And oh, by the way, did we mention there was also a hurricane in the region?

National School Safety and Security Services had the privilege of being selected by John Franklin, the district’s transportation general manager, to provide specialized security training for more than 100 drivers including those drivers transporting children through the security footprint of the Republican National Convention.

Political convention brings tourists, money, international attention — and security risks

Law enforcement officials expected up to 10,000 demonstrators to protest during the convention. While most were expected to be orderly in their protests, a small percentage posed the potential to be anarchists and others posing a higher security risk.

What type of risks might a high-profile event bring in terms of highly disruptive protesters or even lone wolf actors who might capitalize on a national security special event with international attention? Well, just about anything from acid-filled balloons being thrown to bus hijackings and more.

And it didn’t help that the night before our training, two school buses had been stolen off of a school lot.

I forgot to mention that the convention was also being held less than one week after the school year started.  So drivers were just resuming their routes, meeting new students, and gearing up for the start of another school year.

Training focused on empowering drivers, fundamentals of heightened awareness and security

Our approach to the training, regardless of these multiple dynamics and challenges, was to empower the school bus drivers. I wanted them to leave the training recognizing that they know their buses, students, routes, and environment better than anyone else.

It was also important for them to appreciate the valuable asset they have with their school police department, which provided officers on board units driving in the convention security footprint to help drivers through Secret Service checkpoints and with communications on safety matters that might arise during their trips.

Reducing the fear of the unknown contributes to reducing the anxiety that comes along with high-profile, intense circumstances. So our discussion included the potential motivations of the small percent of possible disruptive demonstrators, the importance of balancing heightened awareness of outside threats with the day-to-day student behavior issues that might arise, specific security threats and preparedness, and the fundamentals of heightened awareness, security procedures, and emergency response.

National special security event provides lessons for other communities

This experience was also a learning experience for others. A number of “lessons learned” quickly came to light:

1. There is never enough communication among parties involved in a major special security event. There are always small details that arise and evolve that can determine the overall success of a major event.  Ongoing planning and communications can make or break the effectiveness of large event security.
2. Issues that would normally be minor issues can be major issues in a special event. For example, driving with windows down on a hot Tampa day might not be a big issue under normal circumstances. But with protesters in an area who could throw acid-filled balloons or explosives into the bus through an open window, driving with the windows up while inside the security footprint of a major event may become mandatory.
3. Redundancy in planning is a good thing. Training all of the regular drivers for routes in the footprint of a major event is important. But also training potential sub-drivers and having them available should a regular driver be sick or injured is smart planning.
4. School support staff, teachers, and administrators understand education protocols. Law enforcement understands law enforcement protocols. The priority concerns of each group involved in the same major event may be very different. Talking through these concerns, working together, and remembering that safety is the number one priority must occur.

There are numerous other training points and lessons learned  from this event.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that with good security comes inconvenience. If you don’t have inconveniences, you don’t have real security.

The school police department’s genuine concern about working with the drivers to minimize their inconveniences while adhering to certain procedures that had to occur in order to reduce potential safety risks was commendable.

The seriousness and attentiveness of the bus drivers was also appreciated. But I was not surprised as back around 2004, my colleague Chuck Hibbert and I trained the district’s bus drivers then. I recall the group to have been a very serious, but fun, group at that time, too.

Would your district be prepared to tackle security issues and extensive planning if a major, high-profile national security event came to your community?

Visit School Security Blog at: www.schoolsecurityblog.com

Guest Post by Chuck Hibbert

Part II of this blog article continues with the many lessons learned in school transportation safety and emergency preparedness:

• I asked the presenters what made this tornado watch/warning different that many others they had experienced in their careers.  (Actually, this was the second tornado to strike a school in Dr. Reed’s career.  He experienced one previously at Center Grove School District in central Indiana earlier, but not an EF4.)  Jim Scroggins explained they were watching one Louisville area TV station’s weather (WHAS) closely.  Jim further explained they were also using the Weather Channel’s TOR-CON rating.  The TOR-CON rating for the Henryville area was at 90% and as such tornado chasers from around the country were in the Louisville area waiting to see where the tornado(s) would strike.  If you are not familiar with TOR-CON is based upon a simple one to ten scales for the probability of a tornado within fifty miles of your location.  This was a different situation than the West Clark School District had faced before.
• Communication thought the storm was disrupted periodically.  Cellphones failed time and time again, and the same with the school radio system.  As is the norm, when communication is needed most, it wasn’t there.  At first, when parents called the central office, the school district could not tell them where their children were or if they were safe.  Those at district office feared the loss of one bus and driver.  Parents were understandability angry.  However, once the magnitude of the storm become clear and the bravery and great decision making was learned, the parents rallied around those at the school district, particularly the transportation employees.
• After the second tornado passed through the area (the second was the more severe of the two) the central office staff relied upon their training and used the incident command system and their NIMS training to get their response and recovery systems going.
• Drivers who could return from their routes did so, returning to Sellersburg where the district central office is located.  A total of five buses were damaged in the storm.  “The drivers were so, so brave during the storm,” Jim Scroggins said.  It points out that people will almost always rise to the occasion, particularly when they are well trained and use common sense.
• Once the power failed at the school, the lower level and fault area had no emergency lighting since the school was virtually destroyed.  Flashlights are now being added to the fire extinguisher locations at the school.  They are also being placed in every school bus.
• Dr. Reed emphasized the bus drivers followed the directions of administration without question, whether it was in person or delivered over the radio.  All of this occurred without unnecessary chatter on the radio, which is a problem for many school districts.
• During the recovery phase, community meetings were held for the parents on how school was going to be re-started.  Since the Henryville building was destroyed school was to be held outside the school district.  Start up began with elementary students.  Dr. Reed and Mr. Scroggins stated because they were the group of students who they knew would follow direction the easiest.
• The presenters spoke about needing to make training more event-based rather than the all too familiar reading from the driver’s handbook.  This points out the need for scenario based training or tabletops to make training more relevant.
• The gentlemen pointed out the need for a pre-designated PIO.  Too many districts simply state in their plans the Superintendent will be the spokesperson for the district.  That doesn’t work well when a situation like this is unfolding and the superintendent (captain) needs to be making decisions in the best interest of the district.  Appoint another trusted person to this position in the early stages of an event.
• Since the March 2 tornado struck, the school board in West Clark Community Schools has met thirty-four times.  How many times has your school board met since that date?

For all who care about school children, I wished you could have been there to hear first-hand the lessons learned by the people in West Clark Community Schools.  They are the heroes/heroines of school transportation.

I had a chance to be interviewed by WHAS-TV Louisville who was at the conference to cover this session.  As I told the reporter, too often all we hear about or see is the failures in school transportation.  Here was an example of saving the lives of children which cannot receive enough accolades.

I know I was honored to be there and pleased to be able to give them all a standing ovation.

Visit School Security Blog at: www.schoolsecurityblog.com

Chuck spent over two decades overseeing school security and police services while also assisting with transportation coordination for a 15,000 student township school district in Indianapolis, Indiana.  His experience and credibility as a leader in school safety in Indiana and nationally contributed to his being asked to facilitate this program.

Guest Post by Chuck Hibbert

It was my privilege to have attended, presented and facilitated at the School Transportation Association of Indiana’s 39^th annual conference June 20-22, in French Lick, Indiana.  Over two hundred attendees made this wonderful conference a success.

While I presented two sessions on Bus Behavior Management, the highlight of this conference was the closing session I was honored to have facilitated on the West Clark Community School District’s response to the tornado which ripped through southern Indiana on March 2, 2012.

Many readers will recall the images of the Henryville school complex (West Clark Community Schools) which was virtually destroyed when it was struck directly by an EF4 tornado (EF 5 is the highest rating).  Images of the destroyed Henryville School building with a school bus on its side blown into a business across the street became international news.

Dr. John Reed, Assistant Superintendent at West Clark, and Mr. Jim Scroggin, Transportation Director, told their story about the fateful day.  Unable to attend the conference, but certainly one of many who risked their lives to save their children that day, was Angle Perry, the driver of the bus which was blown into the business across the street from the Henryville School after she got the eleven students on her bus sheltered in the Henryville School.

The day of the tornado was a day filled with loss of life (not at school) and devastation, but it was also a day of celebration because of the lives saved and how great decision making, based upon training and experience, saved those lives.  The two gentlemen stated repeatedly that another power also intervened to save lives - a power that guided many that day.

The many points of interest from this session included:

• “We would have had children killed if we followed protocol,” Dr. Reed said.  This reference made by Dr. Reed was related to several different points.  Children were sent into homes of classmates by the bus drivers who viewed a tornado approaching their bus.  This decision was contrary to the standard that children should not be released to anyone but a parent.  This decision saved lives according to the speakers.  This was an extraordinary event.  Drivers who knew their route, knew their children and families, and knew their community made a decision in the best interest of children.  That is the bottom line lesson for all bus driver training.
• At the Henryville School, the principals (this is a combined elementary and secondary building) decided to dismiss 20 minutes early to get children away from the school.  If the students would have been kept at school and sheltered, as many of our tornado plans call for in this type of situation, the result would have been tragic. “If we had kids in the hallway of that school, the walls would have collapsed on those kids,” Dr. Reed said.
• Driver Perry saw a tornado approaching her bus with eleven students on board, and decided to return to Henryville School.  If she had allowed her students off the bus at home or at the home of other students on her bus, most would have been killed or injured according to Dr. Reed.
• There were 70 children in the building when the storm struck.  Those returned by Driver Perry, children of the staff and a few who remained after school.  This group of students and staff sheltered in a lower level vault area of the building.  No injuries were sustained other than a few bloody noses caused by the pressure of the storm passing overhead as it destroyed the school.
• West Clark is a relatively small school district, enrollment 4,500 students.  As events would have it, a few bus drivers were off and the director, Jim Scroggins, had to drive a route that afternoon.  One lesson learned in this disaster was Mr. Scroggins was needed at central office as part of the Incident Command team.  Next school year he will not be driving a bus.  It brings up the point I often make in training about the captain not leaving the helm, whether it is a central office position or on the school bus.  Only extraordinary events should take the captain from the helm.
• The time it took for the tornado to destroy not only the school in Henryville, but the town itself, was 23 seconds.  It points out the importance of knowing your plan or guideline so that decisions, once made, can be implemented quickly.  You must be prepared by having a plan in place and following it based upon your  training, experience, and ability to adapt to unfolding circumstances.

Part II of Chuck’s article will appear tomorrow with more lessons learned.

Visit School Security Blog at: www.schoolsecurityblog.com

On March 2nd in Indiana, school bus drivers for the West Clark Community Schools reacted quickly in seeking shelter consistent from an approaching tornado consistent with their procedures, according to Campus Safety Magazine story interviews with school administrators.

The school district’s procedures cited in the article included:

“The procedures for bus drivers include evacuating the bus and moving as far away from it as possible. Ideally, drivers should seek shelter in a building, but if that is not an option, they should go into a deep ditch. Drivers must also have an established evacuation plan for their route, and they must have drills with their passengers to ensure that they know the evacuation procedure. In the wake of this tornado, Scroggin said the district is planning to upgrade these procedures.”

In Henry County, Georgia, a 26-year-old man was charged with 20 felonies for an alleged March 28th hijacking of a school bus with 19 children and a driver on board. Police say the man followed his nephews and other children on board, claimed he had a gun and a bomb, and said the bus was not going anywhere. The driver was credited with remaining clam, staying in conect with the suspect and notifying police at the same time.

The suspect, whose mother said he was a paranoid schizophrenic and was off his medicine, was tkaen into custody without anyone being harmed.

School bus driver safety, security and preparedness training is typically minimal

Our experience has consistently shown that school leaders grossly under-train school transportation drivers, administrators and support staff. School transportation departments are not provided budgets to fund on-site training.

We often find school transportation administrators seeking “videos or DVDs” to give to drivers to self-train as their time permits. It is ironic, and pretty sad, to see school districts rely on brief and often questionable videos or DVDs as their primary source of transportation security and emergency preparedness training.

Would the same school administrators tell their teachers and administrators they only training they are worthy of receiving is to watch 15 to 30 minutes of videos or DVDs on brain research, improving test scores and related education topics? Of course, the answer is clearly “NO”!

In our in-person professional development workshops for school transportation staff, we have found many dedicated school bus drivers who are caring, have good common sense and are dedicated to their jobs and the children. These people have also typically been craving training and have been left starving for it for many years.

There are also many practical, cost-effective transportation security and emergency preparedness planning and training steps schools can take to improve school bus safety.

School transportation safety, security and preparedness requires the same commitment of reasonable time and resources as does the same training for teachers, administrators and other support staff. We often say that teachers would not be expected to teach with their backs turned to students all day, but yet we expect are school bus drivers to drive this way with often little-to-no meaningful training for security and crisis issues which may arise.

Have your school leaders made meaningful commitments to providing safety, security and preparedness training for their school bus drivers?

Ken Trump

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This staged event provided a nice message, but mostly offered a good media visual for the Secretary’s public relations machine.  It also overlooked that in many communities, including D.C., school walking routes present serious hazards and threats to the safety of children.

As my colleague and fellow school safety consultant, Chuck Hibbert, pointed out:

“While on one hand it is ‘healthy’ to walk, it is also potentially dangerous.  Schools and parents must offer children additional training on how to safely walk to school.  In addition, in many communities the danger is not simply from motor vehicles, but also greater exposure to child predators, gangs, drug dealers, and others with ill intentions.”

The ED Department’s press release noted that Duncan, along with D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, D.C. Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee, and U.S. Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez joined 100-150 students and parents to walk a two-block route from Lincoln Park to Maury Elementary. While at the school, they discussed the “value of fitness in maintaining safe and healthy lives” following ”First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative aimed at confronting the problem of childhood obesity through fitness and adequate nutrition.”

Fitness and adequate nitruition? A reasonable initiative. A good walk?Absolutely.  I am working with my family and work colleagues to walk more and eat better.  It’s a challenge.  And a good message.

Duncan’s Missing Safety Message

What was missing was a focus on acknowledging the safety threats in many communities.  One has to wonder how far the federal agents and local police who provide security details for Duncan, Fenty, Rhee, and Mendez were from event.  And did these public officials walk by themselves or even in a small group of just the four of them from their D.C. offices to the site of this PR event?

Our kids don’t have federal agents and local police security details.  Many, especially in larger urban districts where parents don’t have the SUVs and portal-to-portal services of many affluent suburban kids, walk up to two miles daily through crime, drug, and predator-infested neighborhoods to get school and back home.  Many of them do so by themselves and without friends, much less a personal protection team. 

Duncan, who came to the Obama Administration from Chicago, should know the perils of “to and from school” safety threats.  Many of the kids killed in his former school district were victims of violence to and from school.  In fact, last year, Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder held another PR event in Chicago after a student was killed, dropping $500,000 from the Education Department’s Project SERV fund and millions in stimulus money to the Chicago Schools and City of Chicago on their way out the door.

There’s even a Safe Routes to School National Partnership.  They note that walking and biking to school can ”provide a variety of important benefits to children and their communities, including increasing physical activity, reducing traffic congestion, improving air quality, and enhancing neighborhood safety.” The bulk of these benefits could be true.

Focus on Personal Safety First, Then the Obesity and Health Message

But the primary focus should be on the last point: “Enhancing neighborhood safety.”  In some communities, collective groups of children could offer a perception of improved neighborhood safety providing the broader community surrounding them consisted of visible adults who proactively monitor and protect kids.  But in many communities —urban, suburban, and rural — there are also dangers on the street that pose safety risks, not benefits, to children walking to and from school.

Duncan’s “Walking School Bus” event could have better served children by not only talking about obesity and healthy lifestyles, but also the importance of being aware of potential threats students could encounter to and from school, and how to manage them.  Otherwise, a well-intended but skewed message of the healthy benefits of walking to school could fail to alert kids to some greater dangers that could actually get them hurt or even killed.

Ken Trump

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

• School bus drivers are the first and last school employees to see many students each school day, and face the challenges of managing the behavior and safety of groups of students typically larger than the average class size.
• School secretaries take bomb threat calls made to schools and deal with irate parents.
• School custodians and maintenance staff know the physical plant layout and operations better than any other school employee.
• School food services staff not only serve students breakfast and lunch, but also have to know what to do if fights, riots, lockdowns, evacuations, or other safety issues arise in their school cafeterias.

Our school emergency planning evaluation consultations often show that school support staff are often undertrained, not included in school emergency planning, and not members of school crisis teams.

Fortunately, our work with local districts around the county since 2003 on the Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) grants has allowed us to work more closely with school support staff.  It is amazing how many bus drivers, secretaries, custodians, and food service staff tell us it is the first time they have received school crisis training during their many years on the job.  It is equally amazing how interested they are and how much they have to offer in strengthening school emergency plans.

Our goal in engaging school support staff in emergency planning is to generate new conversations and perspectives into school-level and district-level emergency planning processes.  Some issues we address and encourage all schools to cover with these valued non-teaching employee groups include:

• Secretary/office support staff safety and crisis issues typically include managing angry and threatening persons, role in access control, parent-student reunification roles, managing bomb threat calls, role on crisis team, etc. 
• Custodian and maintenance staff training and planning sessions focus on roles of day and night custodial staff related to security and emergency response, roles on crisis teams for planning, facility information needed in tactical response, procedures for specific emergencies, after-hours emergencies, and related topics.
• Food services conversations tend to include cafeteria security procedures, impact of drills (lockdowns, etc.) during breakfast and lunch periods, emergency food supplies, food security and protection measures, access to food service vendors, role on school and district crisis teams, and related topics.
• Transportation staff discussions often focus on the role of transportation services in school emergencies, preventing and managing violence incidents on the bus,  verbal intervention techniques, what to expect if police respond to your bus, bus emergency plans and exercises, and related topics.

School security and emergency training for school support staff is more than providing them with a 20-minute video purchased for the purpose of satisfying minimal training requirements and/or the desire to say “some” type of training was provided.  We would not give teachers a 20-minute video on brain research or how to improve test scores as their only in-service, but we often see schools doing this with school safety training for support personnel.

Are your school’s support staff an integral part of school security and emergency preparedness training and planning in your school district?

Ken Trump

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

1. If you had to mobilize school buses at 10:45am to simultaneously evacuate your three largest schools, what is the response time from when the request is made until the first bus shows up at the school?
2. Are school bus drivers and district transportation administrators trained on school emergency preparedness issues, are they trained on their district’s specific plan, and do they participate on district and building level crisis teams? 
3. Are your school buses part of your county emergency management agency’s plan to use when a disaster strikes and they need mass transit vehicles to help transport evacuees or others in the community?

Would your school leaders pass the test?

Ken Trump

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