Practical School Security and
Emergency Planning E-Newsletter

Trends and Best Practices For Protecting K-12 Schools

Pat Lamb, Director of Security & Operations for Irving Independent School District in Texas, shares with our readers some recent security initiatives in his district.

"We want to positively engage any and all visitors to our schools (within or without the walls of the building), and we want to know who is milling about our students," Pat stressed.

One of the interesting components is what Pat describes as the "See what we can see" audits.  The district hired outside security consultants to walk through the schools to see if they could bypass security at the front desk.  If they get past, they walk throughout the school to see if teachers, SROs, district security, students, custodial staff, kitchen staff, or others will engage them or allow them to mill about without being challenged.

This proactive initiative highlights what Ken Trump and his colleagues have been strongly advising school leaders:  Test your own security and emergency preparedness before someone else tests it for you. It is much better for your district to have your plans, programs, practices, and people evaluated and tested than for persons with ill intentions, the media, and/or a lawsuit to test them for you.

Irving ISD's board also recently approved a plan to install over 1,200 digital cameras in all schools, implement a visitor management system that digitally registers visitors and identifies registered sexual offenders, and place 30 security officers in the district's secondary schools to assist with student supervision and to engage visitors.  The district also trains campus staff in emergency response situations, the latest training being focused on conducting lockdown drills at the most inconvenient times.

Thanks to Pat for his leadership and for his willingness to share with his peers!

Our last newsletter reminded readers that the April Columbine anniversary tends to bring about threats, plots, and rumors of violence in the weeks before the actual anniversary date.

Over the past week, we have tracked multiple school incidents across the nation where rumors have disrupted schools and have even resulted in decreased attendance due to fears of rumored violence. The issues of text messaging in particular, and cell phones in general, were credited with sometimes creating more anxiety and panic than any actual threats or incidents that may have triggered the rumors.

"We are now dealing with 'Generation Text' instead of 'Generation X'," said Ken Trump.  "The rumors typically become greater than the issue, problem, or incident itself.  Attendance can go down overnight and rumors can fly in minutes," he noted.

Ken's advice to school and safety officials includes:

1) Anticipate you will have an issue that catches fire like this at some time.  Identify ahead of time what mechanisms you will use to counter it. 

2) Have redundancy in communications:  Web site, direct communications to students and staff, mass parent notifications, letters to go home, etc.

3) Discuss some potential scenarios with your district and building administrators and crisis teams to evaluate what the threshold will be for going full speed on your response communications.  If you go full speed on every single rumor, you might need two full-time employees just to counter rumors in one average secondary school.  Try to get a feel for at what point a situation might rise to the level of being so disruptive or distractive that it warrants a full-fledged communications counter assault by school and police officials.

4) School and police officials should have unified communications so as to send consistent messages.  We train in our emergency preparedness programs for the use of joint information centers (JICs) in a major critical incident response. But even on lower scale incidents, it is important for school leaders to be sending a message consistent with that of public safety officials to their school-communities.

5) Have a formal crisis communications plan and professionally train your administrators and crisis team members on communicating effectively with media and parents.  Professional outside communications consultants, district communications staff (for those with such in-house resources), and related specialists can help develop and audit communications plans, and train staff.

"The key is to be prepared to fight fire with fire. Today's high-tech world and rapid communications must be countered by school officials who have a solid communications plan for managing rapidly escalating rumors around school safety issues," Trump said.

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