Lately it seems there has been a lot of interest in schools and colleges instructing teachers to fight back when confronted with an armed attacker. Certainly the thought of having teachers (and even students) being told to throw books and fight back against a gunman is incredible and counter-intuitive. Luckily no one ever told by Ryan Crowley, Jake Ryker, Josh Ryker, Douglas Ure, Davis Ure, Ada Walberger, Joshua Pearson and Travis Weaver not to fight back against a school shooter. In 1998, these seven students prevented an attacker from killing more of their schoolmates.

On May 20, 1998, 15year-old Kipland (Kip) Phillip Kinkel was expelled from school for possessing a loaded firearm. His father, Bill Kinkel, a 59 year-old Spanish teacher picked him up from the police station, where they stopped at a Burger King on the drive home.

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An untested and untrained plan is little more than theory. After developing school/college emergency plans a training program should be designed to educate students, parents, teachers, staff, crisis team members and administrators in threat assessment procedures, emergency response, management policies and procedures. Once training is implemented, exercises should be conducted to test the plans and training.

Currently, most educational facilities have adopted a training philosophy that embraces performing extremely well under reasonable conditions, rather than performing reasonably well under extreme conditions. For example:

Lockdown, Weather, Earthquake & Fire Drills Deficiencies
Staff has advanced knowledge of the exact time of the drill and the drill occurs when all students are in the classroom.

Solution
After two or three successful drills, limit advanced knowledge to the day of the event and implement the drills during transition times. Note: Avoid conducting drills during meal periods, due to the costs associates with missed lunches. To test response, set up a mock lunch period with students and staff.

Once you have your drills up and running, it is time to conduct training exercises. Tabletop & functional exercises use vivid scenarios, guided by experienced and certified facilitators, to engage participants in discussions of how they would respond to hypothetical events. Tabletops are designed to be a non-threatening and relatively low cost approach to validating capabilities. Use Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program (HSEEP) based exercises to explore and validate plans, identify logical or structural conflicts or gaps in those plans and develop specific areas for further study and improvement. Scenario should be coordinated/developed with local emergency management and public safety.

Stay safe

Brad

This post is provided by SafePlans (www.safeplans.com), an all-hazards preparedness solution including emergency plans, staff training, and detailed site mapping.

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©2008 SafePlans, LLC

As we approach the anniversary of the Columbine tragedy, it is still apparent that our nation's schools are still in desperate need of formal threat assessment programs to help predict – and thereby prevent- targeted school violence. The first step in implementing your school’s (or district’s) program is to develop a formal threat assessment policy.
A solid policy should set a baseline that establishes what type of behavior will be assessed or investigated. It is important to remember that the key is not who makes a threat but rather who poses a threat. Your policy may be to investigate and assess every threat of violence, no matter how unlikely. However, you should never wait for a threat. Inappropriate behavior and communications, while not a threat, are often a much better predictor or violent behavior. An example of inappropriate behavior is demonstrated in this poem written and submitted to a teacher weeks before the author opened fire on his classmates and teachers:

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