School Safety Plan Basics
What are the components of a school safety plan?
A proper best practice of school safety has four distinct and written plan sections that every public and independent school in this country should have. First is a written prevention and mitigation plan. That's a distinct section that outlines the steps in place and strategies to keep bad incidents from happening, and to mitigate or minimize the negative impact of those events that cannot be prevented. Second is our preparedness plan, the most difficult part of the plan to develop. That's the written guidelines and other measures that are in place to prepare our staff and students to respond to some type of crisis. The third is the response plan, which is the plan that will help us manage the situations, the National Incident Management System for example, our ability to communicate under stress. It is the plan that allows people under extreme stress to implement the written preparedness plan. Finally we have the recovery plan, which has two components. First is the mental health recovery plan to help our people recover from the emotional trauma of a crisis, and our business continuity plan. That is the plan that we use to get the business of school back up and running if we have damage to facilities or systems. And all four of these plan phases are crucial to a safe school environment.
How can a school safety plan protect students?
How often should a school safety plan be evaluated and or updated?
At a bare minimum, school safety plans should be thoroughly evaluated at least once a year. We have checklists available free on our website to help do this. It can be done in as little as 20 to 30 minutes on many occasions. But a minimum of an annual review. When a major change occurs in an organization, if we have a large number of retirements for example, for a school system on summer, that's a really good time to go back and re-evaluate. If a new hazard is identified for our community that changes the risk, we definitely need to take that opportunity as well to update a plan.
How often should school staff receive crisis training?
Our approach has been to make crisis training and safety training a regular event. We believe in short, concise, and very focused safety activities rather than eight hours once a year session. There are simple ways to make this a natural part of the school. For example, we teach the use of table top paper and discussion exercises that can be done in just ten minutes, a couple of times a year, that will dramatically enhance the level of preparation in a school. Of course any time there is a major tragedy, even in another region of the country, if you have staff concern because they have seen media reports of an incident somewhere else that is an opportune time to remind staff that your organization does have things in place and review those. You will get more interest at that time and it will help to emotionally reassure people.
What is the most efficient way to develop a school safety plan?
The first thing that's important to understand is that plans have to be customized and tailored to your community. You can't just copy a plan or buy a plan from somewhere else. You have to sit down with your stakeholder, your police, your fire service, your emergency management, your local public health, and the other entities that will come to your aid during a crisis. Do a very thorough hazard and vulnerability assessment of each building and of your community, to make sure that your plans address your local risks, your local resources and the reality of your community. You can't just buy a plan, and you can't just copy a plan if you want a plan that will really work when lives are at stake.
Is a security consultant necessary when developing a school safety plan?
It depends. A properly credentialed and experienced school safety consultant can be an invaluable asset. We urge schools as a non-profit center to be very cautious when hiring consultants. Our feeling, and we have heard this expressed from officials from most, if not all, of the school safety centers in the country, is that about 75% to 80% of school safety consultants are not qualified to do the type of work that they do, at least in some cases. You will see law enforcement officers teaching mental health, and mental health professionals teaching law enforcement. We see people with falsified credentials, they say they are a doctor but they don't have a PhD. We see people working with mail order certifications. There is no regulation of this as an industry, and so we want to be sure that we are able to sort out, make sure that the consultants you choose, if you feel they're appropriate, are qualified in the area they're working in. For example, a consultant who was a law enforcement officer or a retired school superintendent is absolutely not qualified to help write crisis plans unless they've had formal experience and
How can our school partner with law enforcement?
There are many ways to partner with local law enforcement. That's an important thing for schools to do. School resource officer programs, school liaison officer programs, educational programs where officers come in and teach, mentoring programs. Just having officers able to use your school as workspace to come do their reports there. Coming to have lunch with the students. There are a variety of ways to integrate law enforcement effectively to schools to improve those schools, and to improve local law enforcement services. What we see are many creative ways. Some schools have officers living on campus after hours, they provide living space to reduce vandalism and burglary. There are a lot of creative ways. Letting the local police SWAT team practice with your building after hours, letting canine handlers come in and utilize your schools for canine training every once in awhile. Letting the police academy use the school to do training during the summer when the school's not in session. There are a lot of ways to improve that partnership in a way that's beneficial to our schools and to our law enforcement agencies.
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.
What are the most common mistakes made by school administrators in preparing safety plans?
What is 'hazards analysis' and how can it promote school safety?
Hazard and vulnerability analysis is one of the most important aspects of school safety, because that is how we match our safety efforts to our real risks. Time and time again we see organizations and schools included, where we overemphasize certain risks because we see them so much in the media. For example, school shootings are extraordinarily rare events. We definitely need to address school weapon assaults, but we very often see that other more prevalent threats are not being addressed. For example, we probably lose more kids to heart stoppage at school in a bad week than we lose to violence all year for our entire country for schools. We want to make sure that we tie our safety efforts, equipment, policies, and procedures to our real risks and we don't miss risks that are right in front of us. Sometimes that can be found through that type of assessment process.
