As anyone who follows our blogs knows, we have only been able to post six blogs since the February 14, 2108 tragedy at Marjorie-Stoneman Douglas High School. The massive and unprecedented surge of requests that has still not abated has resulted in our senior staff and many of our analysts becoming exhausted.
After 18 months of a seven-day a week schedule with average workdays of 12-18 hours and less than one day off a month, I decided that our leadership team could not continue working at this pace no matter how much it pains us to decline the opportunity to work to make schools safer. As one of my doctors at the Mayo Clinic explained it to me, I had two choices – I could “slow down” or I could “stop”. Though it has been truly painful, we were forced to begin declining more than 75% of all requests for new assessment projects, keynote presentations, consulting projects, and requests to serve as an expert witness starting about eight months ago. As a result, our leadership team is now getting at least a few days off each month.
While we have 62 dedicated analysts, Phuong Nguyen and I personally work on and provide oversight for all Safe Havens projects. While we plan to hire an exceptional executive-level project administrator to help us provide oversight to ease our heavy project load, we have also decided that we must scale back on our overall project load. This will allow us to focus more time, energy, and budget on developing a variety of school safety resources, tools, and train-the-trainer programs to increase the number of individuals who can share our concepts. We are currently evaluating a combination of live and distance learning concepts to make these programs more accessible.
We are still very heavily engaged in expert witness work for two major court cases, three massive school safety projects for large districts, some smaller assessment projects, and a number of conference keynotes. We have just been approved for a second contract extension to continue to assist the Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) as they continue to move forward in their significant upgrades in emergency preparedness and the implementation of the nation’s first Enterprise Risk Management Department as recommended in our Phase I report, rapidly approved by the School Board of Broward County, and in keeping with the Greater City Schools report recommending that the nation’s 70 largest public school systems adopt ERM in a 2016 report. Since we were unanimously selected by the School Board to conduct the nation’s first comprehensive school safety, security, climate, culture, and emergency preparedness in the wake of a mass casualty school shooting, the tragedy at MSD High, our work to assist the BCPS has been and will remain our single biggest priority. Having provided post-incident assistance for 19 of these types of tragedies in U.S., Canadian, and Mexican K12 schools, we have never seen a school district attempt to make such a major overhaul of their school safety efforts. We feel compelled to expend every ounce of energy we can whether for the services we have been contracted for or the hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro bono work our analysts have donated to the BCPS.
Conducting school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness assessments for more than 1,000 K12 schools in less than 18 months, while providing post-incident assistance for six active shooter and targeted school shootings and delivering more than 50 keynote presentations, writing a 600-page university textbook, and completing many other major projects has been incredibly tasking, even with more than 60 dedicated personnel. We love what we do but hope we never see such demand that we have to decline requests to assess a school district of more than 600 schools, dozens of mid-sized and large public school systems, and even more small public school systems, faith-based schools, independent schools, and charter schools. Our hearts hurt every time we have to advise a school or public safety official that they will have to wait a year or more before we can assist them. While an astounding number of school officials have agreed to wait 8-12 months, most do not have the ability to do so.
We plan to begin posting increasingly more regular blogs and starting in the summer, resume our work on new free guides on various school safety projects. We thank our loyal readers for their patience with us as we have had to delay adding new content to our website, releasing free guides and training videos and of course, releasing only six blogs in 24 months.
We appreciate how patient everyone has been with us and we plan to work hard to provide practical and useful blogs and free resources in short order.