National School Safety and Security Services

National School Boards Association School Safety 2005 Conference Daily

National School Boards Association

Reprinted from:
National School Boards Association
2007 Annual Convention
Conference Daily Newspaper
April 14, 2007

School Board News

Well-trained staff is first line of defense

4/14/07 -- The best way to prepare for school violence is to have a well-trained, highly-alert staff and students, develop a crisis plan, and practice how to deal with an emergency, advised the panelists in an Early Bird session on school security issues.

Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, and Curt Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, reviewed some of the high-profile incidents during the current school year.

In September, a 53-year-old gunman took six girls hostage in a Bailey, Colo., high school. He killed one student, then himself, as SWAT team members moved in. A few days later, a 32-year-old male shot 10 girls at an Amish school in rural Pennsylvania, killing five of them before he committed suicide.

And now school officials need to be increasingly aware of the potential for schools and school buses to be targets for terrorism.

The presenters cited a number of “red flags,” including the 2004 Beslan, Russia, school hostage incident and the reclassification of schools to a higher risk category in the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan last summer.

Most alarming, the FBI and Homeland Security Department issued an advisory a few weeks ago about foreign nationals linked to extremists who are getting licenses to drive school buses and who have purchased school buses.

“There are enough indicators to suggest that schools could very well be targeted by terrorists in the future, so complacency is not an option,” Lavarello said.

“Nobody inside the D.C. beltway wants to tackle the issue of schools and terrorism head-on because they are afraid of creating fear and panic among parents,” Trump added. “While we do not want to be alarmist, the fed’s posture of ‘downplay, deny, and deflect’ about schools and school buses as terrorist targets only feeds into the ‘ostrich syndrome’ effect that makes schools more vulnerable.”

According to Trump, most of the best practices in school safety have to do with training and education -- not dollars for high-tech security systems or highly paid consultants.

“The teacher who fails to challenge or report a stranger in the hallway or the student who opens a locked exterior school door for a stranger can inadvertently pose the biggest threat to the school’s security,” Trump said.

Relationships are a critical element in school safety strategies, he said. Teachers, administrators, and support staff must develop relationships with students so they can detect early warning signs of violence.

Trump and Lavarello recommend “tabletop exercises,” where school administrators and crisis team members, along with their public safety community partners, go through unfolding hypothetical scenarios and debriefings designed to see if what is on paper would work in a real emergency.

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