Ultimately, it’s up to parents to do everything they can to ensure their kids’ safety and security. We expect school officials to keep our children safe while they’re at school. Unfortunately some school officials don’t. Some are too lazy to ensure exterior doors are secure. Others suffer from a mental denial response that anything bad would ever happen at their school. Denial, of course, has no survival value.
Even if they mean well, not all school administrators have the expertise in safety and security to successfully implement best practices to keep kids safe from lunatics and criminals who might want to do the unthinkable. That’s where we as parents must step up and hold school officials accountable for the safety and security of our kids. A failure to do so can result in unimaginable horror.
Take Uvalde, Texas for instance. The officials there had a “no guns” policy prohibiting staff from having guns even though Texas law allows it. They also had a school police force, but those officers prioritized their own safety over the lives of children they were paid to protect.
Local law enforcement failed to follow widely accepted protocols for dealing with an active shooter. As a result, kids who didn’t have to die bled out while police waited 75 minutes to take out the killer.
The Washington Times reported on the cascading failures. We covered it here as well . . .
Police officials who responded to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the massacre.
The Justice Department report, the most comprehensive federal accounting of the maligned police response to the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School, catalogs a sweeping array of training, communication, leadership and technology problems that federal officials say contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than necessary. All the while, the report says, terrified students inside the classrooms called 911 and agonized parents begged officers to go in.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in active shooter situations and gone right after the shooter and stopped him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday at a news conference in Uvalde after Justice Department officials briefed family members on their findings. The Uvalde victims, he said, “deserved better.”
Even for a mass shooting that has already been the subject of intense scrutiny and in-depth examinations – an earlier report by Texas lawmakers, for instance, faulted law enforcement at every level with failing “to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety” – the nearly 600-page Justice Department report adds to the public understanding of how officers failed to stop an attack that killed 19 children and two staff members.
What can you do to make sure your kids’ or grandkids’ school takes security seriously and aggressively mitigates risks? First and foremost, visit the school yourself. If you as a layperson see obvious security failures like unlocked exterior doors during school hours, there may be other issues that you didn’t notice. If school officials aren’t aware of these deficiencies and are working to correct them, we as parents can help nudge them in the right direction.
No one likes to deal with heightened security…until after the wolf is at the door. Unlocking doors every time instead of propping them open takes effort. Teaching staff not to hold open a door for unknown people as a courtesy is also contrary to what those not sensitive to security considerations are used to doing. However, when it comes to saving lives, proactivity beats reactivity every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Don’t assume. Act.
Know and assess your kids’ school security protocols. Then open a dialogue with your local school administrators. Yeah, it’s not a conversation that they are used to having with adults.
The NRA’s School Shield program provides a great apolitical springboard for those discussions. Share their suggested questions in your initial email to administrators so they get an idea of what you’re looking for. Some school administrators will be uncomfortable with this unusual attempt to evaluate their security program.
However, holding administrators responsible and accountable for ensuring your kids’ safety is more important than your worries about making them a little uncomfortable ahead of your meeting with them.
Remember…the harder the target, the less likely a bad guy will successfully recreate another Parkland or Uvalde in your hometown.
Here are some questions the School Shield program has put together for parents to ask teachers and administrators to make sure they don’t have their heads in the sand when it comes to students’ safety . . .
1. Has our school ever had a vulnerability assessment done?
2. Does our school work with local law enforcement and emergency responders in crisis planning and training?
3. When was our emergency operations/crisis management plan last reviewed?
4. What types of drills are conducted at our school and at what frequency?
5. Are all exterior doors of our school locked during instructional hours?
6. Are all visitors to our school required to check in with the main office?
7. Are students and staff trained on how to identify and report suspicious or concerning behaviors/comments?
8. Does our school have a behavioral threat assessment team?
9. If there is an emergency, how and when are parents/guardians notified?
10. Do we have designated security personnel assigned to our school? If so, are they armed/unarmed?
Here’s a guide you can download and print out with all of these questions. Or you can email it to your school’s administrators.
The School Shield website also has a series of videos talking about the security analysis their experts provide from the perspective of teachers, parents, paramedics, etc., as well as ways to implement increased security without frightening parents.
Don’t assume your kid’s school is as safe as it could (or should) be. You can help them make sure they work to mitigate risks and maximize safety. The life you save might be your son’s or daughter’s.
“Some are too lazy to ensure exterior doors are secure. Others suffer from a mental denial response that anything bad would ever happen at their school. Denial, of course, has no survival value.”
You forgot something…. duty of care. Generally, teachers and staff ‘duty of care’ covers only two main things: Its not a duty to prevent all harm – and – take reasonable care to prevent harm where it is reasonably foreseeable. But the context for those is for things under control of the teacher or staff in the ordinary course of school activity to exercise reasonable care to protect students from injury. Outside of that ‘ordinary course of school activity’ is where schools fall flat. So this thing that the teachers union want you think about how they are ‘protecting’ the kids – you need to take it with a very big grain of salt because its, at best, subjective. But this ‘ordinary course of school activity’ is what the teachers union pushes.
You see this concept echoed frequently in an indirect manner when this subject comes up in relation to school shootings and allowing teachers to be armed – the complaint is “no, teachers should not be armed they are not cops.” and then the teachers unions get involved trying to turn it into the typical left wing anti-gun argument with all sorts of things they spout.
So this begs a few questions. One being is just what good does that ‘duty of care’ for a school do if the schools leave the kids defenseless simply because anti-gun?
Now granted, my wife and I do not have children of our own. But the rest of our family does and they spend time with us just about as equally as they do their own parents and we care for them like parents. So I have an idea of what it should be, that a real parent would be willing to die if necessary to protect their kids from a mentally ill killer, and would fight to the last breath to protect their kids. My wife and I would be willing to do the same for our nieces and nephews in our care, they are our kids too and we would do the same to protect any of our family from a mentally ill killer. So when we pack these kids up to send them off to school, we expect the school to be willing to exercise that same ‘duty of care’ if it came down to it. And here, they do – we have armed teachers and school staff and school resource officers as well, with some armed volunteers ready to respond.
They may not be cops, but are teachers and staff human? Its doesn’t take much to lock a door, but if you look at school shootings overall in the last 40 years you find that the majority of victims are injured/killed within 20 feet of a room that could be locked or was locked and they could not get in (i.e. Oakland Calif, Nashville), or in rooms that should have been secured but were not (i.e Uvalde), or in larger common areas (i.e library) where they were left to escape or hide the best they should (i.e. Columbine) – even in schools that had plans and drills in case it happened. The one common and constant thing in all school shootings in the last 40 years where there was injury or death of students or staff when the mentally ill killer showed up is that where these victims were injured or killed they were without any means of self-defense and the police saved exactly zero of those victims that were were injured or killed when they needed to be saved from that injury or death.
Have there been teachers and staff go beyond this ‘ordinary course of school activity’? Yes, there have been and they got very lucky, but luck or not some were saved – but the question is what were their chances? Some would say their chances were pretty good because they succeeded but success its self is not a measure of chance of success because in every case where a teacher or school staff were successful all it took was a moment of timing to be off or a wrong turn or even being too loud and their ‘success’ would have vanished. That’s the way it is when all you can do is react blindly and not controlling the situation, the tempo and the where and when is set by the mentally ill killer so what happens when that ‘success’ suddenly vanishes when you are face to face with the mentally ill killer?
Allow armed teachers and staff. In the worse case its better to have some chance than no chance at all, in the best case you succeeded and saved yourself or others from a mentally ill killer – and the only one there to save you or others is you when you come face to face with that mentally ill killer. The excuse of “The school has a lock down plan, and we do this and that and other….” falls flat, when there are injured or dead. So back to the question…. They may not be cops, but are teachers and staff human? Humans exercise a ‘duty of care’ for the young ones in their charge – its built into the human species to do that, to be willing to fight to the death to protect our young and that’s ‘duty of care’ also.
So the Teachers Union needs to take a step back and shut up about ‘duty of care’ and ‘”The school has a lock down plan, and we do this and that and other….” and stop their griping and BS opposing armed teachers and staff. If they are not willing to enable teachers and staff the armed ability to fight to protect our kids from a mentally ill killer then the teachers union is as mentally ill as that school shooter for they doomed those kids when they came face to face with that mentally ill shooter. Its not complicated like the teachers union wants to make it – its a normal natural human instinct to fight to protect ourselves or our young when the threat is imminent.
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Until people view the ability to implement weapons as part of the school’s defensive life safety codes (i.e. structural composition and fire safety), and implement legislation to to act upon it, little will change.
can ya get rid of the spammer posts by ‘jalalive’. Their ‘user name’ contains a link to a foreign scammer web site that redirects (when it works) to another web site trying to sell ‘legos’
I taught playground inspection for professional development at some of our local early childhood associations. Most of the participants wanted to know how to technically inspect manufactured playground structures with test guages. The startling first photo I splashed on the screen was a broken park bench with sharp wooden edges. Then, I showed a photo of busted and rusted gate latch. My point was that technical inspection is done at the tme of the equipment manufacture or installation. What we need teachers and adults to be vigilant for is maintenance. You don’t need test guages to report a broken park bench or the gate latch.
The Sandyhook murderer simply shot the “bulletproof” glass until it caved. Once compromised, he climbed though. It took a moment to accomplish and had anyone been armed it would have ended there. The Uvalde murderer jumped the fence and walked up to the building. It doesn’t do any good to armor the front door if the murderer can simply walk around to the side/back of the building or shoot through the barrier for several minutes before police arrive.
At my children’s elementary school, visitors had to be buzzed into the hallway… but… a physically capable person could have simply jumped over the low counter and entered… or walked around to the back of the building and entered.