School Insecurity: A Comprehensive Guide for Parents and Educators on School Security, Protecting Your Children, and Fostering a Safe Learning Environment

By Wayne Black

 

The must-have school safety guide for any parent and professional ready to make a change

Is your child safe at school?

Who makes the decisions about your child’s safety and security when you send them off to school each day? What does a truly safe school look like? Does your school have an adequate security plan? How can we prevent the unthinkable? It's time to talk about what the parenting books don't teach you: the unmentionable events that occur in US schools every year and how to try to prevent them with invaluable information.

Every time you turn on the news, it seems like there is another active threat on a school in the United States. From Columbine and Uvalde to Parkland and Virginia Tech (to name a few), these unimaginable attacks have brought death, severe injuries and mental trauma upon too many of our country's precious children and teachers. It is 100% certain that another school shooting will occur, yet many people still deny that it could happen at their school. This is a dangerous normalcy bias that puts lives at risk. If it’s predictable, it’s preventable. Just when you think it can’t happen here, it does.

In this comprehensive guidebook for parents and professionals, Wayne Black utilizes over forty-five years of security experience in both the private and public sectors to educate you on:

• Who is responsible for your school’s safety and security
• How to talk to the school board and administration about security policy
• The most effective physical safeguards for preventing an attack
• How to detect and report observable concerning behavior
• The role of security and law officers in schools
• Easy-to-follow pathways for you to push for positive change when and where it is needed plus simple, helpful checklists to quickly assess school safety

It’s time for parents to get involved in their children’s safety at school. In the words of Lori Alhadeff, a parent who lost her daughter at Parkland and founder of Make Our Schools Safe, “Your voice is your power.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Viva Editions
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781632281463

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Why Are We Doing This?

When you walk into your child’s school, what do you see? The bobbing heads of children moving down the hallways, teachers standing in doorways smiling as students pass, bright fluorescent lights, hand-painted posters on the walls advertising an upcoming dance or student body election. You hear the chatter and laughter and the happy commotion of the life your kids live every day when they’re away from home.

When I walk into a school to do an assessment, I see something more ominous: a dark figure holding a gun standing at the end of the hallway, crouching in a stairwell, peering out from around a corner. I look at the bobbing heads of the students and the smiling faces of those teachers and ask myself: Where will they run to, what will they do, when that dark figure steps into the light . . . and fires? This is my continuing nightmare, but it is what drives me to write this book and to keep trying to convince those in charge to harden schools as potential targets.

I’m a security specialist with over forty-five years of professional security experience in both the public and private sectors. I currently own a company called Wayne Black & Associates, Inc., through which I provide threat assessments and training to schools all over the country, along with other susceptible spaces like hospitals and synagogues, churches, and other houses of worship. I also provide special firearms training for security teams and law enforcement focused on defending a school or house of worship. So, when I visit a campus or a building that houses hundreds if not thousands of young lives, my immediate instinct is to check for their security and safety. My mind just goes there; I cannot help myself.

Security professionals know that there is a one hundred percent chance of another school shooting in this country. Let me repeat that so it really sticks in your mind. There is a one hundred percent chance of more school shootings in this country. And as long as we keep saying and publishing the names of the monsters who kill our children, the copycats will keep coming out of the woodwork. Instead of making these killers the topic of the next prime-time special, we need to focus our energy on securing our schools to the point that possible attackers are dissuaded from even trying. I have a saying in regard to security: if it’s predictable, it’s preventable. Many of these kinds of attacks are predictable. So, why aren’t they being prevented? We will explore that in detail in this book.

Active shooter, or active killer, incidents in this country and others can be traced back decades. There are countless instances throughout history where a disturbed individual has sought out innocent victims to murder. These incidents are not typical to a specific location or specific group of people. These types of mass murders have occurred in educational institutions, on military bases, at businesses, at public gatherings, and in places of worship.

In all of these incidents, many lives were affected in the wake of the destruction caused by the murder of innocent people. The other thing that has been affected and changed is law enforcement’s response to such incidents. Law enforcement response plans had to change in order to keep up with the instant danger and the need to neutralize the threat as soon as possible. And there is that old saying, When seconds count, police are minutes away.

From 1999 to 2022 in the United States of America, 169 lives were lost in mass school shootings. Most of these were children. They are not just statistics, numbers read on the news to shake your head at and hope things get better someday. They are someone’s son or daughter, sister or brother, cousin, best friend, parent. Only hours before a gunman opened fire at their school, they played on playgrounds, took geometry tests, planned birthday parties, and looked forward to college or summer vacations. Their parents hugged them goodbye that morning, never in a million years thinking it would be their final goodbye.

It won’t happen here, you might be thinking. This is a safe area. Our kids go to a good school. Maybe you even bought a house in that neighborhood because you were told it’s a good school district. But what does good mean? Just because your school hasn’t been attacked doesn’t mean it won’t be. In my world, this is known as a false positive in security. Just because we have not had an incident or an attack, we think that we must be doing something right. It’s a false and dangerous assumption. The parents, students, and administrations in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde thought the same way. They had never experienced a mass shooting at their schools . . . until they did.

It’s exactly this kind of normalcy bias that lulls us into complacency, and it’s this kind of complacency and denial that sometimes prevents schools from implementing the tools and the plans necessary to keep our children safe in the case of the unthinkable.

As parents, we send our children off to school to learn and to grow. We rely on the school to keep them safe and healthy. We expect, at the very least, that they will come home at the end of the day. But how do we really know they are safe? Who, exactly, are the people making the decisions about your child’s school? Are these people actually security professionals? And how committed are they to keeping your children safe from a potential shooter or other criminal activity? And do they even know what they are doing in terms of school safety and security? Do you know the right questions to ask?

You have every right to ask these questions of your school administration and learn what is being done to keep your child safe.

It’s time for parents to get fully involved before it’s too late. Because just when you think it can’t happen here, it does. Stand up now for your child! The side with the best plan wins.

What does that mean? It means that if the school’s plan for security is better than the killer’s plan, the school wins, and your children will be safe. However, if the potential killer’s plan is better, and the school has weak security, the killer will surely succeed. Know this: in most school shootings, the active killer initially controls the environment. This is what we want to change.

Do You Know the Answers to These Questions?

It’s okay to have some level of trust in your school’s capability to make sound decisions for the education and safety of your children, but that doesn’t mean you should not ask important questions you don’t know for certain that their program is up to par.

If you didn’t know what they were being taught in health class, if they were getting lunch every day, or if their math teacher was actually teaching them math, you’d be uncomfortable with that. Wouldn’t you? So, it’s time to step outside your comfort zone and start asking some hard questions about your child’s safety:

•Who is in charge of your school’s security? What is that person’s background? If the answer is our security committee, there is a problem.

•Does your school have a secure perimeter? Is there an entry gate or checkpoint, and is it enforced?

•How does your administration feel about armed police officers or armed security guards on-site?

•Are local police invited to visit the school and train at the school property after hours?

•What’s your school’s relationship with local emergency-response teams? When was the last meeting at the school? Do fire and police have master keys to the school?

•Do police and fire have a detailed drawing/blueprint of the school?

•What is your school’s plan for an active threat?

•How much money does your school allocate to safety and security? What is the yearly budget for security? If you hear, We don’t have a budget for that this year, ask, What is your budget for travel to conferences?

•Does your school have a policy for reporting observable concerning behavior (OCB), also known as red flags?

•What is your school’s policy on bullying? Is there a written policy?

•Does your school monitor/restrict student Internet activity?

•Where is your school’s reunification location for parents?

•Does your school have walkie-talkies or portable radios for everyone on staff?

•Does your school have a locked-door policy for its classrooms?

•How is your school staff trained for emergency situations?

•Does your school have enough trauma kits and tourniquets on hand? How many do they have?

•Does your school health center stock Narcan?

•How are visitors to the school received and managed?

Do you know the answers to these questions? If not, it’s time to ask your school administrator, principal, or headmaster. If they don’t know the answers to these questions, either, or they don’t want to tell you, then you likely have a safety and security problem at your school and it’s time to make some immediate changes for the health and safety of your children.

Red Flags Indicating Your school May Have Security and Safety Issues

There are very few perfectly safe schools in this country. As a matter of fact, I’d posit to say there are none that are perfect, because there are always human factors involved, and those factors are so variable. But there are quite a number of schools that come close. On the other hand, there are a great many schools that have a very long way to go to protect the students and staff within their boundaries, mostly because the administration is in denial. It’s time to take a critical look at your school through the lens of this list:

•If there is a security committee rather than a security director or full-time police officer at your school, you might have a security and safety issue.

•If there is an excuse like, We don’t have much money for security in the budget when asked about particular aspects of security, you might have a safety issue.

•If you hear comments from school leaders like, We don’t want to live in fear or We want to have an open campus or We have never had a problem at this school, you might have a security and safety issue.

•If you hear, Our IT department is in charge of security or We don’t want police on campus because they may frighten students,