otisgatekeeper-blog

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2018 INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL SAFETY INSTITUTE GATEKEEPER AWARDS

We call our educators and school staff “Immediate Responders,” as they are there before the First Responders if a bad thing happens at a school. Our Immediate Responders in schools truly are the Keepers of the Gate that prevent bad things from happening to our most precious resource, which is our children.

Each year we review projects and case studies from schools and school districts, as well as individual contributions to school safety that show our principles of training are put to work in actual circumstances. At the International School Safety Institute, each year we choose a staff at a school or school district and honor them with our annual Gatekeeper Award for school safety in recognition of their contributions to school safety. We also recognize individual achievements in school safety and safe school culture and climate. We’ll be awarding the 2018 Gatekeeper school and individual awards to some outstanding Immediate Responders at our annual school safety symposium October 9-11 in Carlsbad, CA. I’d like to take a moment to introduce them here.

2018 Gatekeeper School Award: Voyage Academy, Clinton, Utah

Principal Stacee Phillips and Director of Student Services Kami Coleman will be presented this award on the behalf of of their school. Stacee and Kami have been attending the ISSI Symposium since 2016, and have brought staff members to the conference since then. They began implementing programs in areas related to training, planning, and infrastructure target hardening at their school based on the presentations they attended at the symposiums. Their efforts in school safety are too numerous to list here, but we’ll be talking about them at this year’s symposium. Stacee best summed it up in her quote when she sent sent us her school’s list of accomplishments:

“Voyage Academy has been a safety minded school from the first day our doors opened. Attending the International School Safety Conference the past two years has greatly increased our knowledge and capacity to provide a safe learning environment for our students. Thank you for providing such an amazing conference each year. We look forward to attending this conference for years to come.”

2018 Gatekeeper Individual Award: Stephanie Guzman, Kern County Office of Education, Bakersfield, CA.

Stephanie is a school social worker, and most people in education don’t give enough credit to how important people in her role are to safe school culture and climate. This is an area often forgotten in school safety, as we have the ability to reach out to troubled youth before their behavior escalates to violence or dangers to themselves.

During a training session in Bakersfield, Stephanie told me about a case study where she took on the case of a male student who society had pretty much given up on. He’d been thrown out of school, his dad was in prison, law enforcement told her he was no good and couldn’t be saved, and the Parole and Probation Agency told her they would probably end up violating him and putting him in prison. Stephanie rose to the challenge and worked one-on-one with this student. He eventually got his high school diploma through an Adult Education program, and last I heard he was a functioning member of society. There is nothing to say that this student would have become a school killer, but absence of a strong adult role model is a commonality we find in all troubled youth, including the ones who commit acts of violence. Stephanie provided that adult connectivity to society for this young man, and might possibly have been the only adult in his life who hadn’t given up on him. Her efforts may have kept him off the streets, out of prison, or maybe even worse. 

We created our Gatekeeper logo, who we affectionately call Otis, to reflect the dedication and tenacity our Immediate Responders in education display when they’re keeping our kids safe. The color yellow on Otis stands for his level of mental preparedness, his bulldog attitude reflects the same attitude a school staff member would have if someone was going to try to hurt their kids, the gate he is standing in front of is something no predator will ever get to while he is on duty, and his D4 medallion stands for Detect-Deter-Delay-Defeat, which it what we do to protect our kids if a bad thing comes to our school. We’re honoring these Gatekeeper award recipients at our 2018 conference, but we’re also looking for who will be our award winners in 2019 when we’re back in Carlsbad for our symposium. Let us hear from you about your efforts in school safety, because we learn from you so others can learn from us.

Stay safe Gatekeepers…

Jeff Kaye, President School Safety Operations, Inc. www.schoolsafetyops.com 

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STAY IN THE YELLOW

The easiest and safest position on any professional football team is the “Monday Morning Arm Chair Quarterback.” You never get hurt, never throw an interception, and never make the wrong play when you have the luxury of using hindsight, slow motion replay, and video tapes to review a loss. This is also true about law enforcement tactical operations. It is safe and easy for people who never wore a badge, never had to face their own mortality in a gunfight, or never had to quell a violent incident to look at the video tape of a rapidly changing incident in slow motion days afterwards from a position of safety. I wasn’t on scene at the Parkland, FL. school massacre, so I don’t have the right to critique the actions of any law enforcement officer who was there. No one does, except for the trained law enforcement officials who will debrief this incident response. Training, including mental preparedness training, dictates response. This is an area that will be examined by response experts.

I’ve been in my share of tactical response incidents. Nothing like the Parkland massacre of course, but some of them involved the use of deadly force against suspects who were trying to kill officers. I’ve seen cops run into the fray, I’ve seen cops stand and fight, I’ve seen cops run away, and I’ve seen cops freeze up, lose control of bodily functions, and not react. No matter how many years of experience a cop has, you never know how they are going to react until it is time for them to react. It’s all about the state of mind, and the only person’s state of mind you can control is your own. If the mind isn’t trained pre-incident, it won’t react properly when you need immediate action.  

This blog isn’t about the actions of law enforcement in Parkland, FL. or any other violent incident. It is about mindset and mental conditioning. If a thirty-year law enforcement officer didn’t react the way the public expected him to, how can we expect an armed civilian teacher with no training to react to deadly force by using deadly force, and still have the same cognitive functions they had on the range when they were shooting paper targets? Mental conditioning has to start pre-incident, and the only way to do that is with training.

In his book “ON COMBAT,” Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman identifies five states of the cognitive mind when dealing with fear or stress situations. These states of mind are color coded white, yellow, red, gray and black, with white being unconcerned and black being overwhelmed. Increased heart rate due to the fear reaction results in tightening of blood vessels, which allows less oxygen to the brain while moving through these states of mind. This causes deterioration of motor skills like vision and hearing as the brain moves through the escalating levels. Condition black occurs when the heart rate gets above 175 BPM, and rational thought process goes out the window. This is the condition where a person can freeze and not react the way we perceive they should react to a violent or stress situation, especially if they have trained for in a non-stress environment. Tunnel vision, loss of hearing, loss of fine motor skills, and loss of some other bodily functions can occur in condition black. Training, mental conditioning, and second nature brain muscle memory are the only ways to stay out of condition black during a stress reaction to a fear situation. And then it’s only a maybe.

We use Colonel Grossman’s mental conditions, with his permission, in all of the training we do with school personnel. We hope and pray they’ll never be in a gunfight or under attack by an Active Assailant, but it is common for a person involved in any school emergency response incident to move into an elevated condition red due to a stress reaction. Condition red can be a great place to be, if you’ve trained properly in your response. A person is running on adrenaline in condition red and fine motor skills are working, but the response actions are based entirely on what is already programmed into the brain. You will react based on prior training in condition red, so if that training has not pre-programmed the proper response, you will most likely move right into conditions grey and black. Once there, you are not doing anyone any good, because you probably froze.

Condition yellow is a finely tuned state of awareness, where your brain is sharp and aware of everything going on around you. Dogs and predators live in condition yellow. A good dog is never off duty and never takes a day off. That’s why they can wake up from a sound sleep and start barking when they hear something. It’s also why we love our dogs and depend on them for a level of protection in our homes. School staff members also have to live in condition yellow. This is where we are always aware of our surroundings and where we can pre-program information into the brain that will help us when we’re reacting in condition red, and keep us from going into condition black.

Just like dogs and predators, we cannot afford to ever be in condition white and unaware of what’s going on around us when we’re on duty. Save condition white for when you’re in your back yard sipping your favorite beverage and reading a book on your day off. You deserve that mental downtime, because being in condition yellow while you’re working tires you out. Your kids need you in yellow and on your A-game when you’re at school. You owe it to them to be there, because sometimes emergency incidents happen without warning. You have to be ready for them. Going from condition white directly to condition red will probably get you straight to condition black before you know it, and you’ll freeze. It’s just human nature.  

Compare this to driving on an icy road in a snowstorm. You are hyper aware due to the hazardous driving conditions, and your heart is probably beating a little faster. You might have even turned your radio off, because for some reason the quiet is helping you see better. Suddenly your car goes into a right hand skid and you lose control of the car. If you have pre-programmed your reactions through training and experience to take your foot off the gas, not hit the brake, and turn left if your skidding right, you’ll straighten out and keep going. That whole process will take seconds, you won’t remember the actions you took because they were second nature, you’ll come out of it a little shaky due to the adrenaline dump, and you’ll work through it and calm down as you move forward. You just went from yellow where you were hyper-aware of the conditions, to red where your brain took over response using prior knowledge pre-programed through training and experience, and then got yourself calmed down to move back into yellow again where you remain hyper-aware.

If you haven’t pre-programed your response to that skid and weren’t in a state of awareness when it happened, there’s no time to think about what to do while you’re losing control of the car. The natural panic reaction is to hit the brakes, and that causes loss of control. You’ll probably hit something, and probably won’t remember hitting it or what your reactions to the skid were. You just went from condition white straight through to condition grey or black, and will probably not be able to calm down for a while. Like I said, it’s just human nature, but it’s all based on pre-incident training and second nature muscle memory.

Bad things sometime happen in schools, and you might have to respond to them. We have to stay in yellow to protect ourselves from going into black. We should always be in yellow when working, but we should also always be in yellow when we’re training. This is what will come back to us when we need it. All too often I see people in training I’m either presenting or attending looking at their phones, doing something on their laptop, or generally doing anything but paying attention to the training. You see them too, because they are there no matter what the training is or who is presenting it. These people are in condition white during the training, and the brain doesn’t take in information in that condition. That is good information for you to have when making your emergency response teams at your school, because these will be the first people to move into condition black when a bad thing happens because they are not prepared. We react in stress situations as we train during non-stress situations, and we’re not taking in information if the brain is in condition white. In times of stress we do not rise to the occasion, we sink to our level of training.

Mental conditioning is a learned process, and it is a constant fight to keep the mind in condition yellow as we move through our daily routine. Boredom and complacency can cause the mind to move backwards to condition white and make us unaware of what’s going on around us. I used symbolism in my law enforcement career to remind me to stay in condition yellow. There was a yellow paper taped to the inside of my locker door so I’d see it when I was getting my gear. This helped remind me I had to get my mind in the right place before I started my shift. I would put yellow sticky dots on my watch face and rear view mirror of my work car, because these were places I looked often during the shift and the color symbolism would remind me not to slip back into condition white. I knew yellow would keep me from going to black, and that color symbolism helped.

We brought that same color symbolism to the training we do with school personnel in order to help them stay in the yellow. Whether it’s Otis our D4 Gatekeeper logo, the black rubber bracelet with the yellow letters GATEKEEPER on it, or our para-cord bracelet bracelet with yellow on the outside protecting from the black on the inside and the words GATEKEEPER on the buckle, the symbolism is there and it works. I’ve had trained law enforcement personnel tell me they wear the GATEKEEPER bracelet at all times when they’re working, as it helps them keep their mind right and reminds them they might have to react at any moment with no warning. The symbolism will work for you too. Lives depend on all of us involved in school safety, and we need to remember yellow will protect us from black. Target hardening your school is good, but target hardening the mind is every bit as important. It’s free too. You just have to keep your mind right.

You can’t buy a GATEKEEPER bracelet, but we give them to people who show us they live up to that name. If you’re still reading this, then you’ve proven you are a GATEKEEPER, so hit me up at a training or through our website and I’ll get you one. Yellow protects you from black, so stay in the yellow…

Stay Safe Gatekeepers…

Jeff Kaye President, School Safety Operations

www.schoolsafetyops.com

www.internationalschoolsafety.org

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PREPAREDNESS MISSION AREAS

Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD8) directed multiple federal agencies to work together to identify preparedness goals to address the greatest threats posed to the security of our nation. These threats included terrorist threats, domestic and foreign, and Active Assailant events. PPD8 was written in January of 2013 and went into effect in July of 2013. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) identified five Mission Areas needed to be addressed for a governmental or non-governmental agency to be considered prepared. These same five Mission Areas are written into the FEMA Guide For High Quality Emergency Operations Plans. This guide came out in July of 2013 and is available on line for free. It contains everything schools and school districts need to do in terms of planning in order to be prepared for natural or manmade disaster incidents, including these five Mission Areas:

Prevention

Protection

Mitigation

Response

Recovery

I have read or referenced the FEMA Guide hundreds of times throughout the course of my work, and nowhere in that guide did I see reference to Overreacting or Knee Jerk Reactions as preparedness Mission Areas. Yet in the wake of last week’s Parkland FL. school massacre, I’m hearing a lot of just that from a lot of people, including representatives of our government. In my opinion as a school safety professional, the most dangerous of those knee jerk overreactions is arming school teachers. I offer that opinion as a trained professional in both law enforcement and school safety, based on research in both industries. The day we take to arming teachers as a solution to school violence is also the day we must raise the white flag of surrender to the domestic terrorists too often mistakenly referred to as “School Shooters.” I say we will have surrendered because if we arm teachers, we’ve allowed these killers to change our way of life and our education culture as a whole. Effecting the American culture, way of life, and safety of the populace through acts of murder or violence is the F.B.I. definition of terrorism, so we should treat this problem for what it is. We should also fund protection of these attacks like we fund protection of other terrorist attacks. 

My next statement is not meant to be political, as common sense enters into this and not politics. The most dangerous and disturbing advocate for arming teachers I’ve yet to hear is the current President of the United States. In a meeting with grieving students, parents, and teachers at about 2:00 PST February 21, 2018, the President stated he would “Advocate arming 20% of teachers who are very adept at handling a gun.” Those of us involved in education safety and those involved in decision making levels in schools and school districts need to take a moment, take a deep breath, slow things down, and take a hard look at this statement made by our highest ranking law enforcement officer, albeit one with no law enforcement training, and think about it. 

I hear all too often the tired statement that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun in a school is with a good guy with a gun in a school. That statement is typically made by a person with no law enforcement experience, who has never been inside the walls of a school during a chaotic violent incident or a lockdown, has never been in a gunfight, and has never experienced the mental skills needed to make deadly force decisions while the brain is red lining on adrenaline and increased blood flow. 

Opinions vary on arming teachers in the U.S., and some states are doing it now.

A lot of people, including some people I meet who are trainers, disagree with my opinion about not arming teachers, even though my opinion is based on facts. A lot of these trainers teach firearm tactics or sell guns, so they possibly have ulterior motives for arming teachers. I won’t talk about my opinion here, because it really doesn’t matter. But I will talk about the facts involved with arming teachers, because facts are what school administrators need to base their decisions on, and facts are what the civil courts will consider when deciding how big a check your district is going to write when an innocent person gets killed by an armed teacher. Politicians are immune from civil liability if someone gets hurt because of their advocacy of a certain policy or a law they write allowing you to do something like arming a teacher, so paying attention to the facts on this issue is important for the decision makers.

Let’s first look at civil liability for arming teachers. There is a low likelihood of occurrence of an armed Active Assailant attack at a school, even though this is a high impact event that must be planned for accordingly. There are approximately 110,000 public schools in the U.S., and as devastating as the Parkland FL. massacre was, the fact is there were about 109,999 schools that day that were not attacked. The likelihood of occurrence of an accidental weapons discharge by an armed teacher, or the theft of a teacher’s gun is 100% to occur at some point in time. By arming 20% of the teachers in the U.S., we’ve now increased the likelihood of occurrence of an event involving a firearm at a school significantly. If a policy to arm teachers is instituted by a school district and injury occurs due to that policy, the district or school will be held liable. There have been documented incidents of accidental discharge happening in schools and gun thefts in schools with armed teachers. They both happen in law enforcement, so why wouldn’t they happen in schools?

And who will write the check if there is a liability issue in a school related to arming teachers. Will the school district insurance company or JPA cover it? Maybe, and maybe not. Being armed is not a part of the job description when teachers take the position, so there will most probably be an upward adjustment to insurance premiums is teachers are armed. I worked in my position as Director of Public safety in a California public school district for nine years. I carried a concealed weapon every day, because I was certified to do so legally, it was written into my job description, and it was approved by the governing board. I still carried my own million dollar professional liability policy, which was very expensive. I did this because there was a grey area in the district’s insurance on whether I would be covered should I need to use deadly force. We get judged in black and white when we go to court, so there can be no such thing as a grey area when we deal with liability issues. If you tell a teacher they will need to pay $3,000 a year for professional liability insurance, they might not want to do that, so someone should ask them before they advocate arming them.

Now let’s talk about equipment costs. If a district is going to ask a teacher to carry a gun, they are probably going to have to buy the gun and related equipment for them. A decent pistol costs an average of $700. The holster, ammunition, and other equipment would be about another $200. We’ll do the math here in a minute.

And where would the teacher keep the weapon? Some states are talking about keeping them in a lock box in the office and taking them out when they need them. Let’s think about that one. An Active Assailant attack happens without warning. Any cop will tell you that if your plan A is going someplace to unlock and retrieve your weapon when the attack starts, you better have a pretty good Plan B, because your weapon isn’t going to help you at all. 

The weapon has to be carried on the person to be effective. That means the average teacher, especially female teachers, would have to buy new wardrobes in order to conceal a weapon. My school district was in an area where there was triple digit heat at least six months a year, so people dressed accordingly. There aren’t many places for a female wearing a light summer dress or a male wearing a short sleeve shirt to conceal a weapon. What I tell teachers who are advocates of being armed is to carry a full size brick to work concealed someplace on their person for a month, and that’s what it’s like to carry a concealed weapon. It’s pretty cool for a few weeks, but after you don’t use it for a while it becomes a nuisance, so you leave it in a desk drawer instead of carrying it. And you should probably to take it for granted all your students know where your brick is when you’re not carrying it, and one of them is going to try and steal it. You don’t want to be the teacher who has to report to the office and tell the principal to call the police because your brick was stolen…

And how about firearms training for those teachers? Law enforcement and military don’t just train to shoot, they also train in the mental tactics involved in using deadly force. This can’t be taught in a 4-8 hour block of range training most states require for a CCW permit. The President used the terms “highly trained and very adept” teachers should be armed. Law enforcement requires weeks of initial training and hours of yearly re-certification in order to carry a gun, but I’ll use a low end number of 40 hours to train a teacher. That’s an impossible expectation, because there is not that much training time built into the school year for a teacher, and contractually, the district would have to pay them to go to the training and pay for the training itself. There is Zero school budget for that type of training. And no amount of training can prepare a teacher to look through the sights of a gun, pull the trigger, and take the life of a student they probably knew since kindergarten. I love working with teachers because they love their kids. That’s why they took the jobs they did. As a trainer, I would be remiss in my duties to train a teacher the type of mental detachment needed to take a life, because that detachment would transfer into the classroom. Teachers don’t take the job to kill their students, they take the job to educate and care for them.

Now let’s look at cost associated to arming teachers. The President pulled a figure out of the air today of arming 20% of the teachers in the U.S. I’m not sure where he came up with that figure as a solution, but I’ll use that for cost comparison. According to the National Center For Education Statistics 2017 numbers, there are about 3.2 million public school teachers in the U.S. This doesn’t include private school teachers or teachers in institutes of higher learning, but we’ll use that number for discussion. The average hourly rate for a teacher in the U.S. shows to be about $30 per hour. Some are higher and some are lower, but we’ll use that. I’m not that good with math, so the following are just rough estimates of the initial costs of arming 20% of our teachers:

20% of 3.2 million teachers equals about 640,000 teachers with an approximate hourly rate of $30.

40 hours of initial training equals 25,600,000 training hours for this group, at a cost of about $786,000,000. The budget for this training in a school district would be $0.

The cost of equipment for initially arming 20% of the teachers would be about $900 each. Multiplied times the 640,000 teachers, that would be about $576,000,000. The school district budget for this is $0, so these costs would have to be passed onto the teachers.

OSHA would probably require armed teachers to wear Kevlar vests, which are about $1,000 each for a good one. This would be another cost that would have to be passed onto the teacher.

I offer these basic numbers just to show how unreal of a recommendation arming 20% of our teachers is in terms of addressing a realistic threat that is killing our children. Even if Congress funded this recommendation with about 1.3 billion dollars, it would take years to train and arm a group of teachers this size, so this suggestion offers nothing to address today’s threat. What the President suggested today is creating an armed civilian militia composed of untrained persons who would be providing a false sense of security as an ancillary duty to what they were hired for, and this would have no effect on the root causes of school violence. I’m not sure if it’s irony or insanity in suggesting teachers should be the first line of defense to a problem local, state, and federal agencies should be handling. To make sense of this, we just need to look at airport security after the 9/11/2001 attacks. We did not arm the ticket agents and baggage handlers to make the airports safer. The governments spent billions of dollars on law enforcement, TSA Agents, and infrastructure target hardening. Rightfully so, but we should be outraged our kids are safer waiting at an airport gate than they are in their classrooms. I know I am.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun in a school is with a good guy with a gun,” some say. I’ll buy into part of that. It’s not the only way, but it will help. As long the good guy with the gun is wearing a law enforcement badge, has law enforcement training, and preferably is familiar with that school because he or she is a School Resource Officer. It costs an average of $185,000 a year for a school district to hire a School Resource Officer. I don’t know how many SRO’s that 1.3 billion dollars we talked about costing to arm 20% of the teachers, but in the Great state of Nevada where I did my law enforcement career there is a unit of measure called a Crap Load, and that’s about how many SRO’s we could hire with that money…

There is little funding available to assist school districts with paying for SRO’s, so they typically pick up 50% of the cost with a 50% match from the local law enforcement agency. If the politicians from the top down want to look at a realistic measure that would have a positive effect on school safety, and also fit into the five Mission Areas of Emergency Response, they should take a look at funding the School Resource Office program nationwide. None of the costs and none of the liability issues addressed in this blog would be taken on by the school district with the SRO program. The same can be said for the liability issues addressed in this blog.

Even with the SRO program, the law enforcement personnel assigned to the schools cannot be everywhere, and are not on duty at the schools 100% of the time. The SRO program is one piece of the preparedness Mission Areas addressed in PPD8. Infrastructure target hardening, planning, and training still have to be done to make schools as safe as possible. That all takes money, and we need the folks in government to step up and fund school safety grants and SRO grants so we can get this done. In a prior blog, I quoted a retired FBI agent who said on T.V. the government should cancel the proposed parade on Pennsylvania Ave. and divert the thirty million dollars that would cost into school safety to show how great our Country really is. That’s a good start, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ll buy that Agent a beverage of his choice if I ever meet him, because he gets it.

As I write this, I am listening to a town hall meeting involving the students, staff, and parents from the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. Ashley Kurth is the name of the brave teacher who gathered up twenty-five students in her classroom and kept them safe in a closet until law enforcement arrived. She made an eloquent statement during this meeting to one of her Florida senators regarding the President advocating the arming of teachers. Ms. Kurth said the last thing she would have been thinking about when sheltering those kids would have been going for a gun. She also said the first thing the police asked after breaching her classroom door and pointing guns at them was “Is anyone hurt?” The second thing they asked while still pointing guns at them was, “Does anyone here have a gun?” She said she was very glad she could answer NO to the gun question, as she understood there would have been a good chance she might have gotten mistakenly shot in the midst of the panic of the attack.

I am not an expert in Active Assailant response, but unfortunately Ashley Kurth is now an expert because she survived the unimaginable. We, and this includes our politicians, all need to listen to experts like her, because she has touched the flame we hope we will never have to. She’s been there and knows what works. Realistic recommendations that fit into the Five Mission Areas of emergency response, and government funding of school safety measures addressing those recommendations, will turn this thing around.

Stay Safe Gatekeepers…

Jeff Kaye President, School Safety Operations

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[otisgatekeeper-blog]

DESENSITIZATION TERMINOLOGY

The first St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened on February 14, 1929 in a dingy parking garage in Chicago. In that massacre, seven prohibition era gangsters from the George “Bugs” Moran gang were gunned down by rival members of the Al Capone gang. If this same thing happened between rival gangs today, we’d call it a “targeted hit” and it wouldn’t get much press. Yet 89 years later, the Chicago parking garage killings are still called a Massacre, and the suspects are rightfully referred to as murderers. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is still in the press at times, has been the subject of movies, and still evokes some rage emotion when we read about it.

The most recent St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened on February 14, 2018 at a very nice high school in Parkland, FL. Fourteen teen age students and three adult staff members lost their lives that day. Or as one student so passionately put it, “Our community took seventeen bullets to the heart today.” Fourteen other people were wounded by the killer inside the walls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that day. Seventeen dead, fourteen wounded, thousands of lives forever changed, and another blow to our society. This is being called a school shooting. 

The differences between these two deadly incidents are more than obvious. So my question is, why do I hear people including journalists, high ranking law enforcement officials, and politicians all the way up to the President of the United States call these senseless acts of violence “shootings”, and the perpetrators who rain death on the innocents “shooters?” We need to call these what they are. Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and all the other mass murder incidents are not school shootings. They are SCHOOL MASSACRES! The perpetrators are not in these heinous crimes are not active shooters, they are ACTIVE KILLERS!

An often asked question I get during training or speaking engagements is, “What is happening to our society? How have we become so desensitized to incidents of mass violence and murder?” I don’t have all the answers, but I have a couple ideas I’ll share with you. Anyone who cares about this topic and has not read my colleague Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman’s book “Assassination Generation,” should read it. It is an eye opener to the effects of violent media on our society and how violence becomes the norm, especially in teens. Excessive exposure to violent media causes desensitization. Violent media and video games are a problem, and also a commonality in juvenile mass murderers. We need to be aware of this information so it can be factored into behavioral risk assessment. Unfortunately, there is little we can do at our level to control this industry, as it is a powerful money maker.

We can have an immediate effect on desensitization in our society by starting today to change the terminology we use to refer to incidents of mass violence. As the late-great trainer Lou Tice said in his book “Smart Talk,” the brain does what we tell it to do, and then reacts accordingly. If we soften the terminology we use, this is what our brain hears and reacts to. For example, I myself am a “shooter.” I’ve been carrying a gun as part of what I do for a living for thirty-six years now, and sometimes I actually hit what I’m shooting at when I go to the range. I’m very active in the sport of target shooting, so that makes me an Active Shooter. When my brain hears that term, it associates with something that I am familiar with as not being bad, and does not react with the proper emotion.

I am not a killer or murderer. When I hear those terms, my brain reacts accordingly and I feel rage. I’ve dealt with killers and murderers during my career, so my brain is reacting to what I have programmed those terms to mean to me. Likewise, when my brain hears the term “shooting,” it associates the word with something I’m familiar with from my years of actually performing that act, and does not react accordingly. When I hear the terms school killings or school murders, my brain understands the impact of those words through past association with both of them, and I again feel the rage those words should evoke.

As a society, we should NEVER stop feeling the rage emotion that mass killings, especially killing of the innocent children in a school, should cause to us. Softening the terminology used for these senseless killings also softens the impact they have on us, and these killings can become the new norm in our society. Some of my training counterparts tell me the softening of the terminology is used so we don’t scare people, because as a society we can’t live in fear. I agree with not living in fear, and effective training should not evoke a fear emotion, as fear can negate the proper reaction. I call B.S. on the softening terminology part though. We need to feel the rage, because that is what fuels our fire as human beings. Not feeling the rage is what causes us to turn the page and move onto the next Washington scandal or another “top story” three days after the largest mass killing in the U.S. history on October 1, 2017. We don’t hear much about the Vegas massacre in the news anymore. Could this be because it’s still called the Las Vegas Concert Shootings and the perpetrator is still called the shooter? I don’t know, but maybe…

This is nothing more than a change in mindset on how we refer to these senseless acts of violence. To quote my training colleague Officer William Chapman from the Newtown, Connecticut Police Department, “We can change mindsets for free.” No one knows that better than Will, so listen to him and take advantage of advice on target hardening the mind that won’t cost you anything. We can start changing mindset through terminology today, and for free. Try this if you want:

Never again say Active Shooter. The term we like to use in our training is Active Assailant. It doesn’t matter if the perpetrator is using a gun, knife, car, or other weapon. If they are there to hurt people, our response is the same and our rage emotion should be there. We tried the term Active Killer in our training for a while, but we found it evoked a fear emotion in some folks, so it was detrimental to our training. Active Assailant works, and we’re changing that terminology in all areas of safety, including law enforcement. Change can be slow, but you can help speed this up by working with us.

Never again say School Shooting or Mass Shooting. If multiple lives are lost to an Active Assailant, the correct terms are school massacre, school murders, school killings, or mass murders. If no lives are lost in an Active Assailant incident, is still an Attack, not a shooting. We can save the word shooting for the range where it belongs.

We can turn things around, and we will. We are the greatest Country in the world, and we always prevail. As my training colleague Supervisory Special Agent John Callery says in his presentations, “things might get worse before they get better, but they will get better, and WE WILL WIN!” Never stop feeling the rage, allow the rage to fuel your fire to make a difference, never forget the lives lost of the innocents, and most importantly, never forget that each one of us can make a difference if we decide we want to. If you’re still reading this, you’ve already decided you want to. Thanks for that!

Stay safe Gatekeepers…

Jeff Kaye President, School Safety Operations

www.schoolsafety.com  

[otisgatekeeper-blog]

The Aftermath Experts

In the aftermath of every school massacre, so-called “experts” surface to express their opinions on what can be done to prevent mass killings and school massacres. This is once again the case in the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day school massacre in Parkland, FL. The news media has been parading the self-proclaimed experts and talking head politicians in front of their cameras to offer their opinions on what can be done. I am not an expert, and my opinions will not save lives. I am a school safety professional, and my job is to deal with facts, then put that information to use in planning and training for pro-active measures in school safety. It doesn’t matter what a person’s opinion is on the gun control debate, because the fact is the weapons that will kill tomorrow are already out there today. If we start with this fact, we can also start addressing realistic safety measures that can save lives.

The only real Active Assailant response experts today are the staff members and students who worked through and lived through the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. yesterday. We need to listen to their stories about what worked to save lives, and put that information to use for proactive school safety measures.

The quick actions of staff members who appear to have been well trained in emergency response saved lives in Parkland FL. Some staff members took action to get students behind locked doors and into safe rooms. No one behind a locked solid core door was killed in this massacre, and that remains a common fact in these incidents. Other staff members and students who had the opportunity to safely run from the attack to a position of safety, did so. This is also a tactic that has proven to be effective in school violence incidents. Some students and staff inside locked classrooms armed themselves with improvised weapons they could use to fight back in case the killer breached their locked doors. This shows a survival mindset, which is also an effective tool to be used in an Active Assailant attack. There is no right or wrong response; there is only action and inaction. The staff and students in Parkland, FL. chose to take action, and that life-saving choice was a result of pre-incident planning and training.

This school also has a policy to keep all classroom doors locked so staff doesn’t have to take the time to lock them if a lockdown becomes necessary. This can also save lives due to the time and fine motor skills required to lock a door after an attack begins. We saw the vulnerability of unlocked classroom doors during the Sandy Hook massacre. The fact the administration at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. took proactive actions to address the vulnerabilities associated with unlocked classroom doors pre-incident is also a tribute to their proactive planning and training programs.

We also have to take a serious look at infrastructure target hardening of our schools. Perimeter fencing and a secure single point of entry are recommended best practices for schools. It is impossible to keep every perimeter door in a large school locked during the school day, but if an unlocked door is behind a locked fence, the vulnerability of that unlocked door is mitigated. Having a monitored secure single point of entry as the only entry after the school day begins is also effective. If a person wants to get into a school do do harm, they’re probably going to get in. But if we can start the fight at the front entry and delay a suspect from getting into the school, the rest of the school has time to start taking action and law enforcement can be notified earlier. We only have to worry about the time between when a violent incident starts and when law enforcement arrives to take care of that problem. Anything we can do to make it harder for a suspect to get into a school and delay their access to students and staff will save lives. This is a proven tactic in facility infrastructure target hardening.

We make infrastructure target hardening recommendations when doing facility assessments at schools. We can target harden a school without making it look like a prison or having a detrimental effect to school operations. One just needs to look at photos of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School as proof of this. But 100% of the time when recommended target hardening projects are not followed up on, it is because there is no funding available. The U.S. Department of Education stopped funding the Readiness and Emergency Management for School (REMS) school safety grants in FY2010. There is little to no federal funding available to assist schools with target hardening projects, training, or funding of the all-important School Resource Officer programs. Funding is the biggest gap in school safety that needs to be filled, and we need help from the federal government to do that. We don’t need handouts, we need grant funding to assist with realistic projects for school safety. Planning, training, and infrastructure target hardening are the way to address the threats of school violence.

I did hear one post-incident interview after the Parkland, FL. school massacre I agreed with 100%. A news channel was interviewing a former FBI Agent who was talking about funding for school safety. He said, “Schools should have electric locks on doors, but there is no money for that. The government is getting ready to spend 30 million dollars on a two-hour parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, just to placate one man’s ego. How about we cancel that parade, move that money to school safety and teen mental health, and demonstrate our Country’s commitment to keeping our kids safe in their schools instead of demonstrating our military strength.” Makes sense to me…

Stay safe Gatekeepers.

Jeff Kaye

[otisgatekeeper-blog]

Marshall Law

Fire Marshalls play an important role in keeping our society safe from potential dangers associated with fire hazards. But the question that needs to be asked is when does their enforcement of some antiquated fire codes become detrimental to school safety instead of enhancing it? I'm referring here to enforcement of fire codes that are left up to the interpretation of the fire marshall when it comes to door security enhancement during school lockdowns.

Shortly after the Sandy Hook School massacres in December of 2012, the Department of Homeland Security recommended enhancing door security in schools. The recommendation was based on the fact that the children and two teachers who were killed in the attack died behind two unlocked classroom doors. The DHS recommendation was that any classroom door that could not be locked from the inside without opening the door and without using a key should be enhanced. Loss of fine motor skills during an attack can prevent someone from locking a door, even if they have the key in their hand. We saw this happen in Sandy Hook. DHS recommended barricading doors with heavy furniture as a last ditch effort to enhance door security in a lockdown due to a violent attack. The photo above of the door barricaded with chairs is a training photo. This door opens outward, so the barricade would not be effective. The other photo is an actual door barricade used by college students during the June 1, 2016 UCLA shootings. Even if these barricading systems worked, would the first graders in Sandy Hook have been able to erect them in the short time it took the killer to enter the unlocked door to their classroom? That question answers itself. 

Fire codes say doors in schools must be able to be opened from the inside with one motion, even if they are locked from the outside. There are some excellent door locks on the market that are compliant with this fire code and are able to be locked from the inside without a key, but most schools don't use them due to cost. So the question we faced in school safety after the post Sandy Hook DHS recommendations was how to enhance door safety to keep the kids safe, stay within fire codes, and accomplish this at an affordable cost?

The answer I came up with in my school district was to create "Safe Rooms" inside of the schools with enhanced door and window security. Shortly after the DHS recommendations, several door security devices hit the market. I began checking every device I could find, and didn't like what I saw. The devices I looked at didn't address my needs as most of them required opening the doors to engage them, required use of fine motor skills, could not be opened from the outside by emergency responders, or just didn't work on the types of doors in my schools. None of these devices were compliant with the aforementioned fire code, but then again, neither was the DHS recommendation about barricading doors. 

In July of 2013 I found a door security device called the Anchorman Anti-Crisis Tool (ACT). I am not affiliated with this company, but I use their product name here with the owner's permission. This device was designed by two of the most highly trained SWAT cops I have yet to meet, and had everything I was looking for in terms of door security enhancement for my safe rooms. It was well made, did not require opening the door to engage it, did not require use of fine motor skills to engage or disengage, could be opened from the outside by emergency responders using a special tool the company supplied to them, and could be engaged and disengaged in about 2-3 seconds by a person of any size. And in my interpretation of the fire codes, it was compliant. There is an exemption to this fire code that kicks in when a facility is used as a place of detention and not a public use facility. Safe rooms are not used unless a school is in lockdown and something bad is happening, so the school is now a place of detention. It made sense to me, but as I knew from my law enforcement career, common sense is not issued with authority and is often not used when enforcing codes or laws.

I started my safe room project in July of 2013 using the Anchorman ACT on doors and shatterproof window coatings on glass to create areas of safety to be used in schools during lockdowns. We started with the elementary schools first, as these are our softest targets requiring our maximum efforts to secure them. Parents thanked us for this and the local cops endorsed the idea. We worked with local law enforcement agencies so they could mark the location of safe rooms on their diagrams of the schools and work the concept into their Active Assailant Response training. The company supplied law enforcement agencies and the schools with the tool needed to open the door from the outside, and we also worked that into our lockdown planning and training. All was good, until a fire marshall came to town.

A local fire marshall and I disagreed about the interpretation of the fire code regarding opening a door with one motion. The irony here was this particular fire marshall was O.K. with the DHS recommendation of barricading the door with heavy furniture, even though that violated the same fire code and was not a viable solution to quickly securing a door during a violent attack, especially in a room full of kindergartners. This goes back to my prior statement about common sense not being issued with authority. The fire marshall ordered the security enhancement devices removed from the doors, but since fire codes are recommendations and not laws, I declined the order and continued with the safe room project. When assessing Hazards and Vulnerabilities, we look at frequency and likelihood of occurrance, and the intensity of impact a man made or natural hazard presents. We have not lost a child in a school fire in the U.S. since 1958, but we had just lost twenty-one babies and five adults to a school killer in Newtown Connecticut six months prior to our beginning the safe room project. After doing the math, I was reasonably certain there was a better chance of losing a child in a school killing than to a fire. Unfortunately I was correct in that assumption, so my decision to continue with the safe room project was based on the evaluation of the threat posed to children who can't get behind a locked door when bad things happen. It was also unfortunate that some fire marshalls did not agree with my assessment of, and response to, this violent threat to school safety. During the course of the next three years, we continued with the safe room project, installed more door security devices, never removed a single device, and I engaged in multiple and sometimes heated discussions with fire marshalls about code compliance of the project. One of those discussions occurred in a 2015 meeting were seven fire marshalls from the city, county, and state level came to my school district to "ask" us to remove the door security devices based on their fire codes. Not one of those fire marshalls knew about the exemption in their fire codes that allowed use of these devices during a lockdown, and they couldn't supply documentation that the devices weren't allowed for use during a lockdown. Not a single one of them knew how many babies we lost behind unlocked doors in Newtown Connecticut on December 14, 2012, but I let them know. I also let them know that when I heard the mother on one of those angels stood up at an Arizona conference, held up an Anchorman ACT, and told the crowd "if this was on my daughter's classroom door that day, she'd still be alive today," my decision was made that logic trumped antiquated fire codes in my schools. The fire marshalls left that day, and the door security devices remained.

My parting statement to the fire marshalls was that when they get together and write a code specifically saying the door security enhancements were illegal, I'd make sure they were removed. I would not personally remove a single device as I could not live with that decision if a child was ever injured because of it, but I guaranteed my school district would be in compliance with any such code. They told me that day that new codes addressing this at the state level "were coming down the pike." I don't see that day coming, because fire marshalls in other areas of my state of California, ones in many other states, and ones at the federal level have approved the use of these devices in schools to create safe rooms. I respectfully told them until they could get their house together and agree on this issue, my house would remain safe, because my house contains our most precious assets and we'll do whatever it takes to protect them.

I have the utmost respect for my colleagues in the fire services and have worked side by side with these brave women and men in countless emergency incidents, including ones where their life saving skills kept wounded cops alive. I mean no disrespect to them here, but I do ask each and every one of them to get behind our efforts to provide safety in our schools when it comes to locking them down when a bad thing is happening. The fire codes cited here were written in the 1960's. We didn't have killers coming to schools then, but unfortunately that has changed. Different tactics are used today in law enforcement to address active assailant threats. We've changed our tactics and rules of engagement, and it's time fire services took a look at doing the same. 

We're all in this together, and we all have a common goal. When I retired from my school district position in October of 2016 the safe room project was still in place, and the Anchorman ACT devices were still secured to the doors in safe rooms. I recently learned the same fire marshall visited my former school district and cited the same code to try to get them to remove the door security devices. He told them "there were new laws coming down the pike" that would address the use of door security devices. The fire codes had not changed since I started the safe room project almost four years prior, and neither had the wording of the fire marshall about new laws "coming down the pike." That idiom means soon to happen, and it is the same one they used with me in July of 2013. I do not foresee a code ever being passed that specifically prohibits use of door security devices, since they are recommended at the federal level. I do hope the fire marshall is correct that the codes will be updated in my state of California and elsewhere, but I hope those updates reflect proactive changes that approve the use of door security enhancements as long as there is a written plan for their use, accompanied by a training program. This is what we're seeing in other states, and it makes sense. In the meantime, we are deep in the fight to interject common sense into the application of these fire codes, and will never sacrifice the safety of our students based on a vague interpretation of an antiquated fire code.

The good news is proactive school districts, hospitals, and businesses throughout the U.S. are setting up safe rooms and practicing door and window security enhancement to protect against threats. I witnessed this firsthand when I was putting on training in a small school district in central Nevada. The superintendent had installed Anchorman ACT devices on every door in his four schools. These were older schools and some of the classroom doors couldn't be locked quickly. I stood in the hallway of the district's high school and asked the superintendent if he had any problems with the fire marshall when he had the devices installed. The superintendent told me the fire marshall's kids went to his schools, he wanted them safe, so there was no problem. As we say in emergency management and response, common sense is encouraged, but you have to learn how to use it. I saw it in use by the fire marshall in that small town when he made the determination between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law..

We read and hear over and over about people having to barricade themselves in rooms during random acts of violence because they can't lock the door. This was the case during the San Bernardino terrorist attacks on December 2, 2015. On June 1, 2016 the L.A. Times reported that "Thousands of students built makeshift barricades against classroom doors that wouldn't lock" during the UCLA shootings. On June 19, 2017 the San Diego Union Tribune reported that "students were quick to flip over tables and barricade doors when a student with a gun was reported in the area of Bonita Vista H.S. in Chula Vista, CA. The list goes on, but you get the point. Naturally, fire marshalls did not issue citations to any of these folks who were violating the letter of the law to stay alive. But if you ask any one of those persons who were behind barricaded doors if they would have traded belts and chairs for an effective and simple door security device, I'm sure you can guess what the answer would be.  

If there is a fire, the school won't be in lockdown and the door security devices won't be in use. Schools evacuate during a fire, and the fire department responds to put out the fire. Law enforcement responds to violent incident at schools, so why are we not getting their opinion and feedback on this? Fire marshalls are not citing folks for violating fire codes by barricading doors with furniture, even though it violates their codes. But ask any cop if they'd rather get inside of a classroom using a tool to unlock a door security device, or try to get through one barricaded with heavy furniture, you'll get the same answer every time. Seconds matter and can mean the difference between life or death.

As I mentioned at the start of this, it all comes down to individual interpretation of the law. Every cop, myself included, has dealt with that situation when interpreting criminal law based on a particular situation. For example, when I was a young motor cop in Reno NV, I got into a high speed pursuit one night that ended up with the car I was chasing crashing at a downtown intersection. It turned out that the driver was trying to get his wife to the hospital, as she was giving birth in the back seat of their car. As highly trained cops, we determined she was indeed in the midst of child birth when we looked into the car, as we could see her baby trying to make an early entry into the world. We did our thing, the paramedics did theirs, and they completed the delivery in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Mom and the baby were fine and no one got hurt in the wreck. The dad had been in a couple of scrapes with the law and figured he was going to jail. I remember him looking at me and asking if we could take him by the hospital before booking him so he could see his new baby. This one was a no-brainer for me and the other cops. I told the dad he wasn't going to jail and explained the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. One of my partners gave him a ride to the hospital and we left it at that.

I never gave that incident much thought, till about five years later when I was working a uniformed assignment at a University of Nevada Reno football game. I didn't recognize the guy who came up to talk to me, but he recognized me. It was the same guy who I chased that night while he was trying to get his wife to the hospital. He said he never forgot what we did for him and his family, or what I said about the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. He also introduced me to his five year old son named Jeffrey. Maybe the name was just a coincidence...

This is a true story I share with my fire service colleagues to show that no law is written in stone, and we're allowed to use common sense when interpreting the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Some of them get it, and some never will. Hopefully the ones who get it will be the same ones who can someday update fire codes to help us address threats of school violence. We won't give up the fight till the do. Stay safe...

Jeff Kaye  CY6 

[otisgatekeeper-blog]

The Unsung Heroes

I recently returned from six days on the road presenting school emergency response training to school districts and law enforcement in a few different areas of the Country. One of the questions that came up in these trainings is something I get asked often. That question is who from the schools should attend this type of training? The text book answer is every school employee should receive some level of emergency response training, as every school employee has an expectation under civil law that they will know what to do to care for those in their charge during an emergency situation. That being said, it is nearly impossible to get every school employee into a training class due to time and money constraints. Educators already have mandatory training related to their primary role in the schools, and principals are some of the busiest people I've ever met. So the question remains, who do we train in our schools and how do we get the time to train them?

It is a given under civil laws, education codes, and the principles of the Incident Command System under ICS 100 For Schools that the principal or their designee is always responsible for running an emergency incident at a school, and the superintendent or their designee is responsible for running a district level multiple school emergency. Law enforcement and fire services are there to support a school emergency in certain circumstances, but they are not going to take over school emergency procedures like locking down a school, internal and external communications, student accountability, basic logistical needs of students and staff, and the myriad other responsibilities needing to be addressed inside the campus during a natural or man made emergency incident. 

When I looked inside of my own school district for people who would be able to assist in an emergency event, I found groups that I consider to be the Unsung Heroes in school safety. A school's office staff is typically at the school all day and every day. I've found administrative assistants and school secretaries to have excellent critical thinking skills and an ability to multi-task due to the nature of the many hats they wear in order to carry out their daily duties. They are also unencumbered by the responsibility to care for students in a classroom during an emergency, so they have the flexibility to be placed in management positions in the school Incident Command System should they be needed. They will usually know all the students and parents at the school and will have a higher level of experience in communications, as talking to people is a big part of their job. 

Another group I've found useful to train in the school emergency response program are school custodians. They will typically have intimate knowledge of the school and information emergency responders will need if they show up on a school site. We always recommend formation of a team trained in light search and rescue at a school site in case a school has to be searched for missing students or staff members during an emergency. After a large emergency, a city or county Search And Rescue Team might not be available to respond to a school, and time delays in locating injured persons at a school could cost lives. What better group is there to train in light search and rescue than those that know every inch of your school site and where every emergency shut off switch is. Most counties offer CERT (Citizen Emergency Response Team) training for free, so school teams are a realistic possibility. 

School Counselors and Social Workers are also important to work into the school emergency response program. I recently presented to the American School Social Workers Association, and the majority of attendees I spoke to told me they were under used in the school emergency response programs. These are trained professionals with the ability to remain calm during a crisis situation, and also have excellent critical thinking skills. Also, I can't think of a better group of people to have at a school during the immediate post incident trauma response and the critical days following a traumatic school emergency incident.. Emotional trauma care is a large part of what they do, and they want to help.

These are just some of the untapped pools of talent we can use in both the school emergency response program and on school site safety. With a little bit of training, any of these persons can easily be plugged into the school Incident Command System structure at a school in order to assist with a successful and safe outcome. 

To demonstrate this point, I'll use a December 2009 multi-jurisdictional law enforcement gang sweep that took place in the area of several of my schools in the Coachella Valley area of Southern California as an example. Due to the close proximity of the law emforcement activity, eighteen schools had to go into lockdown during school drop off, which is one of the busiest time of the day. This was also the day of the district Christmas breakfast, so every school and district administrator was off campus or out of their office. If the boss is not on scene, they are of no use during an emergency and do not play a role in the School Incident Command System. Those 18 lockdowns were run by persons who I refer to as the Unsung Heroes. I was at some of those schools and debriefed with the others. These incidents were run by secretaries, crossing guards, custodians, maintenance workers, and many other school employees you would not normally consider school emergency management persons. These folks ran the incidents exceptionally well, and no one got injured or lost in the chaos that day. 

If we give these folks responsibility and some training to go along with it, they will rise to the occasion when needed. Or as my friend Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman says, "We don't rise to the occasion, we sink to our level of training to respond to the incident." Training is just as important as planning. How we get that training done in education is another common question I get. I'll hit that in my next blog, and this will be a topic on "Bridging The Gaps In School Safety" at our International School Safety Institute Symposium in Carlsbad CA. on October 11, 2017. We hope to see you there. Stay Safe Gatekeepers...

www.internationalschoolsafety.org www.schoolsafetyops.com

Jeff Kaye   CY6  ​

[otisgatekeeper-blog]

Shake Things Up

Let me start by saying this is not a political blog, but it does have to do with the newly proposed federal budget. If this budget is approved, 10.1 million dollars in funding to the U.S. Geological Survey will be cut. This would put an end to the Earthquake Early Warning System the USGS has been working on for years. This system measures P-Waves that are generated seconds before the actual shaking starts. Dogs and sheep can hear these P-Waves, but humans can't. That's why your dog will start barking just before a big quake starts. The USGS program is a little more sophisticated than depending on dogs or sheep for earthquake early warning, but it needs funding in order for it to work.

While working as Emergency Manager in my southern California school district, I held a seat on a sub committee for earthquake early warning systems in the Coachella Valley Association of Governments. We sat directly on top of the San Andreas Fault and were rated the highest risk area for earthquakes in California, so this was an important project. That was in 2010, and the earthquake early warning system is still not in place today. The reason for this is funding, and what little funding for research there was is now proposed to be cut. The stated reason is that the USGS should focus on programs that are already being used and not spend money on new research. In the world of safety, this type of reasoning is considered the definition of insanity.

An earthquake early warning system gives a 10 to 60 second warning prior to the actual shaking of a large earthquake (4.0 or higher) starting. That type of warning gives people time to react prior to the devastating effects of a major quake. How many lives can be saved in a major quake if people had this type of warning? Now let's look at schools and student lives, especially the younger and most vulnerable ones. If we can get them under desks, away from windows, away from outside power lines, and into safety before the shaking starts, we can keep them alive during a major quake.

We spend a lot of time and money preparing for an Active Assailant incident at schools, and rightfully so. We have to do our best to prepare for a violent incident, but the reality is there is a very small percentage of risk that an Active Assailant incident will occur at a school. In contrast, there is a 100% chance that a school will experience an earthquake at some point is you live in an earthquake prone area. Why would we not want to fund research into better preparing our schools for this type of threat?

The earthquake early warning system we worked with focused on schools as the main infrastructure. The concept was to install a quake guard alert system in each school at no cost to the school district, and then build on that infrastructure to expand to the private community. Protecting children in schools was the priority of the system, as that is where our largest and most vulnerable population is on any given day. Cutting funding to this type of research equates to cutting funding to school safety, and we can't allow that to happen.

The day after the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Congress approved 600 million dollars to fund infrastructure target hardening on federal court houses throughout the country. This was target hardening on buildings that already had some pretty good security systems in place. This funding was necessary, because we can't have another bombing like that happen again if possible. My question is why we don't use that same thought process to fund school safety? December 14th will mark the 5-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and yet we still have no federal funding for school safety and infrastructure target hardening to protect our children from this type of attack. Now we are looking at losing what little funding there was to protect our children from the natural hazard of an earthquake, that is not a question of if it will happen in a school, but a question of when it will happen in a school.

I've seen earthquake early warning systems at work in fire stations in my former home town in the Coachella Valley. My co-author Blake Geotz is a retired fire chief in Palm Springs CA. He had earthquake early warning systems installed in his fire stations so the roll up doors would open prior to the shaking of a major quake starting. If the fire station doors can't open after a quake due to damage to the building, then the fire fighters can't get their equipment out in order to save lives of people needing their help. The systems work, but they cost money to install them in schools. Getting kids to safety and automatic utility shut offs hooked up to the early warning systems will save lives in schools when a major quake hits. We can't allow funding to this type of research to be cut.

Every congressional representative has a contact section on their website. It is up to us to let them hear about funding needed in all areas of school safety, but especially about proposes budget cuts that will negatively impact school safety. I've invited representatives from our local congressional offices here in California to our October school safety symposium. Their reply has been positive, but they want to send people to speak to our audience. What I've told them is I don't want them to speak, I want them to listen. Hear what our presenters and our attendees are saying about what they need to train their staff and target harden their schools to protect our children from natural and man made disasters. What we need to do that is funding, and that has to come from the federal level. Don't cut it, fund it like they did for federal buildings on April 20, 1995, the day after the Oklahoma City bombings. Without that funding, we will never move forward in our efforts to make schools safer.

Farmers used to listen to their sheep to warn them about earthquakes. Having an earthquake early warning system in a school is much more reliable than putting a sheep in the school yard, and a lot easier to clean up after... Stay safe. Jeff Kaye   CY6

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#MemorialDay2017 #RememberandHonor

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Lines and Shadows

Lines on a map creating boundaries between cities, counties, states, and even countries can get in the way of school safety if we allow them to compartmentalize our efforts to remain proactive. School safety knows no boundaries, and neither do the man made and natural threats posed to it. If we don't pay attention to programs, procedures, and best practices that are working to keep schools safe regardless of where they are located, we cast a shadow over the efforts of all education safety professionals. Likewise, if we don't pay attention to man made and natural disaster incidents that occur at schools in other areas because they didn't happen in our backyard, we are creating a state of denial that can prove to be dangerous. Bad things sometimes happen, and they can happen anywhere, so we all need to look at these threats no matter where we live, work, or play. This past Wednesday a violent incident at a North Carolina High School was foiled by a heads up School Resource Officer who got information a student inside of a classroom was planning an attack at the school that day. When the student was pulled out of class, several large hunting knives, a water bottle filled with gasoline, firecrackers, and a hit list with 12 names on it were discovered in his backpack. It looked like he was ready to roll with his violent plan that day. Nice job by the officer, but we need to look further into where that information came from. The local law enforcement agency was contacted by law enforcement in Canada within minutes of them receiving information from a female teenage Canadian student, who saw the North Carolina student post information about the attack in an Internet chat room. 

These Canadian cops knew the lines of demarcation between the U.S. and Canada could not prevent them from doing what their training tells them to do, and that is to follow up the lead till they get to the source of the threat and eliminate it before bad things happen, no matter where that threat is. Canadian law enforcement, schools, and students are very well trained in areas related to threat identification and assessment, and what to do with this type of information when they discover it. I know this, because my training colleagues Theresa Campbell, Sam Jingfors, and their crew from Safer Schools Together out of Vancouver B.C. provide this training throughout the entire Country of Canada and in several areas of the U.S. I've been through their training, I've seen it work, and I used their programs exclusively in my Southern California School District from 2010 until I left that position in 2016. 

Much like the North Carolina case, in 2013 we were able to foil a similar violent incident at a high school in my school district, and get the 15 year old student/suspect mental health assistance before he came to school the next day to kill and be killed. As I understand it, this former student is now doing pretty well as an adult thanks to treatment. We did this through a Violent Threat Risk Assessment program brought to us three years earlier by our Canadian friends from Safer Schools Together. That particular assessment was generated by another heads up School Resource Officer, who had been through the training and was part of our Assessment Team. You see, we also have to eliminate organizational lines and work together with our community partners to make this proactive process work.

When I brought this program and an Anonymous Reporting Program into my Southern California school district from Canada, the first question my CBO asked when she looked at the contract was why I was bringing in a company from out of the U.S., because there's a little more paperwork for her office to fill out when that's done. I told her that these were the best programs out there, and they were having great success with them in Canada so we'd have the same success in the U.S. I said I'd also told the owner of the company they needed to stay on their "A" game, because if better training or technology came along, I'd fire them and bring in the new people. But for now, I said, let's just erase that imaginary line between the two countries and get something going that's going to save lives. She agreed, signed the contracts, and the programs were still going strong when I left my position. She was a very forward thinking individual, and she got it. We need more decision makers like her in the education industry.

Our training symposium draws and International audience and we use International presenters who are the best in their fields. Theresa, Sam, and people like them are saving lives across the world by identifying violent incidents before they happen. Violent Threat Risk Assessment, Digital Threat Assessment, and Anonymous Reporting tools coupled with target hardening, planning, and training are the way we'll turn the trend of school violence around. Case studies where these programs have worked, and tools you can use in schools and in law enforcement to keep things safe will be topics of discussion at our 2017 International School Safety Institute Symposium. You'll hear about them from Theresa, Sam, and other people who are actually out in the field doing them. We hope to see you there...

www.internationalschoolsafety.org

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Collaborative Efforts With Mental Health

I recently had the honor to present to a group of hard working school social workers and mental health professionals at the 2017 School Social Workers of America Association conference in San Diego, CA. My presentation included involving school social workers, counselors, and mental health professionals who deal with school aged youths in safety programs related to safe school culture and climate. These groups of dedicated professionals are often overlooked in school safety programs, because in education safety we are still in the reactive mode of planning and training for school emergency incidents. A violent school incident becomes a law enforcement problem the moment is happens. The information available leading up to the incident, early identification of at risk violent behavior, and intervention and diversion programs to get help for a student exhibiting at risk violent behavior are pre-incident responsibilities owned by the education system that add to a safe school culture and climate. 

The hard working and dedicated professionals who fill these positions in the education system are an untapped resource that can be used to enhance school safety. Including them in the management level of the school Incident Command System and on school safety committees is a proactive method of Bridging Gaps in school safety that are still not filled. Including these highly trained professionals in any program dealing with Violent Threat Risk Assessment, Anonymous Reporting tools used to report at risk behavior, and any post incident recovery programs geared toward a return to normalcy after a violent or traumatic school incident is crucial.

I am not the typical type of presenter this association brings in, because my background is in law enforcement and public safety. My good friend Dr. Steve Sroka and the association's Executive Director Rebecca Oliver asked if I could put something together for the conference, and I was glad to do so. In addition to presenting, I had a display table for the International School Safety Institute set up for the first three days of the conference. Some folks were initially hesitant to stop by, because having someone with a law enforcement background was, well, just different for them. By the end of the conference I was able to show them how important they are to school safety in their current positions, give them some tools they could take back to their schools with them to immediately start using, and I left that conference with about 600 new friends. The mantra for this attendees at this conference was to "BE THE CHANGE." I honestly think they can be, if we reach out to them and invite them into school safety and emergency management programs. Sometimes we overlook the obvious and miss what resources are actually available to us inside of our own organizations. It's better, and sometimes cheaper, to look inside before looking outside.

Stay safe, fellow Gate Keepers.

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Armor Your Emergency Planning and Training Programs

Cops don't use the term "bulletproof" for the equipment they wear to protect themselves when they walk out the door to put their lives on the line. They use terms like ballistic vest, body armor, ballistic helmet, or ballistic shield. The reason for this is that nothing they can wear or use to protect themselves is completely bulletproof. There is always a round out there that can penetrate or defeat body armor. For a cop to think that something is completely bulletproof would create a false sense of hope, and that could get them killed. Of course they still wear the Kevlar vest, but they know the real things that will keep them alive are critical thinking skills, planning, training, and then training some more. Ballistic vests also come in different protection levels. The lower the level of protection, the lower the cost. Most street smart and tactical cops I know spend the extra money for the highest level of protection they can get, because they know you can't put a price on a life and they are going to do whatever it takes to make it home safe to their loved ones at the end of their watch. Those of us in education safety need to use this same Warrior Mindset with our emergency management planning and training programs. There is no such thing as a bulletproof emergency plan, as there is always going to be a situation that can present itself that will penetrate the plan. You can be holding the best emergency operations plan in the world in your hands when a crisis incident hits, and the first thing you should do with it is throw it out the window so you can free up your hands to get busy with the life saving response you trained for. And if you did not train, you will not know how to react, because you built a false sense of hope around your emergency plans protecting you. And just like the cops spend the extra money to get the best protection out there, school districts should apply that same thinking to their emergency management and training programs. A school administrator reading about a cop getting killed because the body armor they were wearing was a Level II rather than the more expensive Level III-A which could have stopped the bullet, might think that cop was lax in their duty to protect themselves in order to save money. Cops use that same logic when they respond to a school tragedy where someone got killed or injured because the school administration cut corners in target hardening, training, and planning that could have saved lives, all in the name of saving money. Cops and educators have a lot in common, and the need to have the Warrior Mindset is one of them. We're all Gatekeepers and charged with protecting the innocents. That's why we chose our friend Otis as our Gatekeeper logo. Otis, like any good dog, is always in "Condition Yellow" and always aware, even when he's sleeping. The need for this mindset in education is why we give a Gatekeeper Award at our annual International School Safety Institute conference. To be eligible for the Gatekeeper Award, a school district or an individual school employee has to take something they learned in one of our training sessions and put it to practical use in their schools. The 2016 Gatekeeper District Award will go to the Pershing County Nevada School District, under the supervision of Superintendent Russel Fecht. The 2016 Gatekeeper Individual Award will go to classroom teacher Shayla Miller from the Virginia City Middle School in Storey County, Nevada. Two small school districts in a big state, but they went for the high level Warrior Mindset. We trained with them, but they made the decision to become Gatekeepers, and we can't teach that. The good news is this mindset is contagious, and we will keep it going in the education industry by getting groups of like-minded individuals together to train and talk about what works. You will be able to hear firsthand what these Gatekeepers did in their own schools to put some "armor" in their emergency management programs when you join us at the 2017 International School Safety Institute symposium October 11-13, 2017 in Carlsbad, CA. I hope to see you there. Stay safe and CY6... Jeff Kaye

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Tragedy averted . . . but new strategies needed.

Tragedy was averted in Trumont MD. this week when an 18 year old female student who had planned to kill students at Catoctin High School was identified through notification to police by her parent. A subsequent search of her room yielded a shotgun, ammunition, bomb making components, and a journal of how she planned to kill on April 5th. We know the threat of school violence is real, and we also know tomorrow's school killer is out there today thinking about it. Proactive methods of identification of persons planning school attacks is no different than methods used to identify terrorist sleeper cells. The parent of this student did the right thing by notifying police, but it is important to look back and see what was missed leading up to this so we can learn from that and use it for future prevention. As my colleague Sam Jingfors points out in his presentations, "the vast majority of school violence attacks have had precursors leaked on line in the form of social media. Knowing where and how to look for this critical information is the challenge to school safety and law enforcement." Providing students with an effective anonymous reporting tool, using a digital behavior violence risk assessment program, and coordinating an effective Violent Threat Risk Assessment program with law enforcement are proactive ways to Bridge Gaps in school safety and identify at risk violent behavior. The days of waiting for the killer to show up at the school before we take action are over. Proactive programs must be used daily in order to mitigate the threats to school safety and Stem The Tide Of School Violence.

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Thoughts and Prayers

Our thoughts and prayers are with our sisters and brothers in Great Britain after this mornings attack on Parliament. Their fighting spirit will get them through this. It always does. It is important to remember we are now in a 14 day critical period where we are susceptible to similar attack by imitators. We cannot live in fear, but this is a good time for all school administrators to review lockdown and Active Assailant response procedures with their staff and possibly schedule a lockdown drill. We call this Preparedness, not Paranoia. Stay safe...

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Otis, the Gatekeeper

Otis the Gatekeeper. Why a dog as the figurehead for our blog? Otis, the dog is the logo for our D4 Training connected to the bigger picture of planning safety programs for our schools. This is also the symbol for the Gatekeeper Award,��given to a school district and an individual who has attended our training during the course of the year, and then taken the training back to their district and done something with it to put it into practical use to enhance safety in their district. It’s pretty special to us because it means innocent lives are being saved. Why a dog? There's some symbolism here. He's guarding the gate to a school, and they called the first Roman Centurions the Keepers Of The Gate. I tell the educators that they are the new breed of Centurion at their schools so they are the gatekeepers. They love that. There is also a lot of yellow on Otis. Yellow is one of the 5 mental conditions and it symbolizes a state of constant preparedness. They say condition yellow is the state of mid dogs and predators live in, so they are always prepared for anything. That's another reason we used a dog in the logo. The educators can also relate to this in terms of constantly being aware of what's going on in their school. The last thing is the D4 medallion hanging around Otis neck. That stands for Detect-Deter-Delay-Defeat, which is a core concept of our training. So there's more to Otis than just another pretty face. You can see we put a lot of thought into everything we do. I guess you’d call this preparedness.