Imagine a student in your high school today turns out to be an alleged international terrorist five years from now.

“New Jersey Jihadist wanted to mutilate gays, blow up high school as troubled teen” was the NY Daily News headline on Tuesday afternoon.

School: NJ terror suspect was dangerous as student blazed across the Associated Press wires.

Both stories highlighted how one of two terrorism suspects arrested at JFK airport over the weekend was removed several years ago from his New Jersey high school due to his potential danger.  According to North Bergen High School spokesman Paul Swibinski:

“School officials were very concerned about having him in the building,” Swibinski said. “They were concerned for the safety of the other students and the staff.”

The male was reportedly placed on “home instruction” according to the stories.

A number of school safety issues and questions arise from this story:

1. What would your school leaders do if they developed reasonable suspicion that a student had truly terroristic intentions?
2. What should officials do if they have a student or students enrolled in their school whose family members are arrested in connection with alleged terrorist plots?
3. Has anyone considered the possibility of terrorist cells including teens planted as students at an American high school?

While these questions sound far fetched, the only thing that is certain today is that nothing is certain today. 

I first raised the issue of a terrorist threat to schools in my 1998 book, Practical School Security.  I have also forced the conversation on schools as potential terror targets at a time when most were, and still are, uncomfortable in discussing the issue.  Several related posts (see below links) have also appeared in this blog.

The good news from one of Tuesday’s story is that one of the schools of the recently arrested terror suspect reportedly had contacted local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security regarding the student in question.  Concerned educators should always report their safety concerns to law enforcement when they feel there is a threat to the security of their students, staff, and school.

We should not be paranoid, alarmist, or seeing terrorists around every high school hallway.  But out of fear of alarming parents and creating public panic, our nation’s leaders and education leaders have downplayed and neglected the issue of terrorism and schools.  The Beslan Russia school terrorist siege of 2004 should have changed the conversation, but at best it only did so for a very brief time.

Have you given any thought to schools as potential targets for terrorism? What would your school leaders say if they were faced with the above questions?

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

A Portland second-grader missing from his elementary school has triggered a search, parent anxiety, and questions over elementary school security.

Last Friday, second-grader Kyron Horman disappeared from the halls of Skyline School in Portland, Oregon.  He was last reportedly seen attending a science fair with this stepmother.

During an interview on the incident for a story with The Oregonian’s Betsy Hammond, I noted:

 ”That would be the first place that would be logical to expect investigators to pursue and rule out: Is there a custody or family dynamic outside of the school itself?” Trump said. “That is certainly not to say there have not been instances of strangers” taking kids from schools. But he said there are at most a handful of U.S. cases each year.

In our school safety assessments around the nation, administrators and safety officials at the high school and middle school level often focus on student-on-student aggression and violence.  At the elementary level, the first conversations (after parent pick-up and drop-off traffic congestion) typically focus on non-custodial parent related safety concerns.

In the Portland case, there are currently no reports of foul play by anyone in the child’s family.  The student was reportedly last seen by his stepmother walking down a hallway just several hundred feet from his classroom after the boy and his stepmother attended a school science fair. 

So if the investigation turns out to show no custody or family issues, the focus will continue to zero in on school security procedures, potential stranger abductions from a school, student “walk-aways,” and related issues.

Oftentimes, our conversations on these issues end up  on one of the most important aspects of school safety:  Supervision, supervision supervision.

Are there any supervision and/or security gaps at your elementary schools?

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

Everyone has jumped on the “bullying bandwagon.” 

People in education, state legislatures, Congress, the media, and elsewhere  love to focus on a single, hot topic issue and then a single, trendy attempt at a response. The education profession is also notorious for fads (or what I call “edu-fads”), such as the current fad of firing teachers and principals in mass in the name of “reform” and “accountability.”  The single issue, edu-fad in school safety today is “bullying.”

Bullying: The Edu-Fad of the Year in School Safety

The U.S. Department of Education’s top school safety administrator, Kevin Jennings, has been clear in making bullying his priority.  In response, we have seen a lot of the education associations, government agencies, and other advocacy groups jumping on the bullying bandwagon.  Many do so out of  legitimate concern about bullying, but many are also saying what they think (or know) those in powerful positions (the U.S. DOE, Congress, etc.) want to hear as a part of the politically-correct trend of the day.  

It’s also easy for legislators, whether in state legislatures or Congress, to beat the drum for anti-bullying laws requiring schools to have anti-bullying policies and reporting procedures.  The vast majority of these enacted and proposed laws have been unfunded mandates.  So what is to lose for the politicians — and how could any of them ever stand against the proposed bills?  No politician wants to be anti-anti-bullying, right?  

Several recent news stories have stated that bullying is more pervasive than any other form of school violence.  School safety advocates, such as Kevin Jennings, have more narrowly stated that bullying is more pervasive than other forms of harassment.  I think it sends the wrong message when reporters and others state or imply bullying is greater than any other form of school violence. School violence encompasses bullying, but a lot of other issues as well.

The Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, didn’t say that bullying was the most pervasive school violence problem in Chicago when kids were getting killed to-and-from school. In fact, the Chicago discussions often focus on gang and other community violence.  The U.S. Department of Education responded with a big media press event with the Secretary and Attorney General, and then stimulus money and federal school crisis recovery money (Project SERV) dollars were thrown at the issue. 

In the Cleveland Municipal School District, stimulus money was thrown at school safety to create family liaison social workers at the beginning of this school year in order to deal with family and social service needs, not bullying. This quick-fix program also didn’t last the full school year.  The decision to cut the program’s funding was reported several weeks ago.

Both of these examples reflect a far too common approach to school safety:  Message, policy, and funding by anecdote (and politics).  They certainly don’t reflect a comprehensive, balanced, and sustained approach to school safety.

Bullying: One Component of a Comprehensive and Balanced Approach

Bullying is an issue.  I’ve said in my Congressional testimony, presentations nationwide, and elsewhere that bullying is an important issue requiring awareness and action.  I have related even related how it has hit home personally to family members, friends, and others who have personally shared with me their children’s bullying experiences. 

But bullying is not the only issue in school safety any more than gang violence, drug use and abuse, weapons, emergency/crisis management, SROs, or anything else is the only issue. 

Bullying and its response needs to be framed from a comprehensive and balanced perspective.  As a school safety problem, it must be framed as a problem in context with all other issues threatening school safety.  Anti-bullying efforts must be framed in the context of where they fit into a comprehensive and balanced approach to school safety policy and funding. 

We have lost the focus on the COMPREHENSIVE and BALANCED aspects of approaching school safety.  It is missing in the message, which in my opinion needs to come from the federal and state departments of education, the education associations, and from local school districts.  And it is missing in policy and funding from the U.S. Congress down to state legislatures and many local school districts. 

I encourage all school safety advocates, regardless of our particular specialty areas of interest and advocacy, to work to send a consistent framing of school safety problems, policy, and funding in a comprehensive and balanced approach.  This has to be reflected in message, policy, and funding.  This is the only way anti-bullying laws and programs, or any other school safety effort, will be effective.

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

School leaders often believe they have a school safety risk or liability in one area, when they are really much more vulnerable on entirely different issues.

We know superintendents and school boards can tell when they have a hot-button issue related to school safety.  Increasingly, these issues are triggering parental, media, and/or other pressures on school leaders.  These often result in my colleagues and I being hired to help educators solve both the safety issue and the school-community relations (translated: political) aspects of the issues. 

Differences Between PR, Safety, and Liability Risks

But it is not uncommon for us to find that the issues creating school-community relations and political problems may not necessarily be the same issues posing substantial security and legal liability risks to the school district.

For example, while school officials in one city where challenged with concerns and calls for metal detectors after weapons confiscations, our assessment found much greater concerns and liabilities with training and staffing issues in the district’s security department. 

In another school district, we were hired for the primary purpose of addressing an issue educators believed would involve physical security issues.  After our first round of interviews, we found greater concerns around school emergency planning gaps and much fewer physical security needs.

And in many districts, we often find huge gaps between written school board policies and district crisis plans, and what actually is in practice on a day-to-day basis in the schools.  These gaps expose school leaders to not only safety risks, but also to potential liability risks.

School Safety Liability Lessons Learned 

We increasingly find two common themes:

1. There is often a difference between a school-community relations school safety problem and a greater liability with actual school safety practices in a district. Both must be addressed, but the “real” area of concern for school leaders may not always be the one where they initially think they are most vulnerable.
2. Oftentimes we find schools are not doing what they say they are doing.  Their policies, procedures, and plans say one thing, but day-to-day practice is much different.  The gap between paper and practice poses substantial safety and liability risks in many of these situations.

Do you really know your greatest school security liabilities?

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com