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On June 13, 2022, at approximately 8:43 am, a man entered through the main doors of the Duncanville Fieldhouse, a sports complex in Duncanville, Texas that is used as a summer camp for children. On any given day, there can be as many as 150-250 students present.
Inside the building, the man was confronted by a staff member. A conversation ensued and the man became upset. He pulled out a pistol but it is unclear exactly what happened next. Some news agencies report that the staff member was armed and that the two fired at each other. Other agencies report that the man shot at the unarmed staff member and missed. Either way, adults helping at the summer camp heard a gunshot and sprang into action. A counselor near the violence quickly closed the classroom door. The man tried to open the door but it was locked. He fired one round through the door and then walked into the gym.
Police arrived two minutes later and immediately rushed into the gym. The officers confronted the man and shots were exchanged. The man was hit several times. He was given aid on the scene but died later at the hospital.
No one else was injured.
With this attack in mind, I’d like to highlight a few points.
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If you’d like to prepare and inspire your teachers, consider scheduling a Safe & Loved teacher professional development. We still have some dates available for the start of the 2022-2023 school year.
Presentations can be 3-8 hours long and fit perfectly into in-service training.
emailfor more details.
There are only two types of safety—mechanical and human (people).
Doors, cameras, gates, and locks are mechanical safety.
Your policies, procedures, and practices are people safety.
Mechanical is a hard asset. People are a soft asset.
Mechanical safety will stop an attacker from getting into your classroom.
People safety will make sure the door is closed and locked.
Mechanical safety will deter an event.
People safety will prevent the event.
Mechanical safety hinders unwanted movement.
People safety encourages positive interaction.
Mechanical safety creates a safer environment.
People safety creates a safer and better culture.
If you only focus on perfecting your mechanical safety, your safety will feel cold, hard, and unfriendly. It’s difficult to be inspired by a camera or a metal door. It’s still extremely valuable…just not warm or inspiring.
If you only focus on perfecting your people safety, your safety will be warm, engaging, and friendly but that alone won’t stop a threat from getting into your classrooms. Your classroom doors must provide excellent protection.
Most schools focus on mechanical. However, mechanical is only as good as your people safety. Afterall, what good is a great classroom door if the people using it never lock it or can’t quickly close it during a lockdown?
The secret to being safe is to have a robust blend of both types of safety.
As you prepare for next year, continue improving your mechanical safety. The greatest improvement you can make is to enhance your classroom doors (ADA handle, metal door frame, and small window with safety wire or tape).
Make this your mechanical safety priority!
Your people safety priority should be to inspire your staff to engage! Engage by blending in violence prevention techniques (safety layers and filters) into every positive student engagement. Engage by perfecting lockdowns to 7 seconds or quicker. Engage by making the most of your mechanical devices by locking every door handle.
Make engage your byword for next year as well as your people safety priority!
Last point—mechanical devices are vital but your people are priceless. People are by far your greatest safety asset. No mechanical device will ever outdo one vigilant, caring, prepared, and responsible person. People are the prize for making your school safe and your teachers, students, and staff members feel loved. Put your effort into your people! They deserve it, need it, and will amaze you at what they can do when inspired to see safety as something different, holistic, positive, and in harmony with the goals of education.
If you improve your people, I promise you’ll leap forward in safety!
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If you’d like to prepare and inspire your teachers, consider scheduling a Safe & Loved teacher professional development. We still have some dates available for the start of the 2022-2023 school year.
Presentations can be 3-8 hours long and fit perfectly into in-service training.
emailfor more details.
I’m getting this question often because a lot of parents and others are wanting their schools to install metal detectors. I know there is a lot to consider and I hope this helps you decide!
If you want to make your school safer you must have multiple safety layers and filters. A safety layer is something that an offender must pass through or overcome and a filter screens for unwanted or dangerous behaviors. The more layers and filters you have the safer your school. The fewer you have the more vulnerable you are.
Having said that…there is a tradeoff.
Metal detectors will require that you add or give up certain things.
If metal detectors were foolproof it would be easy to say yes to them but people can get around them. Like every other mechanical device they are helpful but not perfect.
I was in one school where a student threw a gun up to a waiting friend hanging out of a second story window to get around the metal detectors. In another school a student with a gun was let in by another student who opened an exterior door for him so he could avoid being screened. In one school attack, a student with a gun ran through the metal detector shooting the security guard and murdering him before running into the building and murdering 6 more people.
Last point—if you have severe safety issues, multiple guns found in the building, or repeated acts of extreme violence then you may need metal detectors. However, if this isn’t your school then most likely you don’t need them. Instead, put your effort into people focused violence prevention techniques that multiply your safety layers and filters through positive engagements and interactions with students. There’s no cost to it, no trade off, teachers love it, and you get a safer, happier, and more successful school.
The greatest safety asset you have is your people—focus on them!
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If you think people are the prize for making your school safer then you’ll love Safe & Loved. We have a 2-day course, soon to be released leader course, as well as a 3-8 hour professional development for teachers and staff members.
The professional development is a burst of focused energy to start of your new school year. Schedule Don to present Safe & Loved to your teachers for your in-service training at the start of the 2022-2023 school year. Reserve your day as soon as possible. Everyone pretty much does the same few weeks for in-service so there’s not a lot of slots available!
emailfor more details.
We tend to take a great lesson learned and go too far with it. For example, not asking close ended questions. It’s become a hard and fast rule like never jiggling the coins in your pocket if you’re giving a speech. Don’t do it. It’s bad.
I get it.
Close ended questions don’t promote communication, rapport, or developing relationships. However, if you’re trying to figure out if a student is a threat or dangerous (student safety assessment) then close ended questions are not only helpful, but absolutely necessary!
Close ended questions help you to determine a fact and facts are invaluable.
“Do you have a gun?”
This is a close ended question in search of a fact. Do you or do you not have a gun? It’s a yes or no question that demands a yes or no answer!
Open ended questions help you to gain insight. Use them in conjunction with close ended questions.
Let’s put it all together.
You’re interviewing a student because he made threat. You want to know if he has a gun so you ask him both close and open ended questions.
“Do you have a gun?” (close ended)
“No.”
“Are there guns in the house?” (close ended)
“No.”
“How would you get a gun if you wanted a gun?” (open ended)
“I don’t know. My grandfather has guns. Maybe from him.”
The close ended questions reveal facts—the student doesn’t have a gun and there are not guns in the house. The open ended question gave us insight into the student. He can get a gun from grandpa.
I know what you’re thinking…IF the student was telling the truth.
That’s a fair and smart response. If you’re doing a student safety assessment you must always be skeptical! That doesn’t mean cold hearted or unwilling to believe…just skeptical. Verify everything to not only gain facts and understanding but also to gauge the student’s veracity.
If you follow up with the parents and they tell you that there are guns in the house…then you know the student didn’t tell the truth and therefore the risk just went up because you can’t trust the student!
The more truthful a student is the lower the risk. The less truthful the student is the higher the risk.
Either way, close ended questions are a tremendous and necessary good. Do them to gain or verify facts. Use open ended questions to gain insights.
Call or text me if you need anything! I’m happy to help!
P.S.
If you want to enhance your student safety assessment skills, consider attending or hosting Assess & Progress – Threats & Dangerous Student.
Hosting is easy…just provide a training space and help advertise via established networks and we’ll do the rest. In return, we give you 3 free seats to the training!
Just email us and we'll set it up!
A few days ago (June 9,2022), a man tried to enter Walnut Park Elementary School in Gadsden, Alabama. He tried at least two doors but couldn’t get in. Inside were approximately 34 students participating in a literacy summer camp. The school went to a lockdown and called police. The SRO responded immediately and found the man trying to make forcible entry into a marked police car near the school. When confronted, a fight ensued and the man attempted to wrestle away the officer’s gun. The officer called for assistance. Another officer arrived and the man was shot and pronounced dead at the scene. The SRO was treated for minor injuries and released.
There is no word if the man had a gun or what his intentions were with the school. There are a lot of things that are unknown. I’d like to focus on what is known.
Someone tried to enter the school and was stopped because the doors were locked.
Keeping your doors locked is called exterior access control and it’s one of the 3 things you must do to keep your school safe. You must 1) supervise your space and the people in the space, 2) control who can enter and leave your space (access control), and 3) you must clearly define your boundaries and in doing so help to send a very clear message of ownership. Ownership tells potential offenders that you care about what happens here, you won’t allow any unwanted behavior, and you’re not an easy target.
There is also interior access control. That’s locking your inside doors like classrooms.
A locked door is a layer of safety. The more layers you have the safer your school. A layer is something that an offender must contend with or overcome. All layers are not the same. Your staff wearing a badge is a layer of safety but it’s nothing like a locked door. A locked exterior door or a locked classroom door is one of your best layers and here we see its true value. A person was stopped from entering the school. We don’t know yet what he wanted, his intentions, or why he was trying to get in. We don’t even know if his purpose was nefarious. We just know he was stopped by locked doors.
The threat that is closest to you is the greatest threat. Locked doors provide you with space (an object) and distance from potential danger. I know it seems simple and sometimes a pain in the neck to lock doors, especially with young children, but the reward far outweighs the hassle.
A man was stopped from entering a school with 34 children because the doors were locked.
For a school attack to take place three elements must be present at the same time. If any one of these elements are not present, violence will not occur. If all three of these elements are present simultaneously the crime, violence, or attack will happen.
Those three elements are 1) Desire, 2) Ability, and 3) Opportunity.
Desire:
How badly the person wants to do it?
Ability:
Does the person have the skill set?
Opportunity:
Does the person have the chance or opportunity to do it?
Of the three, which one do you think is the hardest to influence or eliminate? Which one is the easiest?
By far, desire is the hardest to remove because it means getting inside a person’s head and making them no longer wish for or desire something. That’s incredibly difficult, time consuming, and often complicated.
The easiest to remove is opportunity because that’s totally up to you. It’s the quickest and usually the most effective element to remove because you’re eliminating it yourself.
A couple of examples of how it all works together…
As you can see, reducing or removing opportunity is the easiest and often the most effective because we have total control over it and to remove it often requires small things like locking a door. As you consider your next steps to make your school safer, always start first with removing opportunity.
It doesn’t mean that you will or should ignore the other two elements. Working on one also impacts the other two.
If you remove opportunity, the person will have to delay in order to obtain a higher skill set (ability). This delay may help to diminish their desire since they can’t do it or don’t believe they will get away with it.
Either way, work first on removing opportunity. Do the little things. Lock doors, perfect your lockdowns, engage with your students and these efforts will reward you with big victories.
It’s clear that the national debate about how to end and prevent school attacks will not be sorted out any time soon (if ever). I worry that in our drive for long term solutions that we’re ignoring the immediate and personal needs of teachers, students, and parents. After all, any solution that takes longer than a day is too long for those who needed it yesterday.
In this article, I want to share something immediate that every teacher, student, and parent can use to be safer today. This isn’t theory but careful observation and years of study. Not only study of school attackers but more importantly of survivors. We’ve discovered that those who survive a school attack do the same three things.
So, what does this mean to you, how does it work, and how do you apply it?
Last point—schools have 2 natural benefits—size and strength.
On average, school attackers gain access into 6 classrooms or fewer. That’s because the size of the building makes it impossible to attack every classroom. We forget just how big our schools are and how impossible it is to run to every classroom before action is taken to stop the threat. If we act fast and transition even quicker into a lockdown (less than 7 seconds) then we will make it even harder to get into any classrooms.
The other natural benefit of our schools is our classroom doors and frames which have been strengthened to resist fire. This has been a tremendous help by also making it extremely difficult to break into classrooms. It is not an understatement to say that it has saved an untold number of lives. However, none of it helps if we don’t lock our doors!
Please lock your classroom doors!
Act fast, get space & distance, do whatever you must to survive…and lock your classroom doors!
Test everything. Keep what is good. Do no harm.
When it comes to school safety, that should be our motto. Unfortunately, the question of arming or not arming teachers has spiraled away from this success oriented concept and instead has turned into an ugly brawl. For too many it’s become an issue of either you agree with me and that makes you a good person or you don’t agree with me which makes you a bad person. This type of discourse will never make our schools safer. All that truly matters is whether arming or not arming teachers is a good idea or a bad idea.
Here's where it starts and must end.
With that in mind, here are my pros and cons to help you decide whether you think it’s a good or bad idea for your school.
PROS
CONS
If you’re a parent, teacher, principal, or superintendent, I hope this was beneficial. I’m available if you’d like to discuss any of the points, need help with policies, or just would like some additional clarification. I’m here and happy to help!
I would like to end this post by reminding you of a few things.
We’re never going to arm all teachers. The national discourse is making it sound like every classroom will and must have an armed teacher. That will never happen and neither should it. Whether you decide to arm a few select volunteers is no one’s decision but yours—you and your parents.
If you’re wrestling with whether this is a good idea for your school, try not to be too hard on yourself. Arming teachers is no longer a theory. It’s already happening and some teachers have been doing it since 2018. You just need to decide if you want to join them by allowing a few volunteers to be armed. National pressure is making it sound as if this is the only thing that will prevent school attacks. It’s not. There have been many school attacks where there was an armed, expertly trained and equipped police officer in the building, and the school was still attacked. There was an SRO at Columbine and the school was still attacked.
Last point, a safety layer is a human, mechanical, or procedural feature that a potential attacker must contend with. A safety filter is a feature or procedure to scan for dangerous behaviors. The more safety filters and layers you have the safer your school will be. The less you have the more vulnerable you are to violence.
Without a doubt, arming a few select volunteers has benefits and drawbacks. Should you choose this path, you will be adding one more safety layer. It shouldn’t and can’t be the only layer…just one more.
90% of school attackers walk in through an unlocked exterior door. Please lock every door! And if you’re a teacher, always close and lock your classroom when you’re not using it. School attackers use empty unlocked classrooms to stage and prepare to attack the school. Deny them this advantage!
If you must open a door for arrival or dismissal, open only what is absolutely necessary. Every door that is opened, keep the handle locked and flood those entry/exit points with adults. Make sure they know how to identify and respond to potential threats.
Because 75% of all attacks occur during morning arrival, every single adult must be 100% engaged during morning arrival. For most schools, morning arrival lasts about 30 minutes or less. Everyone can and must ‘turn’ it on for those brief minutes each morning when the students are streaming in and give it your all!
If you’re a teacher, stand in the hall and greet the students. If you’re a principal, be outside in the bus or parent drop of zones. If you’re a staff member post yourself where you can see the furthest and help the most. No one is in a meeting, no one is sitting, no one is alone in a room, no one isn’t giving it their all for those short, but critical minutes during morning arrival.
If you do this you will change your entire day as well as school culture!
As far as making it into classrooms, school attackers can only gain entrance into approximately 6 or fewer classrooms. That’s because our lockdowns are getting faster and we’re getting better. Believe in your procedures because they work but do everything that you can to perfect your lockdown. Perfect your lockdown! The more perfect the lockdown the fewer classrooms the attacker will be able to enter!
The person attacking the school is probably a current or previous student. Which means that most likely we know them and they know us. We know their name, we’ve probably had lunch with them, talked to them, attended sporting events with them, and shared the same space with them. This is a scary and yet encouraging thought because it means that right now we have an opportunity, if we take it, to influence 70% of future school attackers to choose a different path other than violence but only if we’re willing to act.
With that in mind, here’s my last point. Good intentions do not prevent violence, change lives, or create great schools. It’s important because it orients you towards the good…but it takes acting on those good intentions to make the necessary difference. It takes engagement. Not perfect engagement but consistent, energetic, and positive engagement with students especially since 75% of all school attackers give off public indicators of danger. If you’re not fully engaged with your students you may miss these or you may not be there for the student who has seen, heard, or felt something and wants to tell an adult but can’t find one.
Engagement is everything. It’s that simple. If you do it, you’ll have a safer school. If you don’t do it, you’ll have a less safe school. There is nothing more important than engaging so commit to making your engagements more frequent, positive, and energetic.
The 7 Second Lockdown will help you speed up your lockdowns by helping the hero of the story—the teachers—be more successful. It doesn’t use fear to help the teachers go faster but a series of progression drills. It also encourages the teacher to play a more active role by self-evaluating their current skill set and success.
If I were a principal or superintendent, I’d review these materials, decide if I like the premise, and then I’d let my teachers and parents know that we’re implementing new procedures and drills that will speed up our response during a lockdown from 38 seconds to 7 seconds! My hope would be to not only make my school(s) safer but also to reduce their fear and anxiety by giving them something very concrete and helpful that they can focus on. Give them a very real and reassuring… “We’re always trying to make it better. We’re going to make it better. Here’s how we’re going to do.”
Here's the link to the webpage where you can learn more about the program.
If you've attended one of my trainings or I've presented to your teachers, the program is yours to use. Email or call and I'll send you the link for the materials.
If I haven't had the privilege of getting to know you or your school, please call (540-577-7200) and together we'll make sure that The 7 Second Lockdown is a good fit for you. There is a MAJOR change (improvement) in how to conduct lockdown drills and if you 1) don’t agree with it or 2) are not fully prepared to explain why it’s so important that we must make this change…you may cause more harm than good.
The 7 Second Lockdown program is very common sense but it will require people to put aside long standing and established practices in order to make big improvements.
Anxiety is understandably very high right now and as more information continues to be shared about the attack in Uvalde, I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse. Not only was the attack horrific, but some of the actions and/or lack of actions are hurting parents and teachers’ confidence in established procedures. I think it’s best in these circumstances to be understanding, open, and very proactive.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer some helpful resources.
Zoom calls/onsite assistance…
If you’re struggling to figure out next steps or you just want some help in clarifying or focusing your efforts, I’m willing to help any way that I can. I can come onsite or I’d be happy to set up some zoom calls. Here are some of the ways I think I can help.
School board. In the last year, I’ve witnessed a slew of school board meetings and they have not gone very well. If your school board is trying to develop a plan for school safety, I’d be happy to help them one-on-one to better understand the needs and nuances of school safety, the threat we’re truly facing, as well as give them concrete steps and goals that will help them to move forward in a positive direction.
Leadership meetings. I’d be happy to help problem solve issues, formulate responses, and focus procedures at a leadership level. This can include school safety teams, district policy teams, or local law enforcement units and leadership. Anyone making decisions or trying to improve safety.
Just to talk…This is a tough time for everyone. I’d be happy to just talk with teachers, staff members, parents, or other critical leaders. This can be individually or grouped together. I’ve been in several extreme events and these informal but open discussions are absolutely invaluable for helping people to feel better and move forward. They’ve changed my life…for the better.
Zoom calls are free. If I come onsite I have to charge a fee.
If you want to utilize any of these resources, just let me know and we can coordinate the time but I’m willing to help in any way that I can!