The Safety Complex

Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, is an expert on school safety. For him, it’s not all about intruders and guns.

“We see something just as horrible as what happened in Connecticut, and all of a sudden we focus all of our specific resources on one type of event,” Dorn said.

When we focus on events like shootings where many children are killed at once, Dorn said we overlook the issues that take students one at a time from many school districts. Instead of spending millions of dollars on advanced video camera systems schools should focus on student supervision.

“Any kind of threat to the safety of children in a school can be reduced by supervision, and for the cost of one security camera you can train everybody in the school on how to do it,” Dorn said.

We lose more students to car accidents, allergic reactions, choking and lightening strikes than by violence, Dorn said.

“We want to be careful because it’s so easy to focus on what’s most visible to us, then we’re quietly losing children in larger numbers,” Dorn said.

Safe Havens International works with schools around the country to find ways to make them safer by prioritizing what they need to work on. Sometimes it’s planning for a natural disaster, sometimes it’s putting up bullet-proof glass, sometimes it’s training teachers. It’s not always about guns.

Debating gun control legislation is important, Dorn said, but shouldn’t take focus away from school safety and supervision. America’s “gun culture” certainly plays a role in school shootings in this country, but can’t be blamed totally. Attacks on children happen around the world regardless of school safety precautions or countries’ gun laws.

“We don’t make anybody happy on the gun control issue,” Dorn said. “People that want to arm teachers, we don’t make them happy, people who want to ban guns and so forth, we don’t make them happy.”

For more, read On Target — School Safety and 10 Key Findings of the School Safe Initiative