How do we keep kids safe at school?
As both a parent and former Chief Safety & Security Officer for one of the 10 largest school districts in the U.S., it’s a problem I think about a lot: How do we balance limited resources, limited time and a nearly unlimited number of scenarios that may put our kids in danger? How do we increase educators’ time in the classroom, reduce the time that they spend off-task on non-educational outcomes, and still ensure that our schools have a well-understood plan for anything from a gas leak or kitchen fire to a mass tragedy?
States and school districts have created a slew of requirements to track student performance and attendance. They also have security requirements — from monitoring and controlling access to buildings, to hardening classrooms, planning fire drills and creating phone trees. While schools have developed infrastructures to track reading and writing proficiency, budget adherence, instructional hour requirements and operational efficiency (among others), there is no organized way to track whether they are meeting their safety requirements and whether those requirements are doing what they’re designed to do.
Data shows that students learn better in environments where they feel safe. And while I have seen firsthand how committed our educators and administrators are to keeping our kids safe, we are not setting anyone up for success when we fail to give our schools safety and security policies for their specific environment and the tools they need to implement them. (Or make those tools so burdensome that our faculty and staff couldn’t possibly implement them with fidelity.)
Educators and administrators are just that: educators. They do not have the specialized knowledge and training necessary to establish and run a complex safety and security program. Nor do they often have the staff or resources to monitor and track the implementation. Still, after an incident, there is often a conversation in the media and from the public about what school administrators “should have known, should have done.”
A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel about the “Current State of School Safety” at the Global Security Exchange (GSX) 2022. The conference audience was packed with school safety consultants, school administrators and product and infrastructure vendors. During Q&A, an audience member stood up to offer these sentiments: “I am a former principal and am now in district school safety. There is so much riding on a principal’s ability to manage the safety and security of their schools.” He went on to say that when people become a principal or assistant principal, safety and security isn’t part of the screening and promotion process and that they typically aren’t provided training once they’re in the job and responsible for it. Most importantly, he said that in all of his years as an administrator, “safety and security was never explicitly part of (his) annual performance evaluation.”
So how do we start to address these gaps?
First, let’s reimagine how we hire and promote leadership in our schools. Screen for people who accept that safety and security are a core part of their role and career progression. When conducting interviews for school administrators, include questions related to safety and security expectations. For assistant principals, focus on prior knowledge, willingness to accept the responsibility of school safety and eagerness/ability to be trained. Once selections are made, create space for new administrators to learn safety and security principles tailored to their environment.
Second, make safety and security a priority for professional development. Provide leaders with the training, tools and knowledge to cultivate a safe and secure environment, and help them maintain those skills. This should include all-hazards training and drill management, including how to communicate safety and security-related matters to students, staff and the community and how to partner with all these stakeholder groups to create safer environments. New principals would benefit from having a network of other principals to train with, discuss and share experiences and best practices. Assistant principals should receive ongoing training in district expectations and safety and security principles.
Lastly, ensure there is a mechanism to track safety and security implementation and reflect those results in evaluations. Hold administrators accountable for safety and security with the same emphasis that we place on the personal and educational development of their students. Principals and future principals should be measured on their development in these newly trained areas and skills. The conversation should center on how things can be enhanced or improved. Districts must be open to feedback from their up-and-coming leaders regarding improvements. By fostering productive discussion, districts create buy-in from the district’s future leaders. As Peter Drucker said, “What’s measured gets improved.”
So why don’t we do it? The answer is typically “time.” There is so much information and so many priorities competing for the professional development time of administrators. We need to decide whether we are going to prioritize safety and security by making the time and funding the tools and training needed to make the process efficient. These efficiencies will help identify gaps and vulnerabilities proactively instead of during a crisis.
Hire and train administrators who want to be responsible for school safety, then provide them support for understanding their overall safety program, the layers of security that are involved and how safety and security expectations are set and measured as part of their evaluations. Their professional development curriculum should enable them to become well-rounded school leaders who look at their environments through an “all-hazards lens” and can execute and communicate the safety and security vision to their students, staff and community.
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