School Safety, Part I: Planning and Prevention

by Dr. J. Howard Johnston
University of South Florida

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(A photo from our 2006 Summer Leadership Institute.)

   
  Random acts of school violence grab headlines across the nation and fuel public interest in school safety and violence prevention. For principals, though, school safety isn’t just about violence; it encompasses all of the threats and conditions that might harm the students under their supervision. Moreover, it remains at the top of their leadership agenda all the time, and the results of this attention are positive. Given the millions of students who attend America’s high schools for thousands of school hours ever year, high schools remain one of the safest places for adolescents to congregate. In fact, in many cases, schools themselves are far safer than the communities that surround them.

  Clearly, though, episodes of tragic violence or disaster remind us that principals must remain vigilant and well-prepared to prevent such occurrences in their own schools. Further, no community is entirely immune from these awful ordeals. Fortunately, there is a body of professional literature that helps principals plan and organize safety measures that create a climate of order and security for all of their students and staff. Ultimately, in an open society, it is not possible to eliminate all violence and other harmful events from every corner of our lives, but careful planning and school-wide awareness substantially reduces the risk of these events in our schools.

 The principal’s role in emergency planning and prevention is absolutely critical for success. In their excellent Pathways series, The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) has combed the literature in the field and distilled essential responsibilities for principals as follows (http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/drugfree/sa200.htm).

•Provide leadership in assessing, developing, and monitoring the safe-school plan.

•Establish a continuous system of school crime tracking, reporting, and feedback, and provide this information to concerned parties.

•Design a school environment that ensures safe traffic patterns within and to and from school.

•Adopt procedures for emergency evacuation and crisis management.

•Establish a school safety council or school planning team with representatives from school staff, students, parents, and community representatives. This council is responsible for providing advice and making decisions about critically important cases of violence and crime, evaluating the state of school safety, and proposing revisions to the school
discipline code and school safety plan as deemed necessary.

•Ensure that all people involved with the school are working in support of safe schools. This goal involves parental involvement, careful screening and selection of all staff members, in-service training on school crime for all staff, comprehensive violence-prevention approaches, intervention in bullying behavior as well as racial and sexual harassment, addressing of student discipline issues in a nonshaming but firm manner that does not incite violent behavior, and development of interagency partnerships directed at creating a safe school within a safe community.

•Provide leadership in developing extracurricular activities and recreation programs that provide positive alternatives to juvenile crime and violence, along with specific programs directed at eliminating gang influence in schools and preventing school drug trafficking.

•Provide leadership in developing a school discipline code of student behavior and conduct. Such a code requires the input of parents, students, teachers, youth-serving professionals, and community leaders.

     The list is long and the tasks are formidable. The most important feature of this list, however, is that school safety is a shared responsibility; it requires participation by students, school staff, the community and safety-related agencies in the community and state. NCREL goes on to outline the responsibilities of teachers, parents and students for creating safe schools as well.

Teachers

• Respond to students in a caring and nonshaming manner. They also provide consistent and firm guidelines and rules regarding student behavior.

•Consider the teaching and modeling of pro-social behavior to be as important as the teaching of academic subjects.

• Display diligent and impartial behavior when supervising students. They use a consistent and prompt manner to grant rewards for good behavior and sanctions for unacceptable behavior.

• Participate in the development of a school safety plan, discipline code, and racial and sexual harassment policy. They also play a responsible part in the implementation of such policies by promptly and consistently reporting incidents of misbehavior, crime, violence, and harassment.

Students

•Want--and are entitled to--a safe, orderly school environment in which to learn.

•Develop a sense of responsibility for contributing to the improvement of school order and safety. Members of all peer groups participate actively in the planning, implementation, and enforcement of discipline policy and programs.

Parents and Community

•Are familiar with the school safety plan and the school discipline code.

•Are responsible for monitoring the behavior of their sons and daughters.

•Are equal partners with administrators and teachers in the development of the school safety plan and discipline code. Their recommendations on policy and implementation are carefully considered.

Comprehensive Planning

    Among the most comprehensive of the crisis planning models is one advanced by the U.S. Department of Education as part of its safe school initiative (http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/emergencyplan/crisisplanning.pdf). This model focuses on prevention, preparedness, response and recovery from violent acts and other emergencies. A full description and manual for school leaders can be found on the program’s website.

Mitigation and Prevention

The goal of mitigation is to decrease the need for response as opposed to simply increasing response capability.

•Connect with community emergency responders to identify local hazards.

•Review the last safety audit to examine school buildings and grounds.

•Determine who is responsible for overseeing violence prevention strategies in your school.

•Encourage staff to provide input and feedback during the crisis planning process.

•Review incident data.

•Determine major problems in your school with regard to student crime and violence.

•Assess how the school addresses these problems.

•Conduct an assessment to determine how these problems—as well as others—may impact your vulnerability to certain crises.

Preparedness

Good planning will facilitate a rapid, coordinated, effective response when a crisis occurs.

•Determine what crisis plans exist in the district, school, and community.

•Identify all stakeholders involved in crisis planning.

•Develop procedures for communicating with staff, students, families, and the media.

•Establish procedures to account for students during a crisis.

•Gather information about the school facility, such as maps and the location of utility shutoffs.

•Identify the necessary equipment that needs to be assembled to assist staff in a crisis.

Response

A crisis is the time to follow the crisis plan and make use of your preparations.

•Determine if a crisis is occurring.

•Identify the type of crisis that is occurring and determine the appropriate response.

•Activate the incident management system.

•Ascertain whether an evacuation, reverse evacuation, lockdown, or shelter-in-place needs to be implemented.

•Maintain communication among all relevant staff at officially designated locations.

•Establish what information needs to be communicated to staff, students, families, and the community.

•Monitor how emergency first aid is being administered to the injured.

•Decide if more equipment and supplies are needed.

Recovery

During recovery, return to learning and restore the infrastructure as quickly as possible.

•Strive to return to learning as quickly as possible.

•Restore the physical plant, as well as the school community.

•Monitor how staff are assessing students for the emotional impact of the crisis.

•Identify what follow up interventions are available to students, staff, and first responders.

•Allocate appropriate time for recovery.

•Plan how anniversaries of events will be commemorated.

•Capture “lessons learned” and incorporate them into revisions and trainings.

Planning Guides and Resources

   The National School Safety Center, a partnership of the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, offer excellent guidance and resources for creating safe school environments. At the center of their agenda is making school safety a community-wide effort that involves everyone with a stake in the school.

   In their comprehensive planning document, NSSC says, “while most schools have existing safety programs, these programs often need conscientious, creative application to improve their effectiveness. Many of [their school safety suggestions] may be initiated and carried out by school-site principals or parents' groups working with local school administrators or by school district public relations directors, working cooperatively with school superintendents and other district administrators.”

     NSSC continues, “perhaps the most important strategy is to place school safety on the educational agenda. This includes developing a safe schools plan — an ongoing process that encompasses the development of district-wide crime prevention policies, in-service training, crisis preparation, interagency cooperation and student/parent participation. An appointed task force should develop and implement the plan with representatives from all elements of the school community — board members, employees, students, parents, law enforcers, government and business leaders, the media and local residents. Educators who take active roles and initiate positive programs — rather than just react when negative conditions arise — help create successful schools.” (http://www.schoolsafety.us/Working-Together-to-Create-Safe-Schools-p-19.html).

    The U.S. Department of Education advocates that schools develop comprehensive emergency plans, not just for violent events but for all of the crises that may affect student safety including natural disasters or severe weather, epidemics or biological contaminations, or acts of terrorism. Certainly, all of these are terrifying to contemplate, and care must be taken so that emergency planning is conducted in a calm and deliberate manner. A professional approach and air of calmness is essential so that students and the community are confident in the plans that ultimately emerge from the process.

     Fairfax County (Virginia) and Montgomery County (Maryland) have excellent emergency plans that are both comprehensive and full disseminated in the community. By making comprehensive safety and emergency planning a routine part of the school leadership process, these districts avoid the sensationalism and high drama that can raise student anxiety and community fears about the safety of their children. In fact, by addressing issues such as violence, terrorism, disease epidemics, and other horrifying possibilities in a professional, thoughtful manner, anxieties may be reduced and community confidence that the school has the best interests of students at heart actually enriched. Both of these plans can be viewed online:

•Fairfax County: http://www.fcps.edu/emergencyplan/
•Montgomery County: http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/info/emergency

     A number of agencies and professional groups have created guides and toolkits that provide the resources principals need for crisis planning in a single location. Two in particular, those from the National Education Association and the California Department of Education, are well-planned, comprehensive and easily accessible to principals. These can be obtained from the organizations’ websites:

• NEA: http://www.nea.org/schoolsafety/nearesources-schoolsafety.html
•CDE: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/ss/cp/documents/crisisrespbox.pdf

    Schools with fully-developed, thoughtful, comprehensive safety plans that have been created with input from students, the community and other safety agencies are more likely to prevent emergencies from occurring and recover faster from those that are unavoidable. Because a safe, orderly and secure environment is absolutely essential for any meaningful learning to occur in school, planning to assure school safety and a deliberate response to emergency situations is truly the most important job facing the high school principal. When schools are safe, anything is possible; when they aren’t, nothing else matters.

This article is the first in a series on school safety presented by www.princpalspartnership.com. Others will focus on crisis response and creating a climate and culture of safety in the school.

See our Feature Article Archives for past articles!