Murder in the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Prevention

By Robert Sollars

School violence can happen anywhere and at any time, in big schools and small ones, in big cities and small towns. The perpetrators can range from social misfits to seemingly nice, well-adjusted kids. But that doesn’t mean that we’re helpless to prevent, or at least minimize, school violence.

In this book, Robert D. Sollars, a security professional, describes the early signs of violence teachers and school administrators must look for. He discusses the need for changes to school buildings—from building layout to the type of door each classroom should have. He doesn’t limit himself to what schools should do; he also talks about what parents must do at home.

As he says in the Introduction, "These ideas will work for any size school or district. You have to tweak them for your own use, but they will work. I certainly believe that the lives of our children, the future of this country, are much more important than any ideological political arguments, left or right."

About Robert D. Sollars

Robert D. Sollars has more than three decades of experience in the security field. He has held various management positions at both national and regional security companies. He is also a prolific writer, having published more than 75 articles, and has appeared on radio and television. He has appeared in the media as an expert more than 150 times, including stints on two radio shows.

He has been involved with school violence since learning of an incident south of his hometown in 1988, in Mid–Buchanan School District in Faucett, Missouri. He began studying, researching, and writing about workplace violence in 1991, and is considered an expert in both areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Sollars
• Release date: Jun 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463250372

Book preview

Introduction

First of all, I want to inform you that I am not a law enforcement officer, nor have I ever been. I am not a psychologist or any kind of professional of that kind. I am a 35–year veteran of the security field. But I am not, nor have I ever been, your everyday guard or rent–a–cop.

I am a security professional, which means I have different rules than other people. The ideas presented in this book will be shocking to some and just plain weird to others. I have lived my career by doing things out of the ordinary and out of the box. With school violence, that is what’s needed.

This book is filled with quirky, innovative, and unusual ideas. Think what you want; I can guarantee that they will work.

Now, on to preventing violence in our schools and stopping the murder of our kids.

Ninety−nine percent of these incidents were of the threat variety. In more than half of those, the individuals making the threats had no way of carrying out those threats. Additionally, of those incidents, several were suicides on the school campus, and just as many were simple drive–by shootings aimed at the school or students.

It is unfortunate that every threat, no matter how benign it may be, has to be taken seriously by the school and law enforcement. If they don’t do so, then the result could be another Parkland, Florida.

To summarize that horrific case:

A 19–year–old former student walked into the school just before the final bell for the day. He proceeded to pull the fire alarm and get students into the hallway so he had a turkey shoot.

He tried to go to the third floor and act like the shooter in the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017 but couldn’t break the hurricane glass. He then mingled with the students running for their lives and got away, temporarily.

While listening to the news reports, I heard six of the warning signs. I don’t know whether the media were aware of them. Several other shocking behaviors emerged from this, as well.

The deputy assigned to the school hid in the parking lot and didn’t enter the school. The same was true of the first three officers to respond.

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI did nothing to investigate the numerous tips they received. I’ve heard there were as many as 45, many of them focusing on the predator’s potential to be a school shooter.

An entire book could be filled—and I’m sure one will be released by the end of the year—with explanations of what went wrong. Perhaps it will also focus on what went right, although so far I haven’t seen anything that went right.

Everyone wants to say something after a school shooting. Frankly, they are interested in nothing but media sound bites and kneejerk solutions that give everyone warm fuzzies. They give the appearance of doing something, but most of the time it is nothing but political grandstanding, lip service, and throwing money down the drain.

Nor should you believe the politicians who promise their constituents that they will stop at absolutely nothing to ensure it doesn’t happen again. That usually means spending hundreds of millions of dollars on items that are mostly useless in the real world. Most of what they promise is nothing but fluff, such as adding psychologists to every school, or child services to every police department in the state, or placing police officers in every single school. An example of this is the governor of Florida, who wants to spend literally $500 million to appease those who were shocked at what happened at Parkland High School in February 2018.

I can tell you from experience that these proposals for increased security and money simply won’t work as they are intended. How do I know?

When I went to work for the now defunct First Response, Inc. of Mission, Kansas in October 2001, they had clients calling them immediately after the attacks of 9/11, wanting extra coverage and new services. First Response turned most of them down for the simple reason that they couldn’t adequately serve them without everyone, including the office personnel, working 16 hours a day for weeks on end.

After six months or so, the extra coverage went away, and a lot of people were left unemployed, while companies scrambled to replace the extra coverage they had furnished, at a great profit for overtime. Why? Because the people at those companies got tired of the extra security. It was too intrusive and a pain in the butt. Other measures were instituted to keep them and the company safe if a terrorist attack occurred. I have no doubt it will happen again as kneejerk reactions dissipate and logic reigns.

Then you have the pundits, talking heads, news anchors, law enforcement, and others telling you that what needs to be done is complicated and hard. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is hard is getting everyone to actually listen to what needs to be done and then following through.

Everyone wants to talk about gun control, or no gun control. I am sorry to tell everyone out there that gun control is not the real answer. I will say a couple of words in this book about firearms, but I don’t want to make this a political book and argue about that aspect.

As a side note to that issue, I will never use the word gun if it can be avoided. I learned in my ROTC classes in 1975—thank you, SSgt. Gilbertson—that it is not a gun; it is a firearm or weapon. By calling it a gun, you are disrespecting the power that it has. If you call it a firearm or weapon, then you give it the respect it deserves as an instrument that can cause incredible death and destruction.

Some will consider the ideas I put forth in this book to be stupid, even idiotic. To others, it will make perfect sense to take a logical approach and not a kneejerk reaction to the issue. Mine is a logical, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary approach to preventing children being murdered in a place where they should feel safest next to their own homes.

I won’t go into the many aspects of the disciplines that are needed to accomplish this goal. I hope that by reading this book you will understand the other people who need to assist in this project. I have never taken anyone I have trained by the hand and led them from point A to point B to point C, and I’m not going to do that here, either.

The biggest emphasis of this book is where to place the weight of preventing these incidents. I do not lean on the government, police, or security. While they all have a part to play in preventing the incidents, it doesn’t primarily fall on them.

The onus of this prevention strategy falls on the following groups of people.

Parents

Yes, the parents. They should know their children and what they are planning. Children under the age of 18 have no privacy rights at home or with any devices the parents may have given them. It’s not up to the government to instruct children on right and wrong.

In February 2018, the Gilbert, Arizona school district stated that they were instituting a new office to help equity and inclusion for the students. This was instituted after a video showing some middle school students dancing to a rap video. This is an example of parents abdicating their responsibility, which is a big reason for these incidents as well.

Students

Teenagers and younger children are one of the primary indicators of what is going to happen. How? They need to be snitches—tattletales. They need to report to teachers, administrators, or someone else in authority if they believe something is wrong with another student. It is then up to the teacher and the administration to determine if this is serious or whether it is nothing. After all, who knows their fellow students better than other students?

We will discuss the warning signs later, but I want to inform you at this time as well, and I will harp on this throughout, that if a student is displaying four of the warning signs, you probably don’t have much to worry about. However, if they begin to show seven or more, I would force an intervention.

School Teachers and Administrators

The last group. They have to learn the tenets of this book and be willing to pass along what they are told and track it.

In Italy, Texas, in January 2018, a student at the high school walked into the cafeteria and shot a female student. The issue with this is that school administration knew about this student’s troubles for three years and did absolutely nothing to stop it, other than discussing him. This is the modern way of compassion, and it was obviously ineffectual.

Look at the underlying issues surrounding school violence, and you’ll notice that far too many times, school officials knew about a student who was troubled but did nothing but make a note to themselves. Many times, this is because the administration either doesn’t want the district to know they are having issues, or they are scared of losing funding.

The things I am discussing in this book may strike you as weird, quirky, and even unworkable. However, you will also find them creative, innovative, and absolutely workable if you allow them to be put into place. But you also have to give them a chance to work and not dismiss them because they don’t fit some ideology or agenda. It’s about the kids, not ideology or agendas.

These ideas will work for any size school or district. You have to tweak them for your own use, but they will work. I certainly believe that the lives of our children, the future of this country, are much more important than any ideological political arguments, left or right.

Lastly, will these ideas stop kids from killing kids at school? Have no illusions about it: They will not. However, they can prevent most of them.

Firearms are just one way to murder someone at school. There are innumerable items within a school that kids can kill each other with: scissors, lamps, stairs, and many different items in any shop class. Nothing can stop it all. For that matter, some will find a way to get a firearm past the metal detectors and officers or simply wait until after school to murder or injure another student.

One

The Tenets of Prevention

There are several tenets of preventing school violence that I discuss in this book. Each will be discussed in detail later, but I want to give you a look ahead at what they are and then leave it up to you to read, see, and implement them.

1. It can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

It doesn’t matter how small your school is; it can happen there. Firearms have been confiscated in schools as small as a couple of hundred students. Shootings have occurred in schools that serve an entire county—e.g., Red Lake, Minnesota.

2. Take responsibility and be accountable.

Parents must take responsibility for their children and what they do and not deny or freak out if someone accuses their teenager of doing something wrong. Likewise, schools need to be accountable for the things that they do or don’t do to prevent these incidents.

3. The CHH attitude

It can’t happen here. This is the most dangerous attitude that anyone within a school can have. It extends to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the school district officers. It means that they believe it can’t happen in their school.

4. We can either choose to act upon or ignore the warning signs.

If you act upon the warning signs, all 22 of them, then you may prevent an incident. There are no guarantees of this, but look at the warning signs that were ignored by the sheriff’s office and FBI in Parkland, Florida.

5. Warning signs

If you see as many as four of the warning signs in a student or teenager, then you probably don’t have to worry. But if you begin to see seven or more, it may be time to worry and take action.

6. Hold the school accountable for physical security.

A parent doesn’t need to know every security measure that the school has in place, but they do need to know if measures are in place to protect their children. The schools should know what measures they need to have and then take the initiative to install or implement them, without costing the taxpayer millions of dollars on elaborate ideas when simple ones would work just as well or better.

7. Training

Most schools have an active shooter plan but are afraid to run drills for fear of alarming parents and students. They are afraid to upset the mentally and psychologically fragile teenagers we seem to be raising. By upsetting them, they risk having a parent filing a lawsuit because their little angel was traumatized. They would be traumatized worse if an incident occurred.

8. Use the fight, run, or hide method.

This is contrary to everything you have heard about an active shooter incident. But as I will explain later, it will prevent your teenager or child from becoming prey to an active predator that walks on two legs and carries a weapon.

These are the basic items that you need to learn in this book. All of it is included, although as I said above, parents don’t necessarily need to know all of the security measures. They just need to be assured that security policies and procedures are being followed to the letter, every single minute of every single day.

As for the schools, don’t try to fool us. Some parents will accept anything you say as gospel. But there are parents who are savvier or even paranoid. Some, like me, have a distrust of anyone who is playing politics, which includes principals, district officials, law enforcement, and other government officials.

Two

Myths of School Violence

There are a great many myths concerning violence in our schools. And that’s exactly what they are, myths. In subsequent chapters we will address all of these myths, although not under the heading of a myth.

What are these myths I’m talking about? They are the founding premise in the handwringing that we as a society do every time we have a shooting at a school.

Keep in mind that there have been other lists of this type. This list is not all–inclusive and counts several different myths together that others have counted separately.

Myth #1: He didn’t fit the profile.

Let me be clear in deflating this myth. There is no absolute profile! While other types of violence can be profiled, such as workplace violence, there are no absolutes for violence in our schools.

Not all school shooters are loners, losers, druggies, or other crazies. Violence in our schools is committed by virtually every category of student—white, Asian, A student, former student, those who dress goth, and those who dress like preppies.

The only differential in school violence incidents is that the overwhelming majority of incidents—90%—are committed by males. While females have committed such crimes, they seem to be able to control their hormones and anger better than testosterone−laden male students.

Myth #2: They just snapped.

No one ever just snaps, even if it appears so at first. There are always warning signs, discussed later in this book, to tell us what is likely to happen, or at the very least tell us that a teenager needs help.

As I will say several times in this book, the warning signs are always there. The key is whether we ignore them or act upon them. We have all seen how any type of behavior is dismissed because that’s just them, or they are going through some stuff. We have to pay attention to our teenagers, family, and others to see the problem. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

Myth #3: No threats were ever made.

Threats can be made in any number of ways. It doesn’t have to be a finger−pointing, chest−thumping, screaming, drag−them−away type of incident to cause a threat, although these do occur.

As you’ll see later, there are four types of threats. They range from silent to subtle to out−and−out threats. But just because a threat is not specifically mentioned doesn’t mean that one wasn’t implied.

Myth #4: If only we had…

We can never protect our schools to an absolute degree of security. Just because we have metal detectors doesn’t