The May 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas that left 10 people dead and 13 others wounded has once again shined a spotlight on the threats posed by active shooters to our nation’s K-12 schools. Coming a little more than three months following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., security experts say the Santa Fe shooting reinforces the fact that there is no panacea for this mindless school violence.
While many parents, students, teachers, administrators and lawmakers continue to primarily focus on hot-button issues, such as gun control and mental health, schools, by and large, remain woefully underprepared with respect to active shooter mitigation and training. In fact, according to Paul Timm, VP of Facility Engineering Associates and author of the book, "School Security: How to Build and Strengthen a School Safety Program," people are increasingly being “forced to accept” the idea that it takes a truly collaborative effort to better secure schools against these threats.
“I say forced to accept because everybody wants to find something or someone who can fix everything and it’s just not that simple,” Timm says.
While many people immediately focus their attention on gun control in the immediate aftermath of any mass shooting, Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, president of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based security consulting firm Risk and Security, LLC, and a member of the recently formed Palm Beach County Association of Chiefs of Police Public-Private Partnership on School Safety and Security, says that it’s simply the wrong place to start a conversation on improving school security.
“Gun control is such a polarizing issue and when people start with that issue they get bogged down in controversy immediately which doesn’t help anybody,” she says.
Instead, Ramsey-Hamilton says the focus should be on what security controls schools have in place that could be used to prevent a similar incident from occurring tomorrow or next week rather than what Congress or the state legislature decides to do further down the line. Among some of these controls include access control at ingress and egress points, actively monitored video surveillance and metal detectors.
“There are so many incredible security controls you can put in place but 90 percent of the places I go into have none of these controls in place,” she adds.
There are No Silver Bullets
For those school districts fortunate enough to receive some of the additional funding that the federal government and various state legislatures have allocated in the wake of Parkland, security experts say they should not only be investing in manpower and technology resources, but also in providing additional training to faculty members and assessing the overall security posture of their facilities.
Timm says this, again, is also a place where those who think there is a silver-bullet solution need to realize that a collaborative effort is needed.
“The mental health experts can sometimes be diametrically opposed to those of us in the physical security industry and we’re going to have play better together and work in ways that we haven’t understood in the past,” he says. “We’ve got to get a group of stakeholders together that cover all of these areas (security, education, mental health, IT, etc.) and everyone is going to have to be flexible and cooperative.”
And while implementing layers of technology can bolster a school security posture, Timm emphasizes that security systems are not a panacea either.
“Instead of trying to find the one-size-fits-all or magic wand solution, we’re going to have to take a measured approach to this and we can and that begins with relationships, not a system,” he adds. “It begins with getting people together and getting them talking about things that are difficult to talk about but now they are front and center.”
To Arm or Not to Arm
One of the fiercest debates following Parkland, and now Santa Fe, is whether or not teachers or other staff members in schools should be allowed to carry guns. The issue, as with gun control, has elicited a wide range of opinions both for and against the idea.
Timm, who is in favor of having armed police officers in schools, doesn’t believe that arming teachers is the answer, nor does he think providing any other type weapon, such as a bucket of rocks that was recently proposed at a Pennsylvania school district, for defense is a good idea given the chance that is could be misused or even leveraged by the attacker.
“Here’s the problem; in attempting to defend ourselves and provide something that defends ourselves, we have introduced more risks. One of those risks is that the bad guy now has ways to hurt us that they might not have before,” Timm says.
Conversely, Ramsey-Hamilton believes providing teachers with non-lethal defense solutions in a worse-case scenario would be an appropriate countermeasure to have in schools.
“The arming teachers initiative is, number one, going to be very expensive and difficult because teachers want to teach, not be security officers,” she explains. “That’s the nice thing about controls; they don’t involve human emotions. That metal detector or video camera is going to work even if it doesn’t feel like it that day.”
How Students Can Play a Role
Politics aside, Timm believes the fact that students have started to rise up and have a voice in the national discussion related to improving school security and safety could be a positive development.
“Parkland had that and some of it was agenda-driven, kids were exploited and I understand that, but – we’ve been saying this for a really long time – because they are ahead of us with technology and because they have a better pulse for what’s going on, they are uniquely positioned to be a better part of the solution than the problem,” he explains.
One of the ways Timm says students could be more involved in helping to mitigate mass casualty events in schools is requiring them to register their cellphones with any mass notification solutions a district may have at their disposal. He believes students would want to be a part of it just like those in college are and that parents would want them to be a part of it. This would enable those who may already be away from campus not to enter back into a potentially dangerous situation.
Secondly, Timm says that students could also be involved in digital threat assessment as it pertains to reporting potentially disturbing or threatening behavior by their peers on social media.
“Adults tend to be trying to catch up with digital threat assessment where student are right in the middle of it,” he says. “What becomes important then is to say how we will involve them and everybody is pushing the limits because we don’t know all of the privacy laws, rules and liabilities, etc.”
Better Training Needed
Given that many schools have either already entered or will be entering summer break soon, Ramsey-Hamilton says districts should be planning for more advanced teacher and staff training on how to respond during an active-shooter situation. The moment an active shooter actually occurs, she says many people don’t know what to do because there isn’t a response plan in place.
“They are told to run but where are they supposed to run? They don’t have a place of refuge setup and the teachers don’t know what to tell the students about where to go,” Ramsey-Hamilton explains. “I’m a big believer in running and not hiding because I think hiding just sets targets up for someone to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time. But if you’re going to run you’ve got to have a place to run to, you’ve got to have a designated place you can lock that has no windows or bulletproof glass so that if they have to they can shelter there and wait.”
Many have also pointed to that fact that a student pulled a fire alarm during the Santa Fe shooting – potentially endangering additional lives - is evidence that there needs to be more training and drills around active shooters in schools.
“Routinely, every time one of these shootings happens, someone says, ‘I can’t believe it happened here,’” Ramsey-Hamilton concludes. “You have to go back to those basics and say, ‘Do we have everything in place so that if it does happen here we can mitigate it?’”
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
