On March 27, 2023, a mass shooting occurred at The Covenant School, a private Presbyterian Church in America parochial school in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee. Six people—three children and three staff members—were killed. Again, what are we really going to do about it besides point fingers?
When parents drop their kids off at school, the expectation is that at the end of the day, they will be returned home safely.
The Mirror has brought this up for several years–stopping a determined bad actor is difficult, and requires a systems approach to school physical security. There are specific elements such as security equipment and technology (detection devices, smart cards, two-factor entry points, etc.), site and building design, people and personnel, policies and procedures, and training and exercises. There is no one size fits all so this is a layered security approach. Protection and mitigation is built into the policies, procedures, and training developed around school physical security. The key is to tie together people and personnel with equipment, technology, and design choices to build a coherent system. Not just physical, the layered approach includes elements of school violence prevention, such as student mental health and school climate (emotional/cultural environment), as well as emergency response and recovery efforts. This is a full-time, very difficult thing to implement, and it’s not free, so the expense will need to be weighed against the risk.
Such plans have four key elements, all of which work together to improve safety and security for students and staff:
- Awareness—You need to be aware of potential threats and incidents. A strong school safety culture begins with students and staff enjoying a strong sense of belonging in their school and “ownership” of that community. This can then be leveraged to increase safety through clearly identifying visitors, ‘See Something, Say Something’/check-in policies, and a norm of quickly responding to any staff or student concerns.
- Training—Regular fire and weather emergency drills have proven the value of training students and staff in emergency response. Evacuation, lockdown, and assailant response procedures should similarly be regularly rehearsed.
- Access Control—97% of all public schools have some sort of access control in place. This includes exterior doors with electric strikes, cameras, a guard, etc.
- Physical Security—These are the bullet-resistant barriers, windows, panels, doors, and frames that integrate your access control, awareness, and training into a cohesive security response
On the Mirror Facebook page, we posted, “Growing up in Great Bridge (Chesapeake) kids would have guns in their trucks during hunting season. There were plenty of guns out there–we shot them all the time and it was pretty normal. But we did not see school shootings, or hardly any rando active shooter events (there was the Austin tower thing, but that was so weird and rare). Now, it seems like it is becoming a regular thing. What changed?”
We received a very insightful comment from a reader:
Violent video games, parents not parenting and letting their children have free reign on what they want to watch, broken homes, broken marriages, no fathers in children’s lives and or mothers, youtube, parents not storing their firearms properly in a safe where only they know the code to access the safe. Lack of access to mental health care. Lack of accountability for people and their actions. Removing the death penalty for capital punishment, lowering the prison time for crimes, getting parole early after violent crimes have been committed. Basically turning our judicial system into a joke that benefits the person who committed the crime and no longer serving the ones who have suffered from it. The list goes on.
Lastly any weapon can kill someone. Just because it kills children doesn’t make it an assault weapon. What is next? Will we try to ban knives, baseball bats, rocks, building materials, “legal” drugs and alcohol and or cars that kill people? It is the user of that “weapon” that decides how it is used. I will remind you a weapon is an inanimate object, it has no feelings or thoughts, it is the user that decides how that weapon is used. The user is the assaulter, not the weapon. People need to stop blaming the instrument used to commit crimes and look at the person using the instrument. That is the problem.
About the Author
Identified mental health issues make assistance available to folks in need help with substance addiction identification and aid with the need for use
Are there enough professional counselors or centers available there is not a blanket solution as each case is a individual