Education Blog

Inside a School Safety Drill

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:27:00 GMT

Since safety and security drills continue to spark news stories concerning both K-12 and higher education schools, it would be interesting to understand what happens when a drill takes place. Recently, Navajo Preparatory School (NPS), a college prep high school in New Mexico, conducted a safety drill (Source: THE Journal, March 8, 2010, Safety Drill! Critical Response in Action). Here’s what occurred.

- Disturbing note found: A student found a disturbing note with a picture of a gun and a message saying, “There is no tomorrow.” The student gave the note to a teacher who passed it along to the principal, which kicked the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) into action.
- Shelter-in-place: CIRT used the intercom system to “put the campus into shelter-in-place – whereby everybody stays put but activities otherwise go on as normal.”
- Report of possible gun in bag: Simultaneously, a “student reported a young person sitting just outside the school campus who possibly had a gun in his bag.”
- Lockdown: CIRT ordered a school lockdown and called 911. Teachers moved students into a safe area in the classroom away from windows and doors.
- Accounting of students: An accounting of all students and staff took place, and CIRT determined that all doors were secured, which effectively ended the drill.

Additionally, the student who reported the suspicious person who may have had a gun admitted that he made the story up, which often occurs during real incidents.

The school learned some important lessons from the drill, including communication issues with the radios, radio batteries dying out, and some new teachers were unsure about what to do with students for a shelter-in-place versus a lockdown.

Overall, NPS’s safety drill illustrates the importance of practicing. While some schools may find that they require innovative technology, such as video surveillance or access control, to make their schools safer, others, like NPS, would realize that they need more training in radio communications. Moreover, it’s obviously critical that schools then address the issues that arise from safety drills to ensure that the same mistakes aren’t made at future drills and, more importantly, during real incidents.

How often does your school district conduct safety drills?

Clery Act Changes Require Drills

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:16:00 GMT

Higher education institutions have done a good job of developing emergency plans to prepare effectively for security and safety incidents. This summer new amendments to the Jeanne Clery Act, “a federal law requiring colleges to release campus crime statistics and security policies to their current and prospective students and employees,” should help those colleges be prepared even better for emergencies (Source: Security Directory News, February 9, 2010, Changes to Clery Act impact emergency plans, require drills).

The Clery Act’s new amendments focus on three main changes.

1. Emergency notification – schools must include the procedures to notify the campus community during an emergency immediately in their official emergency plans. Schools must also have a plan summary disclosed in their annual security reports.
2. Security drill – schools will now be required to conduct a yearly security drill to assess and evaluate its emergency response and evacuation procedures.
3. Reporting of hate crimes – schools must report crimes that “manifest evidence that the victim was intentionally selected because of the victim’s actual or perceived race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or disability.”

Overall, anything that enables schools to practice their emergency plans more often to determine what works well and what areas should be fixed is a positive step forward. Colleges, as well as K-12 schools, owe it to their communities to prepare themselves in the event of an emergency. Throughout the year there are new employees, as well as new students, who require emergency response training because you never know who will be on duty when a safety or security incident occurs.

Does your emergency plan need to be refreshed? Are all of your employees trained on current procedures?

School Security Drills Help Improve Emergency Preparedness

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:47:00 GMT

Last December the New Jersey State Senate passed a bill requiring schools to conduct security drills. Conversely, earlier this month Colorado lawmakers voted down a bill that supported mandatory safety school drills (Source: 9News.com Denver, February 12, 2010, Lawmakers toss out bill requiring school safety drills). While normally this news would be shocking, especially given Colorado’s tragic history regarding the 1999 Columbine shootings, the bill failed mainly because of expert testimony explaining that most school districts already have safety drills in place.

Overall, schools shouldn’t need legislation to require regularly scheduled security drills, as it simply is common sense to hold drills. With this news Colorado schools have an opportunity to set an example for schools across the country by establishing a security drill schedule because it’s the right thing to do and not because it’s a legal requirement.

Ultimately, the goal for schools conducting security drills consistently is to improve emergency preparedness. Here are five tips for making the most of emergency drills:

- Add the element of surprise: Because the purpose of a drill is to verify preparedness, and because actual emergencies will never present themselves as imagined, every drill should incorporate an unexpected obstacle that participants must react to and overcome.
- Incorporate all individuals: Conducting drills at different times during the day and during different days of the week will more likely incorporate a broader group of participants, such as substitutes, part-time teachers and visiting parents.
- Use technology to enhance drills: By watching live video of the drill, administrators and security personnel can review reactions in real-time, noting where improvements can be made and capturing video that can later be used for training and review purposes.
- Coordinate with law enforcement and emergency responders: They may be able to provide instruction on better responses.
- Consider the unexpected: This is an opportunity to think about the real issues and obstacles that may present themselves in an emergency.

For more information about how you can improve emergency drills, please read: Do your emergency drills pass or fail?

How does your school district conduct emergency drills?

Broken Security = Poor Security

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:30:00 GMT

Does your school district have difficulty maintaining its security equipment? Are broken cameras not fixed for months? How fast do you repair broken panic alarms (Source: KTRK-TV Houston, February 16, 2010, What good is security equipment that doesn’t work?)?

Recently, the local ABC-affiliate in Houston, Texas, reported that several Houston Independent School District (HISD) schools had inoperable security systems. Certainly, any large (or small) district would expect to find broken security equipment from time to time, but it’s the amount of time that these systems remained broken that is newsworthy. For example, one high school had broken security cameras “for up to 147 days.” Another school reported that panic alarms did not work in several classrooms for many months. Ultimately, the HISD communications representative explained that the district has limited resources, but that it would make fixing these systems a higher priority.

Overall, this news report should spur HISD to address its security flaws and maintain the security equipment better in the future. Obviously, it would be much worse if a security incident occurred prior to fixing the equipment. Then there wouldn’t be just one article, but many exposing the district for poor security management. Going forward school districts should do two things to manage their security systems more effectively. First, when budgeting for a security solution, it’s helpful to save some of the funding for maintenance of the system. Some of these funds could go toward the purchase of software support and maintenance contracts that will allow them to fix problems and upgrade to new versions more efficiently. Additionally, they could use some of the saved funding to service equipment that breaks (and is no longer under warranty). Second, school districts should implement a project management system (this could be as easy as a spreadsheet or a packaged project management software application) to track their security solutions and manage the ongoing maintenance. By designating a project manager, possibly a facilities manager or IT employee to oversee the security system, it’s likely that the manager could assign the appropriate person to fix broken equipment in a timely manner.

How does your district maintain your security solutions? Could an article like this be written about your school district?

Explain School Security Program

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:58:00 GMT

Earlier this month a borough in Greencastle, PA, rejected a state grant to fund a school resource officer (SRO) position. The main reason for the rejection, however, was that the local school board did not like the idea of adding an SRO (Source: The Herald-Mail, February 1, 2010, Borough says no to school safety officer). Citing “peer-reviewed articles on the efficacy of resource officers,” the research showed that SROs did not “make a significant difference in the amount of criminal activity in America’s schools.”

Unfortunately, the choice to reject the additional SRO position is not what’s most disappointing about this story. What’s upsetting is that the school community is left not knowing the state of its school district’s security. The debate left the community polarized with many parents upset that there would be no new SRO. Additionally, last month’s student assault on a teacher was still fresh in many parents’ minds. The school board rejected the position, but did it explain how the school safety and security program in place would provide a safe learning environment?

Overall, school districts have a responsibility to work with administrators to provide the safest learning environment possible. It’s quite possible that this Pennsylvania district would be better served without adding an SRO, but the article doesn’t mention that. It’s likely that the school board neglected to explain the effectiveness of current security initiatives. Other than the peer-reviewed research articles, did the district conduct an assessment or a crime climate survey to determine the critical security issues? Perhaps, an explanation would mitigate the community polarization, assuring parents that the security program works and will be evaluated on an ongoing basis to ensure that students and staff are kept as safe as possible.

How does your district explain security changes to the community?

Take Incident Report Data in Context

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:22:00 GMT

Two weeks ago this blog highlighted the challenges schools have when reporting safety and security incidents. While that article dealt with a Maryland school district, it’s apparent that Pennsylvania schools grapple with the same issue (Source: readingeagle.com, February 1, 2010, School safety reports imperfect, Berks educators agree).

This article explains how a conservative school district may appear to have more incidents per student because it reports more incidents, but that it doesn’t mean that it’s more unsafe. In fact, it may be safer due to its focus on identifying issues and resolving them. People reviewing the reports should not jump to conclusions. Frank Vecchio, Reading’s acting superintendent, said it best, “You have to be careful with the data.”

Overall, the school administrators’ comments in the article about the issue of incident reporting data represent a pragmatic view that the data should be taken in context, helping to reveal trends rather than trying to compare schools to one another. While some educators would like to have a system that supports an incident reporting system with rigid definitions, that should not be the goal. Ultimately, incident reporting requires subjectivity on behalf of the people doing the reports. Certainly they could report incidents based on guidelines like they are doing now, but the goal should be safe learning environments, not a perfect reporting system. Additionally, schools across the state of Pennsylvania (and across the country) are all unique, since they have different students from distinct communities. Of course, many problems schools face are similar across the country, but they are often dealt with in different ways to mitigate and reduce the number of incidents. It’s imperative that school leaders recognize that their safety and security programs are tailored for the specific issues of each school district.

Does your district focus more on how you report incidents vs. developing innovative ways to reduce them?

The Perception (and Reality) of School Crime

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:35:00 GMT

For many schools across the country, drugs are a big problem. However, often illegal drugs are less prevalent than the improper use of prescription drugs. In light of this, the Benton Police Department in Arkansas plans to conduct Operation Medicine Cabinet on Saturday, February 6th. The program encourages parents to dispose of old medicine properly and rewards parents with gift cards that drop off medicine at the police department and other locations next Saturday (Source: TodaysTHV.com, January 20, 2010, Operation Medicine Cabinet to combat prescription drug abuse in Arkansas).

According to the article, many teenagers in this Arkansas community have abused prescription drugs that come from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and some have even sold the drugs in school to their classmates. Obviously, this community recognizes that it has a prescription drug problem, but what about other communities across the country? From a school perspective, how do School Resource Officers (SROs) determine the facts about their crime problems, so they can focus on addressing the correct problems? In addition to understanding the right drug problems their schools have, do they have the right insight into other crime-related issues?

For this reason, SROs need to use tools that let them understand perceptions. An anonymous crime survey distributed to parents, students and staff is a great way to do this. Here are some benefits of conducting a survey:

- Understand what’s really going on: an anonymous survey allows students to share information about incidents safely without revealing their identities
- Learn of problems in the community before they make it to school: crimes and trends in the community will likely spill into the school
- Measure success: over time an annual crime survey provides feedback to schools about the effectiveness of its security initiatives

For more information about how you can leverage crime climate surveys to help you sort out fact from fiction, please read: Using Anonymous Crime Surveys to Reconcile Perception and Reality in Schools.

Do you currently ask parents, students, and other school community members about their opinions on crime to determine if your perception equals the reality of the situation? Do you plan to conduct a crime climate survey in your school district?

The Art (or Science) of Reporting School Security Incidents

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Is the reporting of school safety and security incidents an art or a science (Source: WTOP.com, January 15, 2010, Montgomery County grapples with school safety report)? If it’s a science, then schools simply would note their security/safety incidents and let the report speak for itself. If there were 20 fights during the school year, then that’s how many would be in the report. If it’s an art, however, then of those same 20 fights, it’s possible only 10 would appear in the report.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is not the only district dealing with this issue, but it is the district covered in the highlighted article. With several groups weighing in on the latest School Safety and Security at a Glance report, including county officials, school security representatives, and Maryland State’s Attorney’s Office, it’s no wonder that there’s disagreement about what incidents should be reported.

For example, Acting Chief of School Performance Frank Stetson said the following about the distinctions that are made, “You can have a fighting incident between two kids, but that doesn’t necessarily rise to a serious incident report. However, if it’s a group of students, and somebody gets injured in that, that’s a serious incident report.” Conversely, “council member Roger Berliner said he would want any fight reported,” especially if his child was in a fight.

Additionally, another council member expressed that teachers and administrators often have challenges regarding incidents in the classroom. Teachers likely do not want to report issues out of fear that administrators will push back with the message that they can’t handle the students.

Overall, it’s time for all school officials to take responsibility for safety and security issues collectively and establish a clear process for how to report incidents and plan for how to reduce the number of future incidents. Most schools are still very safe places where learning happens every day, but each school has its own unique attributes that impact the school’s effectiveness in providing a safe learning environment. A minor fight in one principal’s eyes may be part of a larger bullying issue, so it should be reported as an incident (this is reporting as a science). Each report should be analyzed based on the school’s individual make-up (including its incident reporting history and how it has dealt with its prior security incidents), which allows schools to report all incidents without fear that someone may label the school “dangerous” based solely on the report. With this approach schools can plan and act accordingly for the long-term, rather than simply trying to address with knee-jerk fixes for the short-term.

How does your school district classify security/safety incidents for reporting purposes? Are you concerned people will stereotype your school negatively if you report too many incidents?

Don't Forget About Security

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:42:00 GMT

Thieves stole nine flat-screen televisions, television production equipment and an undisclosed amount of money from Johnson Middle School in Melbourne, Florida, on New Year’s Eve (Source: Florida Today, January 11, 2010, School slowly returns to normal). Additionally, they vandalized the school, breaking windows to access classrooms and destroying musical instruments such as cellos. Overall, the break-in “resulted in more than $30,000 in damaged and stolen school property.”

There are two main issues concerning this crime that warrant attention. First, the school did not have video surveillance. While video surveillance may not have deterred the perpetrators and prevented the incident, it likely would assist police in catching the thieves. Since most of the school’s students understandably were upset and concerned because of the break-in, capturing the vandals would help improve overall student morale and may lead to some type of restitution.

Second, it appears that the school did not enhance its security upon its purchase of expensive technology and equipment. Schools no longer have only blackboards, chalk and erasers. Many schools have advanced interactive white boards that amplify the teaching and learning process. When schools upgrade their technology it’s critical that they also upgrade their security practices. While budgeting for security technology, such as video surveillance, access control and intrusion alarms, is important, schools also can use free solutions to protect property by locking expensive equipment in rooms that are much harder to access for would-be thieves and vandals.

Overall, schools benefit if they conduct comprehensive security assessments each time they purchase new technology and/or new equipment, including musical instruments that are costly. A good security assessment helps schools take the new equipment into account, showing them that they need to increase their security programs to protect the new property.

Does your school budget for security increases when you buy new technology and equipment? How are you securing your expensive teaching tools?

Communicating the Value of Security Upgrades

bret.rachlin@wrensolutions.com — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:58:00 GMT

Schools in Lynn, Massachusetts, plan to upgrade their security programs with access control systems this year (Source: The Daily Item, December 27, 2009, Security upgrade coming for Lynn schools). Eighteen schools will benefit from the upgrade, which costs $75,000. With the new system, the school will issue access control cards to employees, allowing administrators to keep track of people entering and leaving buildings.

While the article simply highlights the basics of the new security upgrade and explains that the mayor-elect wants to bring back school resource officers, it’s the comments section that is most interesting. Obviously, many people who comment often hide behind obscure usernames, and it’s usually those most passionate that take the time to comment. Unfortunately, the majority of the 10 comments are negative about the security upgrade. Some blame parents for problems with students and others think that the security technology is a waste of money and an excuse for school employees who don’t do an adequate job of monitoring their campuses.

Even though those who commented may not represent the majority of the school community, it’s important that the school district address them on a consistent basis. School safety and security cannot be practiced in a vacuum. It takes the whole community to keep schools safe, as it’s often the community’s tax dollars (in addition to grants) that provide the funding for security initiatives. When schools implement technical solutions to complement the security work of administrators and officers, they should communicate to the community the effectiveness of the program. By explaining what’s working and the areas that need improvement, the community can work together more effectively to solve these problems. It’s likely that several community members who aren’t familiar with modern school security programs may have read these comments and agreed with them without knowing the whole story.

Of course, ongoing communication requires more work from overworked superintendents and principals, but if they can incorporate the students into the communication process, then the students can assist them in carrying this message of proactive security to the community. Outlets such as the school newspaper, as well as social media, can help schools explain the importance of adding technology to safety and security initiatives, which allows schools to provide safe learning environments.

How does your district deal with negative comments about your security program and the money you spend on it? Do you have a communications plan to explain your security initiatives to the community?