How can our school identify potential threats?
Well, the first thing that we need to do is understand just that. Schools have to assess by a variety of means what the real risks are. We have to do surveys of staff, students, and parents on an annual basis to gauge what their concerns are and what they are seeing. Until we've done this, we really don't know how much bullying is going on in school. We really don't have any idea how many weapons, for example, are coming in to our school until we survey. We need to look at reported incidence. How many cases of bullying, theft, have been reported in our school in the last year. We need to look at the community's hazard and vulnerability assessment, which has been done for us by local emergency management, to find out about the chemical transport on a rail line two miles from our school. We have to conduct a tactical site survey of every school facility and support building at least once a year. Where we bring a multi-disciplinary team in and we look at the physical place for hazards, risks and opportunities to enhance the learning environment. So, we have a variety of measures of assessment tools we have on our website. A number of assessment tools that we can use to make sure that we are in line with what our actual risks are. We should do this before making major expenditures, buying security equipment or major policy changes to make sure we are efficient with available resource.
