According to the results of the 2014 Student Safety Survey conducted by Awareity, provider of the TIPS risk management and prevention platform, there is an alarming disconnect between the threats students say they are aware of in schools and what administrators and security personnel are doing to actually address potential problems. The survey, which collected responses from nearly 6,500 K-12 students in 14 states as well as Canada, found that 34 percent students are aware of someone who may pose a risk to other students or the school itself.
“That’s a big number - 6,500 kids - and nearly a third basically know someone who poses a risk to their school and with all of the headlines, stories and tragedies we’ve seen and of the discussions about how to prevent them; we’ve got 34 percent of kids here who might be sitting on information that would certainly be helpful to preventing something from happening,” said Awareity Founder and CEO Rick Shaw.
Additionally, 18 percent reported being aware of a student who has brought a weapon into school and 16 percent said that they had missed school at least once because they felt unsafe, uncomfortable or nervous either at or on their way to and from school. However, when bullying concerns were reported, students said that only 17 percent of the time did the situation get any better.
Shaw, who has more than 30 years of experience in risk mitigation and prevention, said that the results of this year’s survey are eerily similar to the one they conducted last year and the fact that there has been little to no improvement on the part of schools in improving reported bullying situations is concerning. “That’s pretty scary that 2014 basically validated what 2013 found,” he added.
Overall, 79 percent of students polled in the survey said that that they have been impacted by bullying. Another 23 percent of students said that they are bullied at least once a week and 49 percent reported witnessing bullying of other students at least once a week. Social media is also contributing to the problem as 46 percent of students in the report said that they have been impacted by cyberbullying.
“Most school administrators when we ask them if (social media) is a problem, most of them say absolutely. It’s a big problem because 1) they can’t see it and 2) most adults are not that familiar with how to investigate it,” said Shaw. “Also with social media, the evidence disappears, whether it is deleted or it is there for a short amount of time. By the time they try and go do an investigation, they can’t find any evidence of what was happening.”
When it comes to evaluating the overall safety climate of schools, Shaw said it really depends on you measure it.
“If you’re saying are there going to be very many shootings and things like that? Not likely. Statistically, shootings are very rare, it’s just that they get a lot of attention and certainly they cost lives,” said Shaw. “However, having said that, if you’re looking at just safety and security for a student, the fact that 34 percent of them maybe aware of someone that is scaring them or scaring others or the fact that only 17 percent of the time when they go to an adult for help does the situation get better; these kids, as adults would do, if things only get better 17 percent of the time then they are going to take actions into their own hands. Those actions might be violent, those actions might be bullying, it might be depression, it might be alcohol, it might be drugs, or it might be suicide. When you look at that way, the safety climate for students is not very good.”
One thing schools can do to improve their security posture is to practice what Shaw refers to as the “six essential steps to proactive prevention.” These include:
- Individual Awareness
- Collecting the Dots
- Assessing the Dots
- Connecting the Dots
- Intervention & Monitoring
- Prevention
Shaw said these steps have been validated by all of the post-incident reports that have been put together in the wake of shootings and other incidents where prevention efforts failed. Conversely, there is also evidence where schools that have implemented these steps have been successful in preventing acts of violence. The problem is that the majority of schools and other organizations only implement the first two steps, which really only serve to generate awareness about an issue.
“In other words, they may be handing out policies, procedures, laws, or posters, but all of those things they are handing out are awareness. That’s all they are. They’re recipes,” explained Shaw. “If I were to meet you in person, I could hand you a postcard of a chocolate cake and on the back it has the ‘best chocolate cake ever’ recipe. Basically, that’s all schools are doing right now is they’re handing out recipes – those laws, policies, procedures and plans – but you can’t make that cake unless you have the right tools and unless you take the right steps in the right order.”
While he believes the use of security equipment in schools is important, Shaw said that oftentimes schools rely too heavily on technology instead of taking these aforementioned proactive steps to preventing acts of violence or bullying in their facilities.
“We need to adjust the percentage of focus on security stuff, which is very reactive to more proactive prevention tools,” he added. “Even after a shooting, we see a lot of talk about how we either have to have armed guards or we have to lock the doors, get metal detectors – all of those things are still loading up on security. I think we’re sending out a message that we’re loading up on security because we don’t believe we can prevent it. The data clearly shows in hundreds and hundreds of post-event reports that the pre-incident indicators existed, people observed them and reported them.”
The problem, according to Shaw, is that these pre-incident reports and indicators are not streamlined or readily available to the people that need to see them.
“That’s what we see over and over again and it’s not just schools. Look at Fort Hood, they’ve had two shootings now and if you saw the post-incident reports that came out after those, it is the same thing that they didn’t have a central prevention platform to collect the dots, assess them and put all of these pre-incident indicators together,” Shaw concluded.
