The recent mass-shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, was yet another example of a school targeted for mayhem. And the incident raised the question, once again, about what schools can do to keep their students safe. At Boston University Thursday night, school safety experts talked about ways to do that without turning campuses into fortresses.
Safe and Sound, a non-profit dedicated to school safety, organized the session. It was founded by Michele Gay, whose daughter Josephine was one of 20 children killed more than two years ago in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
Gay told an audience of students, police, school administrators, parents and others that one of the lessons learnedabout school safety that day was the problematic role of social media.
“We were given a single mass notification via our cell phones and our land lines initially to our homes,” Gay said. “But beyond that, social media took over. The texting took over. People were going to Facebook, people were going to Twitter to communicate and get information. So we had a tremendous amount of misinformation that occurred.”
Gay said her Safe and Sound co-partner, Alissa Parker, received three different answers about where she should go to reunify with her daughter, Emilie, also a victim.
Gay said parents and members of the school community need to know in advance where to go to get accurate information when a crisis occurs.
Gay was joined in the panel discussion by Kristina Anderson, who was shot four times in the Virginia Tech shooting. Anderson founded her own school safety organization, called the Koshka Foundation. She spoke about how police can prepare to react to crises like these.
“So law enforcement, the ones that I’ve seen that are the best and the most proactive are the ones that continually train, both mentally and physically,” Anderson said. “These guys are fully ready to go in and respond to situations, and also be community service leaders, that they reach out.”
Scott Paré, the Deputy Director of School Safety at Boston University, said campus police try to stop violent incidents before they happen by monitoring social media.
“We have software that we can plug into key words - whether it’s ‘shoot, kill, die’ - and we monitor that information from I think it’s nine different sites now at this point.”
Of course, police aren’t just in universities these days. Increasingly, even elementary schools have school resource officers patrolling the halls. Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, acknowledged that causes worry.
“Sometimes people will say, ‘all that’s happening is you’re going in and arresting more kids and putting them in the juvenile justice system,” Canady said. “And I have to tell you that if the program’s done the right way – it’s the right officer, they’re properly trained – the opposite is happening.”
Canady said school resource officers build relationships with students, and are more likely to be able to help calm a fraught situation. He said from 1994 to 2009 juvenile arrest rates were down 50 percent, and he said school resource officers deserve some credit.
The Superintendent of Schools in Fitchburg, Andre Ravenelle, spoke about two students who told school officials when they thought they’d heard a conversation about a weapon. Ravenelle said a school resource officer responded immediately. When it turned out to be a false alarm, he said, some suggested it was an overreaction. But Ravenelle said that response is exactly what they want.
“We would rather go through all of that, and then at the end find out that you know there was miscommunication there, somebody didn’t hear it right, and then be able to take a deep breath and know that nothing is going to happen, than to have people not feel they can come forward with that kind of information, and then be on the end of some sort of trauma.”
Detective Sean O’Leary of the North Redding Police Department is a school resource officer. He came to Thursday’s event hoping to bring the lessons of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and other disasters back to his community. O’Leary’s goal: to help make it real for staff as they implement new safety programs.
Like many school systems, he said, North Redding has adopted active-shooter training that goes beyond so-called lockdowns.
“We say, ‘run, hide, fight.’ It doesn’t mean we want to turn everyone into fighting an active shooter or someone actively hurting people. But if you’re in the corner and you can throw a book at him to get out of the way. Or teach your kids you don’t want to sit and huddle under the desk… if you can get out, get out.”
One parent in the panel’s audience stood up to say she’s worried those kinds of drills might be harmful. They could just scare kids.
Among parents, Michele Gay said, it’s a common concern: “In our elementary schools, especially, I think that’s where people struggle the most with active shooter training, they think, ‘oh my gosh, I can see it with the high schoolers, I can see us maybe boiling it down a little for the middle schoolers. I can certainly see it with the staff members. But how in the heck are we going to introduce this information to our K to 5?’”
Gay said there’s a way to prepare them without freaking them out, and she said there’s an example of how it can be done. For generations we’ve trained kids about fire safety. And we’ve done it, she said, by sharing information in manageable and age-appropriate ways.
“Taking that information that was developed maybe for a higher level, and doing what educators do – boiling it down. Differentiating it.”
The more we prepare, and the more we take ownership of our own safety, she said, the better off we’ll be if something is to happen
