School Safety Strategies

School Safety: 5 things you can do now

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School Safety 5 things you can do now

Small changes really can add up to greater school safety. As we begin the new year and embark on the second semester of our academic year, I find myself thinking about what it really takes to create safer schools for our students and staff. Over the past two decades, increasing research has taught us a great deal about best practices in preparedness, response and intervention.

Here are 5 things you can do now to improve your school safety:

  • Take a critical look at your school’s emotional climate to determine whether you are truly providing a safe haven for children and teens. Consider implementing a school climate or safety survey for students, staff and parents, to pinpoint areas that need attention. An extra benefit of this survey is that the data it provides will be extremely valuable for any grant funding you seek.
  • Foster a sense of belonging in your school community. Celebrate differences and offer a diverse menu of activities, mentoring and connectedness programs, so everyone has a place to call home.
  • Train your staff to identify the signs of those who are struggling so they can support and refer those needing help.
  • Review your crisis response plan. Ideally, this should be done every year, and no less frequently than every 3 years. We learn more every day in this field – you’ll want to be sure your plan reflects current recommendations.
  • Add a new type of drill. If you haven’t done a reverse evacuation or a lockdown drill in awhile, schedule one today. Then, review the results with your staff so everyone can make adjustments if needed.

This year, I will continue to dedicate myself to working intensively with school districts so each of them can rest assured that they have done everything they can to make their schools a safer place. I limit the number of schools I work with so I can provide highly targeted services. I will have the capacity to add a few selected districts over the next few months.

If you have a school safety question or just want to know more about how I can help your district, simply contact me here.

Remembering Sandy Hook

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Remembering Sand Hook

We all remember those dark days of December, 2012 when innocent lives were lost due to an unthinkable act of violence. The 3-year anniversary of this tragedy has just passed, and our hearts go out to those who were intimately affected. Their lives have been forever changed.

Learning from the Sandy Hook tragedy

In this post, I’m going to focus on what I believe is the single most important take-away from the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy:  There is an established and effective practice that can help prevent future tragedies. The practice of violence threat assessment allows us to identify and attend to the warning signs before we get to the point of another school shooting. It is precisely the model used by the FBI and Secret Service to evaluate threats and warning signs.

In the days, weeks and months following a targeted act of violence, we start to peel back the layers and acknowledge the many signs and missed opportunities. When we notice, assess, and intervene in behaviors that seem “off” or match those we know are indicators of possible mental illness, lack of coping skills, violent ideology, suicide or violence, we are taking action to prevent violence from occurring.

By attending to the warning signs, communicating with others, gathering information that helps us form a complete picture, and implementing plans for both safety and intervention, we are making great strides toward preventing violence. To learn more about how violence threat assessment works, simply click here.

Parents: How to handle safety concerns about someone in your child’s school

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Parents: How to handle safety concerns in your child's school

Parents: do you know how to handle safety concerns about someone in your child’s school? Perhaps, it’s a classmate or one of your child’s friends. Maybe it’s someone your child has mentioned as a bully or a disruptive student in the school. What if your child expresses concerns about an adult who works or volunteers at the school?

Rest assured: there are some things you can do. Here are some tips that other parents have found to be helpful as they’ve navigated these troubled waters.

How to handle safety concerns about someone in your child’s school

  1. Trust your intuition. If you believe someone’s words or behavior warrant further investigation and possible action, report those concerns to an administrator at once. Intuition is not some mystical sense. It is our subconscious picking up peripheral clues while we are focused on other things.
  2. If you are concerned that violence could be imminent, contact law enforcement immediately. If it does not appear that violence is imminent but you have concerns about someone being on a pathway to violence, report your concerns to the school principal. You may have to move up the chain of command until someone takes action, which could require taking your concerns to the school resource officer, director of student services or superintendent. Understand, though, that much of what needs to be done by school staff to address the issue is behind-the-scenses, and cannot be shared with you.
  3. Document dates and content of any reports you make, and any responses or conversations you have with school personnel regarding your concerns.
  4. Show an interest in wanting to be part of the solution. Let the school staff with whom you speak know that you are not trying to create upheaval or place blame; you simply want to do all you can to be certain the school is safe for students, staff and families.
  5. Do your research. Read about the warning signs of violence from a reputable source such as this list, created through a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice. If you find it challenging to get school staff to understand the seriousness of your concerns or you start to doubt your own perceptions, pick up the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker for reinforcement. This book will help you decipher and understand your sense that something isn’t right, giving you the strength you need to press on.
  6. Don’t give up!  Stay with it until you are confident that your concerns are being adequately addressed. You will be rewarded with a sense of relief and your community will be safer because of your tenacity.

 

Youth Risk Prevention Specialists is Relocating!

Suzanne Sibole School Safety Strategies

Youth Risk Prevention Specialists Albuquerque

Youth Risk Prevention Specialists is relocating to Albuquerque, NM. I lived and worked in New Mexico a number of years ago and look forward to returning. Yet, it will not be easy to leave the amazing friends and colleagues who have enriched my life in Wisconsin.

Please know that I will continue working with schools nationwide to help them become safer havens for students, staff and parents.

For those of you in Wisconsin, I will be here until the end of October, so if you have been considering a staff safety training, violence threat assessment training, parent presentation or other Youth Risk Prevention Specialists service, now is the time! Of course, I would be happy to work with you in the future as well, but you can save on travel expenses by scheduling something in the next two months.

It has been a true pleasure to work with all of you and I look forward to our continued professional relationship.

Suzanne

Domestic Violence Goes to School

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Domestic violence goes to school

Have you considered the impact of domestic violence on your school?

While school violence is actually quite rare, we need to give some thought to all of the hazards that could affect our schools.

A school is a workplace, and domestic violence finds its way into the workplace on a regular basis. You may have an employee who is a victim of domestic violence and you might not know it. An especially high-risk time for a domestic abuse victim and those around him or her is before, during, and after either a restraining order has been issued or a relationship break-up has occurred. When it comes to mass shootings, domestic violence makes up the most common scenario in our country today.

Even if the person has moved out of the home to a safe-house or other location, the abuser knows that he or she will likely continue to report to work.

Minimizing the impact of domestic violence on your school

Encourage your staff members to use your Employee Assistance Program and seek out other sources of support. Be alert to signs of stress, agitation, worry, increased absences and deterioration of work performance. While an employee may not want to disclose much information and is likely to underestimate or downplay the seriousness of the situation, it’s important to let him/her know of your concern and availability.

If you have reason to believe the person is in danger, you will need to discuss your concerns with the employee and your threat assessment team or law enforcement. You must act to protect not only the victim of domestic violence, but others in your workplace as well.

If you have a situation that concerns you and you’d like to talk it through, consider a 1-to-1 Consultation or a Threat Assessment Consultation to do just that.

Top 5 Reasons for Background Checks in Schools

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background checks in schools

According to the Federal Government Accounting Office background checks are not required of school volunteers in 32 states; 12 states do not require background checks for contractors who have unsupervised contact with children, and 5 states have exemptions for some employee categories such as bus drivers and coaches.

Failure to conduct background checks on any adult who spends time in your building leaves you open to serious liability.

According to Patrick V. Fiel Sr., Campus Safety, there are 4 things that a background check can uncover:

  1. Cover-ups and lies on applications or resumes
  2. Employment eligibility/legal residency
  3. Sexual offender history
  4. Theft or other financial issues, especially important for individuals working with cash or fundraising
  5. I would like to add a 5th: It’s  important to be aware of other types of past criminal involvement such as fraud, disorderly conduct, assault, battery, and drug charges, even if they were dismissed.  

The knowledge gained by checking will give you the information you need to make much safer decisions.

Back to School Safety Made Simple

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back to school safety, school safety drills, tabletop exercises

Back to school safety: It feels like there are a million things to attend to and safety drills are probably not at the top of your list. Should they be?

Well….the beginning of the year is a time when school staff members often talk with students and parents about expectations, rules and policies. Everyone is fresh and ready to learn. Perhaps this is a good time to talk about drills.

Back to school safety. What next?

A good place to start is by walking through a variety of emergencies during tabletop exercises with key staff and emergency responders. Perhaps you did this over the summer. Next, you will want to conduct full-school drills. The type of drills should be rotated and include fire, chemical spill, evacuation, reverse evacuation, lockdown and any other type of drill pertinent to your specific location (flood, tornado, etc.).

The more you practice, the calmer and less fearful everyone will be. We can’t always control what happens, but we can control how we respond. Practicing drills conditions us to behave in a specific way even when our physiology and cognitive capacity are compromised.

In an emergency, stress causes several things to happen to us physiologically. Our fine motor skills deteriorate, followed by our complex motor skills and cognitive processing ability. We lose some of our problem-solving skills, and if our heart rate gets high enough, we may begin to behave irrationally.

Practicing drills exactly as we want to behave in a true emergency will help tremendously. Remember Pavlov’s dogs? A conditioned response is what we strive for in a fire drill. The alarm sounds and we drop what we’re doing and evacuate. We want to do the same for other emergencies, while still allowing for some decision-making on the part of staff if a situation deviates from what is expected. Your back to school safety efforts will go a long way toward keeping everyone safer. 

Principals’ Top 7 Goals for the New School Year

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Principals' top goals for the new school year

It’s nearly the end of July, with the start of another school year just a few weeks away. Along with the excitement of the new school year, administrators are very busy making preparations.

Here are principals’ top 7 goals for the new school year, as outlined in education journals:

  1. Motivating teachers
  2. Improving morale among staff
  3. Building a team atmosphere
  4. Creating excitement for learning
  5. Increasing parent involvement
  6. Creating a positive school climate
  7. Ensuring that the school is a safe place to learn

If you’re thinking about improving any aspect of your school’s safety, I would love to talk with you.

Here’s why

I’ve worked successfully with schools nationwide to help them to significantly improve their safety plans and I’ve provided students, staff and parents with highly effective safety awareness training. I’ve also established and trained violence threat assessment teams, with outstanding results.

I limit the number of schools I work with so I can provide individualized and highly targeted services to meet each district’s specific needs.

Because of this, there’s a limit to the number of schools I can work with. The reason I am writing to you, is that I have just 3 places 2 places available, starting in September. If you’ve been thinking about proactively improving safety in your school, I’m here to help you.

To find out more or secure 1 of the 2 remaining places, get in touch using the contact form here or call me at 505-313-1092. I’m happy to answer any questions you have. To avoid disappointment, get in touch as soon as possible.

 

How to Prevent School Violence

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These days, we are all focused on how to prevent school violence. First, it’s important to note that there are multiple types of school violence. This post focuses on preventing targeted school violence.

The motivation for a targeted school attack is related to many factors and often makes no sense to observers. With this type of violence, we are looking at a multitude of factors including marginalization from peer groups (or perception of marginalization), societal scripts for violence, fascination and experience with violence and weaponry, possible personality disorders and/or mental illness, recent or long-held grievances coupled with a lack of alternatives to solve them, a default to coping through violence, recent humiliation, and a number of other aspects.

Individuals responsible for school violence have been studied extensively. Most share a number of the characteristics noted above. Any approach to prevention and intervention must include a process for identifying troubled and troubling individuals and sharing information with others who have knowledge of the person.

Taking away the weapons helps, but it is not a cure. Mental health treatment can help avert a crisis, but mental illness is not the sole cause of violence and the majority of mentally ill persons are not violent. Sometimes individuals with a grievance are determined to exact revenge and will intentionally resist therapeutic efforts.

Many variables determine whether a rigid and hateful view of something in the world will be turned into action. Easy access to weapons, lack of mental health treatment options for many, violent video games, television and other media, loss of funding for prevention programs and overly strained social service systems all contribute to the problem.

You can be a part of the solution by applying these simple strategies:

  • Build relationships with staff and students
  • Identify troubled individuals and provide appropriate resources and monitoring for those who need them
  • Teach your students and staff to report concerns about someone’s words or behavior
  • Connect with students one by one and let them know that you take their concerns seriously and will follow up with appropriate action

Once they trust you to do that, word will spread and the student network will open up to you. This is vital. In 80% of prior school attacks someone knew about the plan before the attack. Be the person students want to tell, and you’ll be able to keep your school much safer.

Teaching students to break the code of silence

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Teaching students to break the code of silence

How do we going about teaching students to break the code of silence? Can we increase the likelihood that our students will speak up when they have concerns about someone’s behavior or have seen/heard something threatening?

There’s good news about teaching students to break the code of silence

It starts with building a climate of trust between the students and the adults working in the school. When kids feel supported and heard, they are more likely to report concerns to an adult who can then act on them.

Consider this: sometimes, we inadvertently train students that it is not safe or effective to tell an adult when something is wrong or when they are concerned about someone’s behavior. With good intentions and the desire to help our students become self-sufficient and capable of navigating relationships, we instruct them to work it out on their own. Perhaps, we remind them to practice the skills they’ve learned through a prevention curriculum like Steps to Respect or Second Step. Or, we believe their conflict is minor and that they will be best served by learning to ignore it.

Unfortunately, when we don’t listen and act on concerns, students learn not to tell us, and more importantly, not to trust us. When we later struggle to motivate students to break the code of silence in middle or high school, we may find it difficult to undo the learning that took place years earlier when referring to their concerns as tattling or pushing kids to work things out on their own.

The most effective way to combat this is to train your staff to listen and follow through on all student concerns, starting with pre-K and continuing through high school. This doesn’t always necessitate action; sometimes just listening and brainstorming solutions with a child are all that’s needed.

A 2008 bystander study commissioned by the U. S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education (Pollack, W. S., Modzeleski, W. & Rooney, G.), revealed additional reasons students did not report concerns. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

This post first appeared here, on LinkedIn. You can connect with me on LinkedIn by clicking here.