The devastating tornado that left seven children dead in Moore, Oklahoma has resulted in extensive media coverage.  As with other mass casualty school crisis events, inaccurate and potentially dangerous information has been reported. 

For example, news reports have related that it is always dangerous to use hallways for tornado shelter areas.  Having worked with thousands of schools across the nation and with architects and engineers who design them, there are situations where following this advice could result in mass casualty loss of human life.  With the dramatically varying designs of schools across the United States, there are schools where some interior hallways are the best available shelter. 

I have had the good fortune to interact with many different people who are well versed on specialty areas in the school safety arena.  Steve Satterly has spent considerable time researching school safety topics including school tornado preparedness measures.  I have thus far never met anyone who knows more about the topic of school tornado preparedness than Steve.  After carefully reviewing the research on this Steve makes a convincing case that assuming that hallways are never suitable shelter areas could result in less safe areas being selected. As with school shooting incidents, making blanket conclusions based on any one tornado event can be a serious and potentially deadly mistake.

School safety is naturally more on the minds of parents, students and school officials since the deadly school shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school.  School officials across the nation have spending millions of dollars and making major changes in school safety measures.  Unfortunately, there are a host of increasingly popular school safety concepts that have not been validated as effective.  In some cases, schools are changing to approaches that we have some solid indications are likely to increase rather than decrease danger. 

For example, we are seeing some very troubling reactions when crisis simulations are run in schools where students and staff are taught to attack a gunman as a last resort.   With more than 3,000 one-on-one crisis simulations to date, we are seeing bizarre reactions such as an incident where a teacher and students prepared to attack a public safety officer in an Iowa school after they completed a training program of this type. As we outline in our paper on the topic, an 18 month research project revealed that a number of school employees have already been shot and killed needlessly attempting to disarm people with guns in K12 schools.

During school safety assessments of more than three dozen public, parochial and independent schools across the nation since the Sandy Hook tragedy, we have seen a startling increase in the number of staff who respond that they would attack people who are threatening to commit suicide with a gun or who would travel across the campus to attack a drunk brandishing a gun when these responses clearly increase danger.  We predict that school officials and public safety agencies will be successfully litigated when students and staff misapply these techniques under stress and attack people who are not active shooters causing injury and/or death. 

We urge school officials to resist the temptation to adopt school safety concepts that may sound good but have not been validated by testing.   Just as importantly, school officials should keep in mind that most serious injuries and deaths on K12 campuses are not related to school shootings.  In fact, school violence is not a leading cause of death for students or school employees in the United States.  Focusing too intently on active shooter incidents has and will likely again result in the deaths of students and staff. 

There are people saying that the school lockdown is a failed concept that is outdated and in dire need of replacement.  This argument has not been established as a fact.  This assertion is hotly contested by most leading experts in the field of school safety.  When pressed for examples of where lockdown has failed in schools, proponents of abandoning school lockdown usually cite four instances:

• The library at Columbine High School which was actually never locked during the attack.
• The Virginia Tech shooting where lockdown was not in place as a protocol, practiced by the faculty and most rooms did not even have locks.
• The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting where we do not even know the key facts of the case at this point and will not know them until the official report is released this summer.
• The Red Lake Reservation School Shooting which I worked as an expert witness finding no evidence of concept failure.

When evaluating school lockdown, we should be especially careful not to confuse application failure with concept failure.  For example, if an aggressor is able to attack victims in a room because there is no viable lockdown protocol, staff do not have a key to the room they are teaching in, lockdown drills have not been conducted, etc.  The cause can be and usually is from a failure to be able to apply the concept of school lockdown rather than a failure of the concept itself. 

We respectfully submit that most of the problems we have seen with school lockdown do not indicate that this is a faulty concept, but instead that there is much evidence that many school staff are not properly prepared to apply the concepts under the stress of actual incidents.