Since 9/11, public schools have changed immensely in reforming procedures and initiating crisis plans that include concern for terrorist events. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting further propelled school administrators and personnel to focus on active shooter scenarios.
College campuses continue to have inconsistent success rates for emergency notification systems. Institutions of learning, in their inherent need to be open places, pose significant vulnerabilities to terrorist activity. Private and public high schools with predictable bell schedules, online building blueprints, large gatherings of students, and inconsistently secured entrance points pose a continued high value soft target.
As an educator with more than 15 years of experience in five Virginia public school districts â having witnessed many gaps in those years â much remains to be done to protect young people.
Open doors to outside classrooms can give entry to an offender. It is up to faculty and staff to be perceptive and ask unknown or suspicious persons to identify themselves and question their purpose in the building (or on campus). Assistance may be required. Maintenance entrances, for instance, were to remain locked at all times. These doors were consistently unlocked all day until after school. Hundreds of students ate lunch near those doors every day. A terrorist or heavily-armed assailant could easily kill, maim, or injure hundreds of children. Incompetence and a lack of training lead to entrenched complacency.
Incidents similar to those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., are not far from reality in every school district, given bullying and the immense pressures on teens today. Security cameras can be very helpful collecting evidence after the fact, but a police officer cannot be dispatched quick enough when intruders gain access to school property in a matter of seconds. Many school districts know of these weaknesses by internal or external safety audits but do nothing about it.
Many school crisis plans include active shooter protocols as well as shelter-in-place options for community-wide disasters like the recent tornadoes. Most talk about how the district is prepared, conducting drills for natural disasters and proactive code signals for intruder and locked-down situations. School districts have a prescribed list of actions to be taken by faculty, staff, and administrators in the event of an emergency, but it is far from certain these actions would be carried out if an attack occurred with a lunch room full of children.
School resource officers would engage, but at what cost? Dealing with the immediate aftermath and the cascading crises that could occur often have not been practiced, taught, or planned for in detail. Should an event like this actually occur, many believe existing crisis plans and first responders would handle it. This is foolish. Not having a vetted response, continuity of operations, or recovery planning for a mass parent swarm, economic crisis, social media frenzy, and impact to the community, has massive consequences.
In addition, concepts of sheltering in place in central Virginia schools differ from northern Virginia schools as a bubble of complacency exists in metro Richmond. Schools in northern Virginia, 10 years ago, required faculty to have back-up clothes and do in-depth crisis planning and education for large chemical, biological, or radiological attacks. Complacency erodes competence, often weakening plans. It also opens districts and educational institutions to massive lawsuits, settlements, costs of safety and security upgrades, and reputational damage.
As an educator transitioning from education to emergency management, it became clear that schools have come a long way in planning for extreme events but still possess immense difficulty transcending entrenched organizational defense mechanisms. Increasing security, protective barriers, triggers, and resulting lockdowns or protocols remain torn with the freedom to educate and are in a state of limbo.
Teacherâs Role When Violence Occurs
Teachers are often the first line of signal detection by communicating the presence of a suspicious individual. Often it is difficult to assess who is a parent, substitute, school division official, or a new teacher. Over the years, improvements in identification badges, risk awareness, and improving security patrols has helped close these gaps, but the best crisis education for faculty is often weak or not a priority.
The first priority, beyond tipping off others, is to provide crisis leadership and emotional support for students in the classroom. Teachers are trained to a point but are told to leave the vast other duties to first responders and administrators. During an overwhelming event, I believe this poses an important critical weakness.
According to a 2009 National Institute of Justice Journal piece titled âPreventing Preparing for Critical Incidents in Schools,â emergency plans were not practiced on a regular or ongoing basis and is an issue nationwide. The active shooter scenario, with the wealth of training options out there, includes a recent YouTube video from Houston called âRun Hide Fight.: Surviving an Active Shooter Event.â This video gives organizations information to close gaps, but it remains an issue.
In open-campus schools the only thing often separating a teacher and a classroom full of children from the outside world is one single classroom door.
During my 15 years as a teacher, there was never any practice or drill of what a terrorist attack or extreme event would be like. Mandatory community emergency response, incident command system, and mental health/disaster psychology training remains a low priority.
The table for school district personnel is often empty when multi-jurisdictional emergency management entities, public health, and other key community stakeholders collaborate before and after an event occurs.
School officials sometimes work on evacuation and shelter planning but place a territorial wall to outside examination of safety audits, contingency event planning, or even simple advice.
Changing the Outlook, Plan and Recommendations
Modifying a school districtâs strategic plan would begin by enhancing signal detection and security at the ground level to meet the ever present threat of a crisis. First, teachers need to be trained in disaster or extreme event aid. A modified CERT training plan needs to be developed, implemented, and required to be taken by every school official in the county. Employees would be given the option of taking the program on off hours or attend school training as part of staff development. Modules on active shooter scenarios would be included along with team decision-making exercises to improve crisis reaction. Second, area police should brief district teachers and staff on school site surveys, jurisdictional collaborations, school resource officers, and practical training exercises. This would followed by forming an exercise design team, a seminar, and table top exercises. Third, a school-wide drill should occur before the school year involving staff in a terrorist attack or active shooter scenario.
Fourth, an outside consultant should conduct a vulnerability assessment and external audit of all schools and policies and compare the findings to internal safety audits. The key is to increase dialogue and shift top management culture away from its current stance regarding these types of possible crises. Serious effort needs to change the defense mechanisms of intellectualization and denial in school and top divisional leadership. With comparison audits it may be helpful after a thorough process to develop a publicized progress index or report on the issue of school safety on the districtâs Webpage on school safety.
Fifth, the organizational plan needs to collaborate with local emergency management. That includes tighter understanding of incident command systems, realistic scenarios (including domestic bombing), crisis communication with a shocked and grieving public, updated emergency support functions planning in mass care, logistics, public safety, long-term community recovery, and education at the ground level with staff, students, and faculty. Build teams that engage in solid risk assessment, management, and preventive solutions.
Finally, empower students with better education in responding to possible terrorist events and its aftermath with building a viable model of disaster preparedness engrained into school curriculum or a Teen CERT initiative. Plenty of models exist in King County in Washington, Seattle, Denver, Houston, and an innovative Teen CERT low budget program like Mid-America in Missouri. Find that dedicated teacher who is a CERT volunteer, train him/her, and start a Teen CERT effort by building partnerships with other local public departments if a school district or entity is unreceptive.
With the right collaborative partnering and leadership, one can change the next generation toward more resiliency and build momentum for improved contingency planning. Ultimately it has become a stubborn challenge for many to change the minds of school and division leadership toward an all-hazards approach linked to core capabilities with solid risk management principles. School boards need to be compelled by engaged citizens and students to begin substantive conversations about what measures are be needed to prevent and reduce such a violent occurrence.
Ben Nicely is a former high school social studies teacher and an aspiring emergency management professional. Nicely has a masterâs degree in emergency and disaster management from American Public University and a masterâs degree in education. He is an emergency management consultant/volunteer on program development and instructional delivery of a Teen CERT program and other preparedness and response functions for Henrico County Virginiaâs Office of Emergency Management.
