School safety forums, metal detectors, armed school personnel and more have dominated news coverage and Kentucky community conversation since the Feb. 14 Parkland, Fla. school shooting and, closer to home, the Jan. 23 shooting at Marshall County High School.
But Kentucky school safety experts say the response is not unprecedented, having seen a similar outpouring following the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook, Conn., Elementary School that took the lives of 26 children and staff.
On his first day as a school resource officer at Sharp Middle School, Pendleton County Sheriff’s Deputy Aaron Adams talks
with, left to right, Principal David Sledd and students Mack Tackett and Keely Pollard. The district was among those adding
to its ranks of SROs following recent school shootings. (Photo courtesy of Keith Smith, Falmouth Outlook)
“I don’t think there’s anything different going on; I think it’s just a continuation,” with news coverage and social media keeping incidents “always on the forefront,” said Tony Kuklinski, an Elizabethtown Independent school board member who works as a federal police officer with the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Dan Orman, training coordinator for the Kentucky Center for School Safety, agreed with Kuklinski, who joined him last month for a school safety session during KSBA’s annual conference.
“I see the response the same as it was then,” Orman said. “We talked about situational awareness then. We talked about police officers in schools. There was talk of arming teachers. There was talk of volunteer dad groups, not just mentoring but getting into the schools and walking the parking lots looking for bad guys.”
If there is a difference, Orman said, it is that there seems to be a more measured response. School leaders in Kentucky, he said following the conference training session, “are processing the information now and wanting to understand reasonable ways that educators can respond. I think we have pockets of knee-jerk (reaction), but I think for the most part … what I’ve seen today is attitudes of ‘What can we do better?’”
While adult reactions have been similar, the response by students has marked one way in which the aftermath of recent shootings has differed, with students in Kentucky joining those nationally in school walkouts March 14.
Schools actually are better prepared than ever from a safety standpoint, said Jon Akers, executive director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety, “because they’re doing more active drilling, they’re doing emergency management plans, police officers and school people are talking on a regular basis. And the center is keeping administrators abreast of trends.”
Akers pointed to research on school shootings by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education showing that the relationship the teacher has with the student is the foundation of school safety. He compared it to community policing.
“We walk the beat, we get to know the people around us. We’re not trying to be buddies with the students, but we’re going to be adults that the students can come to us and talk with us and let us know when they see and hear things,” he said.
Oldham County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Meece also stressed the relationship between schools and law enforcement agencies, urging school leaders to meet with local law enforcement to discuss school security, facility vulnerabilities, communication and other potential weaknesses. Meece was a co-presenter at Orman’s session.
School safety measures are always evolving, Kuklinski said, as “bad guys” find ways of circumventing security. For example, after the Parkland shooting, in which the shooter pulled a fire alarm as a diversion, he expects recommendations on responding to school fire alarms will be revised. “This incident has changed the dynamic,” he said.
From the standpoint of physical security, closing and locking classroom doors when kids are inside and strictly enforcing “buzz-ins” at security vestibules should be the first steps in school safety, Orman said. The idea, Kuklinski said, is to put as many layers of barriers in place as possible, “and that will give schools enough time to get people who are trained there to mitigate that threat the right way.”
Here’s what the experts are advising on other fronts that are getting attention.
Arming school personnel:
Akers does not recommend arming school personnel: “That’s been my stand for 17 years,” he said, citing training needs and other issues. “I would think they would have to have at least the minimum amount of training that law enforcement officers have,” he said. “Anything short of that would increase your liability, in my opinion. Most law enforcement officers I talk with are adamantly opposed to arming teachers.”
His other concerns: Securing a weapon in school, the possibility of students being caught in crossfire, and confusion when professionals arrive on the scene. “If they don’t know that I’m a teacher that’s allowed to carry a firearm, and I’m out in the middle of a hallway holding a gun, and law enforcement comes in – are they going to say ‘Drop it,’ or are they going to shoot first? Just too many things can go wrong with these things.”
Orman instead recommends training teachers in “situational awareness”– being able to quickly react to an incident that may not unfold exactly in the way they’ve been trained or being able to quickly choose an appropriate response based on training in multiple scenarios.
Metal detectors:
School district money would be better spent on school resource officers and mental health services, Orman said.
Akers said a bottleneck at a school entrance with large groups of students waiting to be wanded simply creates another target, and doesn’t stop a perpetrator from surreptitiously tossing a weapon through a window or open side door. And it doesn’t address the issue of after-hours coming and going.
“You can do overt things, the bookbag checks and metal detectors. But realize they’re not foolproof and they are limited based on what I would call sustainability during the day – to have those stations active and staffed,” he said.
The bottom line, Akers said, is that people are envisioning metal detectors working as they do in airports and that model does not work in schools.
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