Prevention and Student Safety for K-12
Rick Shaw Founder, CEO, and CDO of Awareity
Abstract
This chapter delineates the difference between school security and school safety. The chapter refutes common misconceptions about school safety and encourages school administrators to adopt a proactive rather than reactive approach. The data provided show that reaction can be more costly than prevention.
Introduction
As a school leader, would you rather your students and staff react to a threat at your front door or prevent threats from getting to your front door?
Most (if not all) school and college administrators agree that prevention is the best and the right answer. The answer also reveals the difference between school security and student safety. School security involves reacting to threats at your front door while student safety involves preventing threats from getting to your front door.
All school administrators have a responsibility to create a safe learning environment for all students and staff, but student safety is not about how many alarms, cameras, and locks you have or how much money a school or college spends on security systems and security personnel.
Did you know security system solutions (alarms, cameras, locks, visitor management systems, panic buttons, mass notification systems, etc.) existed in every school and college that has experienced a tragic incident? Did you know a new security system was installed just before the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary?
Solutions
Security solutions are designed to record and/or alert people that risks and threats are present on your campus, at your front door and/or inside your building. For example, cameras record incidents that occur in a hallway, classroom or on campus and their primary purpose is recording “data” for post incident investigations in reaction to an incident. Most are not monitored in real-time due to costs and lack of resources. Other security solutions such as locks, safe rooms, and panic buttons serve as a last resort to deter threats.
Security solutions are not designed to proactively prevent student safety-related incidents such as bullying, cyber bullying, harassment, intimidation, abuse, suicide, drugs, alcohol, depression, targeted shooters, and other threats.
Since the Middle Ages and the era of castles and moats, humans have displayed a long-standing habit of reacting to risks and tragic incidents by adding even more reactive security solutions (rather than proactive prevention solutions). Evidence from hundreds and hundreds of incidents clearly reveals status quo (or “castle quo”) approaches have not prevented preventable incidents and tragedies:
• After the Columbine tragedy in 1999, school security experts and school officials focused on active shooter training, cameras, guards, emergency response plans, and gun control laws—all reacting to a threat at the front door.
• After the Virginia Tech tragedy in 2007, school security experts and school officials focused on mass notification systems, security systems/door locks and emergency/first responder plans—all reacting to a threat at the front door.
• After the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, school security experts and school officials focused on gun control laws, cameras, locks, visitor management systems, armed guards, active shooter training, and crisis response plans—all reacting to a threat at the front door.
The focus after each of the above tragedies and hundreds of others around the world has been to add more “reactive security” devices and more “reactive response” approaches.
The key to proactive prevention is equipping students, faculty, staff, threat assessment teams, and community resources with the right tools to do the right things and to get the right information to the right people, so preventable incidents and tragedies can be proactively prevented. The following misconceptions and questions reveal some common problems with reactive rather than proactive security concepts.
It Will Never Happen Here and We Don’t Have a Problem with Bullying, Cyber Bullying, Suicide, Violence, and Abuse…
School officials and school personnel must be open and honest and admit that no school or college is totally immune to bullying, cyber bullying, suicidal ideation, violence, and numerous other risks and threats.
Do You Agree That One Youth Suicide Is One Too Many?
Student safety must include proactively preventing suicides. You may be shocked by these statistics:
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) nearly 4,600 youth (ages 10-24) commit suicide each year.1
• The CDC also reports that, annually, “approximately 157,000 youths between the ages of 10 and 24 receive medical care for self-inflicted injuries at emergency departments across the United States.”2
• The CDC now considers bullying to be a public health problem.
• The CDC has stated that connectedness is a key strategy to preventing suicides.
Do Students, Faculty, Staff, Third Parties, and Community Members Know Information Your Threat Assessment Team Doesn’t Know?
Schools and colleges cannot prevent what they don’t know about, so school and college leaders must eliminate dangerous awareness gaps and disconnects in order to proactively create a safer learning environment for everyone.
A shocking example of students knowing information that a threat assessment team doesn’t know was identified in an ongoing student survey effort: 37% of students reported they were aware of a student or an individual that represented a threat to their school.3
The best way to understand what is really happening in your school is to survey your students. Student survey results can be shocking for some, but more importantly, student survey results validate that students are witnessing and experiencing numerous risks and threats in their schools and communities, allowing proactive prevention efforts to take place. Give your students a voice and a way to contribute.
Our School Has an Incident-Reporting System and/or Hotline Service so We Are Covered…
This myth has multiple false notions. Just because your school or college has an incident-reporting option, doesn’t mean all of your students, faculty, staff, parents, third parties, and community members:
• Know how to access and use your incident-reporting system
• Trust that your incident-reporting system is really anonymous (voice, text, and e-mails are not)
• Believe reporting incidents will make a difference or make things better
• Will actually report the incidents and concerning behaviors they observe/witness
Based on numerous surveys and studies, students, faculty, and staff observe and/or witness bullying, harassment, sexual abuse, violence, drugs, suicidal ideation, and other concerning behaviors quite often. In fact, over 85% of bullying is witnessed.4 Is your school’s threat assessment team aware of all of these incidents, the aggressors, the targets, and the at-risk individuals, and are they equipped to follow up accordingly?
Why Is Only 1 or 2 Out of Every 10 Incidents/Concerning Behaviors Reported?5 How Many Incident Reports Does Your Threat Assessment Team Receive per Day?
Is your incident-reporting system anonymous? Truly anonymous incident reporting must be web-based and must be configured properly. Schools and colleges can lose the trust of their students, faculty, staff, and community resources if they claim their incident-reporting system is anonymous, but in reality is not. Students (and even most adults) know that texting, e-mails, apps, and phone call approaches are not necessarily anonymous. Adding a third-party vendor as a middle-man does not make incident reporting anonymous. With a truly anonymous reporting solution, people will feel more confident they can report concerning behaviors they observe and be more willing to help others without becoming a target themselves.
Did You Know Nearly Every Post-event Report After a Lawsuit, Suicide, and Targeted Shooting Has Revealed That Multiple Incident Reports Existed?
For example, did you know the Virginia Tech Review Panel Report identified over 60 incident reports about the shooter? However, the incident reports were spread across departments, silos, and locations and not reported to a central secure prevention platform, thus Virginia Tech’s Threat Assessment Team was not able to connect all the right dots and prevent this tragic mass shooting.
If your school or college does not have a central secure prevention platform with the right tools to connect all the right dots across departments, silos, and locations…it will be nearly impossible to do so. Dangerous gaps and disconnects with traditional incident-reporting systems are very real and obvious. School officials must understand this and must replace conventional incident-reporting systems with central secure prevention platforms that equip every individual—and especially school safety teams (e.g., behavior intervention teams, threat assessment teams)—with the right tools, so proactive investigations, interventions, monitoring, prevention, and documentation actions can be taken and preventable incidents can actually be prevented.
We Have Armed Guards, SROs, and/or Our Police Department so We Are Covered…
Did you know Columbine had an armed security officer in the school at the time of the mass shooting? Did you know Virginia Tech had multiple armed campus police officers onsite and Fort Hood had armed soldiers all over the base? Yet, even with armed personnel ready to react, each organization still experienced a very expensive, embarrassing, and tragic incident. According to post-event reports, each tragedy was preventable because multiple people were aware of concerning behaviors and threatening comments!
Armed guards, SROs, and police are primarily a “security” solution for protecting and reacting during an incident at a school or college. The reactive security role of armed guards was a hot topic after the Sandy Hook tragedy in December 2012, when many experts suggested all schools should have an armed guard (SRO, school security officer [SSO], police officer, armed teachers, other) to provide protection. Does it make sense to put so much emphasis on a last resort option and hope a “good guy” with a gun can stop a “bad guy” with a gun?
Funding multiple SROs can be difficult for most schools and it is impossible for an SRO to be in multiple locations at once. Making SROs and police officers more proactive in preventing preventable incidents is not difficult and has been proven to work very well if they are equipped with the right prevention tools:
• What if parents and students could easily and anonymously share concerns with SROs in real-time?
• What if an SRO or police officer could be immediately notified when an incident report is made and could view all appropriate incident reports and actions that have been taken (across multiple locations)?
• What if an SRO, police officer, or a safety team could help assess and monitor at-risk students and identify escalation behaviors to prevent potential violence?
• What if an SRO, police officer, or threat assessment team could proactively connect at-risk individuals with mental health resources?
• What if an SRO or police officer, or threat assessment team could securely share information and connect the right dots and prevent incidents?
SROs and police must be “armed” in order to prevent preventable incidents, not just armed to react to risks that show up at your school or college. Arming these personnel with information will go a long way to preventing tragic incidents.
We Have Handbooks, Policies, and Procedures so We Are Prepared…
Every school and college experiencing an expensive, embarrassing, or tragic incident had student handbooks, employee handbooks, policies, procedures, and plans in place, but unfortunately they were not successful at preventing preventable incidents.
Policies, checklists, plans, guidelines, regulations, state laws, federal mandates, job descriptions, training, and many other procedural documents are essentially “recipes” describing how to “make the best cake ever.” You may believe your school or college has the best policies ever, but does every individual have updated and situational awareness based on their roles, accountability for their actions and the right tools to do their part in proactively preventing expensive, embarrassing and tragic incidents? Evidence from previous incidents and tragedies reveals that most individuals do not.
We Have an Antibullying Program so We Are Set…
If you do a web search for antibullying programs, you will find there are hundreds of antibullying programs. Some programs are expensive, some are not, some have a curriculum, some use books, some use CDs, some use checklists, some have people sign a pledge, and some provide posters.
With so many antibullying programs available, and with so much awareness on the news about bullying, why do nearly 85% of students still observe/witness bullying?
Lessons learned reveal that just having an antibullying program is like just having a recipe. To turn the recipe into results, individuals (students, teachers, staff, counselors, principals, threat assessment teams, safety team members, student affairs, SROs, police, nurses, bus drivers, coaches, community resources, and others) need updated situational awareness throughout the year so that every individual understands how prevention works and is held accountable for their roles and responsibilities. Every individual also needs the right tools so they can take action and do the right things to follow the antibullying program recipe and proactively prevent incidents and tragic consequences.
We Don’t Have Funding in Our Budget…
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We have all heard this wisdom and it can be applied to student safety, too.
Evidence from previous incidents and tragedies reveal that preventing is less expensive and more effective than reacting to incidents. For example, look at the high costs of the following tragic incidents, where the school was reacting rather than preventing:
• Virginia Tech: $48.2 M6
• Penn State: $171.0 M7
• Phoebe Prince: $225,000 settlement8
In response to the Sandy Hook tragedy, one of the most common reactions has been to add more security guards at schools. However, security-related costs are very expensive:
• $2,500: annual cost of insurance for each armed staff member
• $5,000: annual cost for arming and training one staff member
• $75,000: annual cost of a SRO in salary, benefits, training, and equipment
• $200: cost per student of placing one SRO at each school
At a time when every school and college is facing tighter budgets and government funding cuts, there has never been a better time to equip your school or college with more effective and less expensive prevention solutions. Evidence clearly reveals that prevention is far less expensive than reaction, which is great for schools and colleges and their tight budgets.
Yet, even with these expensive and embarrassing lessons learned, data shows that school and college administrators continue to approve and invest millions and millions of dollars in reactive security devices, while investing almost nothing in proactive prevention solutions.9
Can We Learn About Prevention from Smokey the Bear?
Smokey the Bear is all about preventing forest fires. He is famous for saying: “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Smokey the Bear understands that prevention does not mean we create a law to ban matches. He understands that prevention does not mean that we place armed firefighters at every tree in every forest. Smokey the Bear’s prevention strategy focuses on situational awareness, awareness of best practices, awareness of surroundings, accountability for consequences, and for individuals to speak up when they see someone in danger of starting a wildfire. Smokey the Bear understands that preventing wildfires is a better approach than just handing out emergency response plans to all campers on ways to take cover, hide, run, or fight the wildfire.
The first question in this chapter asked whether you would want your students and staff to react to a threat at your front door or prevent threats from getting to your front door. If your answer was that preventing is better than reacting, doesn’t it make sense to put more focus on proactive prevention tools and student safety efforts?