of free school security, safety and emergency preparedness resources.  Safe Havens now has more than 30 free school safety training videos on our website along with a free e-book, free webinars, topical papers, checklists and other school security resources.

We consider it an honor every time we are selected for these types of projects.  The fact that Safe Havens has an award rate above 80% for bids we submit reaffirms the value that our dedicated personnel bring to these projects.  We look forward to conducting this school security assessment.

One thing we routinely see when we conduct school safety, security, climate, culture, and emergency preparedness assessments is school crisis plan content that has been copied unlawfully.  Unfortunately, it is rather common for people to copy school crisis plan content without verifying that they can do so.  In a typical situation, a staff member from one school or district asks permission to copy part of the crisis plan from another school organization and is given permission.  However, it is not uncommon for the content being passed on to be licensed or copyright protected intellectual property from a vendor.  An experienced school safety expert can often quickly track down the original source of plagiarized school crisis plan content. In some cases, people knowingly and intentionally claim to have created the content in the school crisis plan.  In either case, copying and utilizing someone else’s intellectual property without permission from the owner of the rights to that property can be a serious legal violation.  Individuals and their organization can be litigated and a complaint of plagiarism to a professional regulatory agency could result in sanctions up to and including revocation of teaching certifications etc.

The fact that intellectual property has been used unlawfully in school crisis plans can also garner some pretty negative media coverage and could become a significant issue during litigation in the wake of a school crisis event.