On Target – School Safety

This article is part of On Target, a three-part series on guns and violence in America. Future articles will cover firearm legislation and the philosophical debate over the second amendment’s role in our culture.

Nothing hits us like violence targeted at children.

“Schools are a microcosm of the communities they serve,” said Linda Underwood, superintendent of Sevastopol School District. “Communities are a microcosm for their state, their nation, their world. Whatever’s going on outside of these walls, around us, it affects us.”

When mass shootings take place within the walls of a school, we’re all engaged. We can relate to school. We remember sitting on carpet squares and sounding out words, or watching our children get on the school bus.

Most of us don’t remember violence, at least beyond empty threats and playground brawls. The U.S. Secret Service found that students have no more than a 1 in 1 million chance of dying in school by homicide or suicide, according to the Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative. But sometimes, the numbers just don’t matter:

“The high-profile shootings that have occurred in schools over the past decade have resulted in increased fear among students, parents and educators. School shootings are a rare, but significant, component of the problem of school violence. Each school-based attack has had a tremendous and lasting effect on the school in which it occurred, the surrounding community and the nation as a whole.” – Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative.

That’s why Underwood and other local superintendents are constantly updating school crisis plans. Kids don’t learn if they don’t feel safe, so it’s important to have a plan and practice it, even if a shooting is unlikely.

“No one who has been attacked ever thought it was going to be their school,” Underwood said. “You never think that. You prepare, but you never really think it’s going to be your school.”

Each local school has a crisis plan with protocol for violence, medical emergencies, natural disasters and other scenarios. The plans are updated frequently, and often with the help of local law enforcement.

When a disaster happens in one school, administrators around the country get out their districts’ master crisis plans and update them to cover the most recent horror.

That’s what it takes, since it’s difficult to predict something like a school shooting. Administrators and law enforcement plan around events that have taken place elsewhere in case they’re ever in a similar position.

“We cover absolutely everything we know about and when something else comes up it gets rolled into that training and that planning,” Underwood said.

The first major event to spur school crisis plans – the watershed moment – happened on April 20, 1999 in Columbine, Colo., when two students killed 12 students and one teacher, and injured 21 more students before committing suicide.

“The world changed after Columbine for a number of reasons,” said Tim Raymond, superintendent of Washington Island School District. “That’s when we first began to see a very systematic and scientific breakdown to student safety and security in school districts.”

Columbine wasn’t the first attack on a school, but it was a turning point. The violence was student on student, and the media coverage was so thorough people across the country watched the events unfold from their living rooms.

Underwood, who graduated from Virginia Tech 25 years before a massacre occurred there in 2007, watched Columbine coverage from her office in a k-12 school in Northern Iowa.

“I don’t think it had ever occurred to any of us as we were dealing with students with issues or students with weapons that anyone would be so angry or so frustrated that they would just come into a school building and take it out on anyone that was within range,” Underwood said. “It was a wake-up call.”

Since Columbine, most schools lock all entrances except one in front of the main office and ask teachers to keep classroom doors shut and locked. Many have cameras set up in and around the school. Some even have metal detectors at the entrances.

It changed how law enforcement respond to attacks, too, according to Door County Sheriff Terry Vogel. Officers used to be trained to contain a violent situation and wait for backup. Now, they go straight to the incident even if they’re alone.

“We go directly to the sound of gunfire – that changed since the time of Columbine,” Vogel said.

It seems like the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 students and six adults, was another wake-up call. Almost immediately after the shots were fired, pundits made politicized calls to arm teachers or ban weapons altogether, but the event inspired real action as well. President Barack Obama indicated he will propose gun control legislation, including strengthening background checks for gun purchasers and banning assault weapons.

While the gun control debate rages outside, schools focus on safety and prevention instead of politics.

Gibraltar School District superintendent Tina Van Meer said there has to be a balance, even with safety. If precautions are taken too far, kids could find the ironclad environment threatening or scary.

“We really want to look at the needs here at Gibraltar,” Van Meer said. “I think every school has different and unique needs, and we as a team need to be looking at the safety here.”

Gibraltar has recently updated their policy for receiving deliveries at the school so deliverers have to sign in to the office before they can go around to the back and drop off supplies. Van Meer said the school is working on creating identification badges for employees, coaches and substitute teachers.

But requiring visitors to buzz into the building or basketball coaches to wear identification badges won’t guarantee safety.

“When you look at what happened in Connecticut, there’s no way to create a plan that would guarantee that something like that wouldn’t happen,” said Joe Stutting, District Administrator of Sturgeon Bay Schools. “You prepare plans for stuff like that to how you react to save as many lives as you could.”

Much of the preparation comes from taking care of students while they’re in school. The School Safe Initiative study found that most attackers indicate need for help, feel bullied or persecuted, and have difficulty coping with losses or failures. Opening communication between students and teachers and facilitating an environment of respect were important to avoiding attacks.

“It’s not just about academics – it’s about students’ social, emotional health as well,” Van Meer said.

It goes back to the microcosm. Schools and their students are asked to deal with society’s problems while facing decreasing resources and increasing regulations.

“With the economic challenges that our nation has faced, we see the ripple effect of that in our students’ stress, in their mental health – everything from nutrition, to how much sleep they’re getting in a night, to what they worry about but don’t say,” Underwood said. “Our teachers, our staff, like all schools’ staff, really pay attention to what seems to be normal kid stuff and what may be indicators of needing more or different kinds of support… When things aren’t going well at home, things aren’t going to go well at school.”

For more:

10 Key Findings of the Safe School Initiative

The Safety Complex; an interview with Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International