By: Robin Hattersley, Campus Safety
School boards play a vital role in ensuring the K-12 campuses they oversee are safe. However, through no fault of their own, many have limited knowledge of how this can actually be accomplished
School board members have historically focused on academics, but their roles and responsibilities have significantly expanded over the years to include ensuring their schools can prevent, respond to, mitigate, and recover from a wide range of incidents involving mental health, bullying, threats, active shooters, medical emergencies, weather emergencies, and a whole host of other crises. Unfortunately, this lack of focus could result in the adoption of ineffective policies, non-existent emergency planning, the wrong technologies and more.
To address this knowledge-gap, last summer Campus Safety hosted What School Boards Need to Know About School Safety, featuring John McDonald, COO of the Council for School Safety Leadership; Melissa Randol, executive director of the Missouri School Boards Assn.; Johnathan Kassa, who is a volunteer, twice-elected school board director for one of Pennsylvania’s largest school districts; and Francisco Negron Jr., chief legal officer for the National School Boards Assn. In this interview, McDonald, Randol, Kassa, and Negron discussed some of the initial steps school boards should take to address their districts’ safety and security vulnerabilities.
School boards play a vital role in ensuring the K-12 campuses they oversee are safe. However, through no fault of their own, many have limited knowledge of how this can actually be accomplished
School board members have historically focused on academics, but their roles and responsibilities have significantly expanded over the years to include ensuring their schools can prevent, respond to, mitigate, and recover from a wide range of incidents involving mental health, bullying, threats, active shooters, medical emergencies, weather emergencies, and a whole host of other crises. Unfortunately, this lack of focus could result in the adoption of ineffective policies, non-existent emergency planning, the wrong technologies and more.
To address this knowledge-gap, last summer Campus Safety hosted What School Boards Need to Know About School Safety, featuring John McDonald, COO of the Council for School Safety Leadership; Melissa Randol, executive director of the Missouri School Boards Assn.; Johnathan Kassa, who is a volunteer, twice-elected school board director for one of Pennsylvania’s largest school districts; and Francisco Negron Jr., chief legal officer for the National School Boards Assn. In this interview, McDonald, Randol, Kassa, and Negron discussed some of the initial steps school boards should take to address their districts’ safety and security vulnerabilities.
Click here to watch this panel discussion, or you can review the AI-generated interview transcript below.
School boards are just one piece of the K-12 campus safety puzzle. School district superintendents also play critical roles. Watch How School Superintendents Can Bolster K-12 Campus Security to find out how they can appropriately protect their districts.
Transcript of ‘What School Boards Need to Know About School Safety and Security’
Robin Hattersley: We’re going to talk about basics first, but before we actually talk about basics, John McDonald, I really want you to talk about how a school board can promote and support the different yet interconnecting roles of school safety and high quality education. I know that sometimes school security and safety and education might seem to be working at odds, but they really aren’t. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
John McDonald: Sure. Well, I think to start with, school boards have a unique opportunity and responsibility, and when school boards allow school safety to be part of the conversation and have that discussion during board meetings, in public session and lift up school safety is a key component of both operation and foundational aspect of quality education. We start to see a change in climate and culture leaders keep school safe, and we found the best school safety really is board driven, but superintendent led. And that means that the board is driving the school safety conversation saying this is critical for our community and we want to keep all students safe and engaged, and we know that if students are safe, they’re better learners. And there is that connection between high quality education, feeling safe, being safe in your school environment. So it all begins with what we allow, what we tolerate, what we say, what we do, and modeling that critical component that school safety is foundational to everything that we do in our school environment.
Hattersley: Thanks, John. And now I know that having an overall vision is really important and that’s really driven from the top down, like the school board, correct, John?
McDonald: Yes, absolutely. And the school board understanding of school safety is essential to good quality school safety in itself, but even more importantly, being willing to engage both in executive session when you can have the really tough discussions, the uncomfortable conversations about what’s happening in your school environment, how you’re going to make sure that you’re addressing those confidential security arrangements that are so critical, giving that pathway to school safety professionals to engage with the board and then also again in that public session that starts the framework for what we’re talking about here.
Hattersley: Now, Melissa, I know you have some really important comments about the vision and how the vision pretty much drives the mission, the goals, the tasks, and the evaluation. So what are your comments on that?
Melissa Randol: That’s right. Well, you said it very well, Robin, and I’d also like to emphasize something that John said, it’s board driven, but superintendent led and understanding those roles. What are the responsibilities from a governance perspective for the board and not crossing over onto the operational side, that’s the superintendent and the superintendent staff, that’s their responsibility. But partnering, understanding your roles and partnering is so critical and aligning those activities with the mission. And back to again, something that was referenced as why is this so critical? I think I know all of us on this particular webinar understand that, but Maslow made it very clear, right, the hierarchy of needs a child is not going to excel in calculus or fill in the blank, any subject that we put before them if we don’t meet their basic needs, and that includes safety. It’s one of those critical needs to feel safe and secure.
Hattersley: Now, Jonathan Kassa, I know you are actually a school board member yourself. So what comments do you have about the vision?
Johnathan Kassa: Really building on the wisdom that’s already been shared, and this isn’t just about a board director, but how can administrators manage up or community members, those staff that are in buildings have ways to help inform board directors? As a board director sitting in that governance role, it’s really important to be curious. There has to be an acceptance that we have multidisciplinary talented teams running our school districts and elected officials, elected officials representing the community, but it doesn’t mean that everyone is an expert in accounting or nursing or school safety. And so that curiosity is really important and what can be done to create a climate throughout the community, but also across the district so that there is transparency and a communication that increases as many opportunities as possible for board members to listen and learn about what concerns are. That way each community is able to craft from the top down what its needs are, what its concerns are based on the resources that it has and how it wants to allocate them.
And so if you’re curious, if you’re transparent, you communicate and you have good data and you review it well, that’s going to create a community dialogue that creates a 360 type of approach, that there’s accountability then of the board holding the administration accountable, but also the community holding your board leaders accountable. And what are we to expand the bench as much as possible? Do you have student representatives on your board? They don’t have to have a vote. Do you have a safe schools committee? And I could go on for a while, but that to me is probably one of the most important questions. If you do have a safe schools committee, do you have student representatives there? They are the most important eyes and ears, boots on the ground, so to speak, that can inform a board with its vision.
Hattersley: And Francisco, I know if you don’t have the right vision or if you don’t include safety and security, you’re going to run into legal problems. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Negron: Yeah, I think that there are always, particularly when we’re talking about safety concerns, and particularly ones that involve some tragic occurrences at schools like school shootings or threats that arise from either other students or folks coming from the outside of a school district, there’s always going to be a legal element. But when we’re talking about students, there are some parameters or some federal laws in particular, but also state laws on top of those that control the kind of information that school districts are allowed to share about students. So we’ve all heard about FERPA, the federal law that regulates personally identifiable information of students and their student records, but not just in the educational area. There are also federal laws like HIPAA that regulate the kinds of medical information or personal diagnosis information that may be somehow relevant to a determination of whether someone is a particular threat, a student for instance, or somebody with mental illness.
So it’s really important I think from the outset as school boards are considering putting into place these policies and everyone’s absolutely correct, policies need to be in place well in advance. There need to be conversations well in advance with the community. But as those things are happening, the school district member of the council of school attorneys there, school lawyer, is going to be an essential partner in helping school districts understand what their legal responsibilities are, what the legal risks are, and how to address ’em. So I think part of those conversations, particularly when we’re talking about law enforcement, and I’m thinking now particularly about tragic one-time events like school shootings, and by the way, that’s not as we’ll talk soon. That’s not the only kind of school emergency or hazard. But in that particular area, connecting with law enforcement ahead of time and having those really strong conversations with law enforcement.
And many school districts have school resource officers, for instance, that they employ as additional resources on the ground at school. But then those school resource officers sort of become members of say, safety or threat assessment teams. But it’s important to remember that they never lose their law enforcement hats, their capacity. So they have certain obligations also as sworn law enforcement agents. And so it’s important to understand what the legal parameters are, what their roles are, and all of this can be discussed in advance so that there are no surprises so that there’s disclosure when it needs to happen and non-disclosure when it can’t happen. But all of that can be done in advance so that at the last moment, you’re not making these decisions and further complicating what could be a very difficult situation already.
Hattersley: And Francisco, you bring up a really good point about the communication and knowing what to share and what not to share and who to share it with and everything like that. And all of that policy needs to be created in advance. Correct?
Negron: That’s absolutely true. There’s no reason, there’s no mystery to any of those. And I think it’s not only important in understanding what you’re going to share with your partners, your collaborators, the first responders, law enforcement. It’s very important that your community also understand what your plan says about the kinds of information that you’ll share so that they’re not surprised because ultimately, if their particular child is a threat or in the middle of an event and their information is going to be shared, we’re all as parents concerned about what actually gets shared and to whom and what’s done with that. So it’s important that the community understand the conditions for when that happens, why it’s important to share that and not just understand that, but really to seek their input. How does the community feel about that? Because ultimately, school districts and school boards are there to serve our students, our families, our communities, those are the stakeholders. And so it’s important for them to understand how a certain decision is going to affect them or keep their child safe. So the communication across all stakeholders, all participants is really, really important.
Hattersley: So I think a lot of part things about the envision is who’s involved, who should be contacted, when they should be contacted? All those things are really important. And Francisco, you brought up the thing about school shootings and they get a lot of attention, but I think we really need to focus on the fact that risk involves a whole lot of things besides just school shootings. And in fact, school shootings are pretty rare. A school is much more likely to experience maybe a sexual assault, mental health challenges, a medical emergency. So what incidents should school boards address? And Melissa, why don’t you lead us off on that?
Randol: Sure. Well, you made a great point, and I think it’s something that we really need to reflect on. Active shooters get a lot of attention. Those incidents, those tragedies do get a lot of attention and they deserve a lot of attention, but they are thankfully very rare when you look at the number of students in school districts that we have throughout the nation, but we’re zero tolerance, right? Any incident that could harm a child or staff, there should be zero tolerance for that. And we do have that kind of zero tolerance in our school districts and in our communities for harming children. But we have to devote resources not just to that one incident, but to anything that could impact the ability of a child to feel and to be safe while in our care and in our communities. That could include everything from how to handle obviously fires.
That’s something we’ve addressed as a nation for a number of years, drills and preparing our kids to deal with that. But it goes well beyond that bullying. If there’s a situation that is occurring on our grounds or impacting our children and our students, we have to have policies in place, practices in place to prevent that, how to deal with floods, how to deal with tornadoes. The list goes on and on and on, and thus we train at MSVA that our emergency operation plans need to be robust enough to address any kind of situation that could harm the environment for our students.
Hattersley: Now, John McDonald, can you give us, I mean Melissa gave us a great list, but maybe there’s some other incidents that we don’t normally think about but actually really impact us a lot. Can you list some of those?
McDonald: Sure. I mean, just off the top of my head, when you think about the threat of our time and what we’re dealing with right now from online bullying to out of control behavior in the classroom, which has become probably the single biggest day to day issue that we’re dealing with right now, the ability to manage student and sometimes parent behavior that’s escalated and what that means to climate and culture and an environment and some of the threats from suicidal ideation to fentanyl crisis that are impacting our schools today. These are real issues and community issues coming into school and our kids bringing that to our environment, child abuse on the rise that we’re noticing and how do we engage properly? How do we train our educators to report that safely, to protect that child, to protect themselves? There’s so much in terms of what our kids are dealing with, and we’ve been having a lot of discussions around our work about the rise of what our artificial intelligence will look like and cyber crimes.
And I’ll tell you, as a school safety person for the last 15 years, I think what’s coming with artificial intelligence is going to challenge us in ways that we’ve never imagined before, and we better get ahead of that and we better start talking about it from the school board level and the operational side and have those conversations today because frankly, tomorrow’s too late. And we tend to have to play catch up a lot in K 12 environments, and it’s painful to learn the lessons and then try to implement them. Whatever we can do to get ahead of it, have those important conversations, bring in those mission partners that help lift us up, make us better, create plans, and have that community engagement early. As Francisco said, none of this is secret, right? The work that we do today matters because the threat that’s happening tomorrow could be on any one of our doorsteps, and how do we manage that?
And especially from a leadership function, we spend a lot of time training schools, teachers and kids and administrators on what to do when there’s a fire and now what to do when you’re under fire. Well, we better be having some of those conversations, same conversations with our leaders. And I think that’s been one of the things that’s lacking frankly over the last 20 years is that we’ve really never provided quality training and support for school boards and superintendents. We just expect they know what to do and we just can’t expect that the world’s changing so quickly.
Negron: I think too, Robin, if I could jump in and say that one area that often goes unnoticed, although it happens a lot more than school shootings frankly, is the whole question of what happens when there’s a natural disaster, particularly, and it used to be that hurricanes were the major thing, and so we were focused on coastal areas in the south and Florida, but look at recent events in Kentucky and Oklahoma and tornadoes on the rise, and often not just a school is impacted, but an entire community gets impacted. And so really when we’re talking about safety concerns, and I would love to hear particularly from Melissa a state level, but also from Johnathan Kassa as a sitting school board member, because I think that the whole question of an all hazards approach and how our safety plans really need to be broader. They need to be about all of the elements that certainly things like school shootings, but things like emotional health, the fentanyl crisis, all of those things come in down to traditional things that now we may not even think of, but John mentioned them, what’s happening at home with kids and so forth.
But this whole idea of what’s happening with the natural disaster strikes and how it impacts the community, how do we recover from that? That’s why I think that these conversations in advance are important because that doesn’t involve just law enforcement. It involves your mental healthcare providers, your county health departments, your city faith-based groups, based groups, emergency
Management, yeah, emergency management, national FEMA. I mean, all of these things are going to impact. So for me, I think one of the important lessons I think is the old Boy Scout motto about being prepared. That means that when you devise a plan and it’s an all hazards approach, dealing with all these things, that you are able to train to it, that it makes sense. Think about who’s at the school level, you’re having faculty replacing, you’re having different principals in different schools. There certainly are student populations and communities. Parents are rotating on a yearly basis, moving from one campus to another, sometimes just coming in from different parts of the state. So all that to say, there’s a lot of room for inconsistency, and you always want as many people as you can on the same page. So it’s important to train. Remember that you can’t put a plan just on a shelf. They’re perishable. You always have to train. You always have to remind people these are the different elements and this is your part of it.
Randol: If I could add something quickly to that, Robin, I couldn’t agree more with Francisco and specifically with the training as well as understanding that your plans have to be living documents that you don’t produce them and then assume that they’re not going to change. We learn every time a disaster happens throughout our country, and we need to make sure that our plans are current with best practices. I’ll give you an example. And we had a horrific tornado a little over a decade ago in Joplin, Missouri, and it wiped out half of our school buildings and most of that community was impacted. It was just devastating. And what we learned through video footage in the Joplin High School, thank goodness this happened at a time when children were not in our school buildings, but what we learned reviewing the footage in the Joplin High School is that what we thought was the best practice in terms of where we sheltered in place when there was a tornado warning was in fact putting our children in high level of danger. There would’ve been fatalities in that building had we been in school that day, we used to shelter in the hallways. Well, that was just a suction zone for the tornado, and so we improved our practices after that. So point is we have to continue to make sure that our plans are current with best practices.
Kassa: What I’ve learned as a director as well, and in a unique position, because I work also in higher education and K 12 safety and security, and a lot of that work is right about being proactive. Really any director or school leader who isn’t aware of all hazards and what that means, you don’t have to be an expert in it, but it doesn’t take much to look that up. Look at Campus Safety magazine’s resources so that you have an understanding of what some of the key competencies, the core competencies should be in the leaders who are tasked, the professionals that you do have in your district, and work with other first responders in a model that is prepared for anything and it’s ever evolving. And that continuity of operations planning. So for director to have that understanding, I mentioned curiosity before, they don’t need to be an expert, but they need to be able to probe and have those questions to learn more, which may actually increase not only their knowledge, but the performance of the administrators.
If there aren’t questions about Title IX, if you’re looking at your incidents once a year of any type of incidents that may affect your students’ health, wellbeing and the climate, it’s too late. That’s stale data. So one of the things we actually put it into a districtwide policy and part of our bylaws is that we receive quarterly incident reports. We’ve actually pushed our vendor as actually think maybe we should get a percentage of their sales because they’re doing something they’ve never done before, which is to keep everything in one place, not only behavioral threat assessment wise and incidents, but we’re tracking the location of incidents so we can see district-wide as well as managing that risk at the building level and begin to create a baseline for year over year management and continuous improvement. Once again, you don’t have to be an expert as a director, you just have to ask the questions.
That high level view helps develop the type of dashboards that will not only prompt you to ask more questions, but if you’re doing that publicly, and this is typically aggregated data, the community is going to have a better understanding too. The last thing I’ll leave this at with data, and this is coming from a person with Clery act experience in the federal space, unfortunately, and speaking, at least for Pennsylvania, and this might not be the case in other states, most elected school board directors and perhaps administrators who I can’t speak for, but from our experience in Pennsylvania where there is no teeth in the department of the State Department of Education to have accurate statistics about incidents reported annually, Florida’s leading in the opposite direction. But most school board directors really don’t have the confidence to stand up and say, well, no, this is transparent. We are a safe school. And yes, these numbers may be high, but that’s because students feel comfortable in reporting and there’s a responsiveness from the administration as opposed to maybe districts who just report zeros across the board. Those would be the ones I’m worried about because ultimately our school is just a reflection of overall society, and so we can only write only what’s measured matters, and I think as school board directors, there needs to be some more bravery in being able to produce those accurate numbers for the community.
Hattersley: Jonathan, you bring up a really good point because I’ve covered the Clery Act, which is more on the higher ed side of things, but I’m always suspicious of the school district or these towns or college campuses that have these unrealistically low crime statistics. We know crimes happen, we know sexual assault happens, and actually they have unrealistically low crime status. That’s actually probably an indication that district is less safe rather than more safe.
Kassa: And there’s the thing, at least I always look at this, whether it’s higher education or K 12, that’s a compass point to direct community members, families, students, journalists to ask the question. Perhaps it is that safe, it’s best to know, but we can’t take things at face value. Once again, back to curiosity, if you’re at the board level, and really there’s a small letter P politics involved in this, how many school board directors are going to show a vast increase in their statistics for incidents across their school district when they’re up for reelection, and that’s where perhaps state systems that actually hold school districts accountable as opposed to just taking the information in a transactional way. I think that that is a much more holistic approach to have an interlocking right, federal, state, local policy that can actually make school safer because families and students and staff have realistic numbers to demand change. Now, ultimately, the Clery Act, it’s a consumer protection law, and so why can’t we have that same approach? I’m not saying by passing a law, but why shouldn’t we have that same common sense at our school level?
Negron: I wanted to support something that Jonathan just said, which is this whole concept of curiosity and the importance for not just school board leaders, but frankly town leaders, our government leaders, to express some of that curiosity. Now, I should say that at the National School Boards Association, we believe in local support, in local control of schools and community ownership. So I don’t know if I would take that further and say that another law telling us what we need to do is the way to go, but I do think that school board members and school leaders should definitely be curious, and let me tell you why. Because whether or not something is reported is not the end of the game, just the way that you just talked about it. But even if something’s reported so many times, not just school districts, but institutions as people, we want to defend.
I’m a lawyer of course, by trade, and so we’ll defend anything, right? It’s just what we’re trained to do. Melissa can back me up on this so we can do that. And there’s this natural tendency, I think that when we have a complaint in school, we treat it as something we have to defend rather, and I don’t mean just lawyers, I mean all of us, rather than to use it as an opportunity to identify a potential problem or a potential challenge that we should address. And by that I mean if something wasn’t reported, maybe there’s a problem in the climate we were talking about that moment ago that sort of doesn’t make people suggest that there’s a problem or complain or say anything about it. Maybe it’s because our people aren’t trained about what’s important. Maybe it’s because as happened in a school in my local community, the teacher thought that it was her job to handle a repeated comment made by a student that he was going to bring a gun to school, and she used all of her skills addressing the child’s social and emotional development and his history of outbursts and a whole bunch of things to decide that this was just a student, a young student talking out of turn.
But what if that hadn’t been that it had been a real possibility? And so we were able to identify in this particular school that there should have been a process, whether or not we handled it in some level as part of a certain student’s individual behavior. Maybe it’s also important to float that up so that folks that are in the security business, whether it’s the principal or risk management or law enforcement, can actually look into it. That’s a process that we would put in place. And so we need to create that culture, I think, and that comes from the curiosity. Don’t be afraid of the answers you’re going to get, even if the answers aren’t the best. It gives us an opportunity to be proactive. And so I really, Jonathan, I couldn’t agree more when you spoke about that curiosity. So we need to be proactive and not be defensive because in this area we’re all learning and because we’ve all agreed that it’s perishable and threats arising all the time and moving a lot faster than we are, this is one way of making sure that we stay ahead of the game.
Hattersley: I think also too, I’m going to skip forward to, we only touched on the first slide and we have 10 more slides to cover. So I’m skipping forward to the questions part because you guys have brought up a really good point about how safe is it for the community to engage with the board about safety and security concerns. Are they going to, how is a reported incident going to be responded to? I mean, will it be responded to or is it just going to be filed away and nothing gets done? So I would like to delve in a little bit more about the questions to ask by school boards. So John McDonald, can you touch on that a little bit on the kind of data that folks need to get?
McDonald: Well, certainly data on climate and culture surveys about how your stakeholders feel is always important. Do your students feel safe? If you ask them, they’ll tell you. And that often drives some of our opportunity for programming. But are you also looking at those statistics that are coming out of your law enforcement partners? What’s happening real time in your school environment? And as Jonathan said, that monthly information versus looking at an annual report is very different. That monthly report drives your tactics. That annual report may drive your strategy, and both are important, but moment in time, what are you seeing that you need to pivot to? And if you’re not pivoting to the issue that you’re facing, then we find ourselves leading from behind and we start leading by headlines. And that’s what happens in a crisis is that we often find ourselves managing by headlines.
And what we should be doing is having these conversations early and often. And I like the board curiosity, but I’ll tell you what really matters is board courage and board courage is being willing to say, we want the answers. Now here’s what happens. The reality of school safety in America today and a lot of districts is this, the school safety director may get called up to do a presentation to the board. What the director is often told is, don’t talk about this, don’t talk about that. We want you just to focus on the good work we’re doing. Don’t get into details with the board. Don’t let them know how scary things are right now. Well, what happens when we send that message to the safety director who’s constrained by what they can say and can’t say? We’re not giving the board the information that they need. And a lot of times, the superintendent’s not getting the information that they need to make good decisions. So the opportunity is open, honest dialogue, talking about the uncomfortable truths of what we’re seeing.
I really believe this. The world is not a scary place, but it’s very uncertain, and that uncertainty is driving a lot of our decision making today in school environments all over this country, and it’s becoming more uncertain, and we’re seeing behaviors at a younger age that we’ve never seen before. Why is that? What are we doing about that? How are we going to address it? How do we fix it? How do we engage with it? And if we’re not having that conversation, then frankly, we’re going to continue down this path where for the past 25 years we’ve been dealing with these school threats and tragedies. We can’t even come to a consensus about why it’s happening. And if we can’t get there, it’s hard to have the conversation. So I think people need to be willing to engage, and if you do that at a community level, that’s where the real work begins.
Kassa: I had like to just a quick comment too, because that’s John. It just reminds me about the importance of the board facilitating, and that’s part of the leadership and governance, but what’s your climate, so to speak, of your administration to the board? It should not be gotcha when it comes to school safety. It should not be ambush, right? Common sense before politics, put the school safety first, and there’s nothing wrong with everything that’s being described by my esteemed colleagues here. We could also say that we are protecting students. It’s first and foremost, you’re also protecting taxpayers. Is it evidence-based? Are you asking the right questions? Are you proactive and holistic? Are you looking at the data? Are you just reacting to what happens? States away and throwing money at something for security theater? And we do have to take that seriously. There’s not a money tree in any of our districts that I’m aware of. So to me, this all comes together, right? It’s one common place that the community should be able to have an honest conversation about ensuring safe schools.
Hattersley: Well, you think about it too. If you don’t collect this data, you might not find out what you’re doing might be right. I mean, how awesome would that be to find out that you’ve made progress? Because there’s been, actually, with the ESSER funds over the past few years because of covid, there’s actually been quite a bit of money available for school safety and security improvements, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there may be a reduction in certain types of incidents, certain types of threats and things like that. But if we’re not collecting that data, how do we know? So who should we be talking to get their information? Students, teachers, parents, administrators, other campus employees. Who should be involved in all this? Everyone. Melissa?
Randol: Well, I think John captured it. I do think that everyone has a vested interest and the safety of our children, and so you had a pretty long list there. I would say yes to all of those, but make sure we don’t exclude critical people within our school systems, within our school environment, such as even our food service workers, our bus drivers, they’re going to pick up information that won’t necessarily be shared in other surveys and critical information. They either observe or hear or children confide in them. And so make sure that’s all encompassing and our community stakeholders, we have to hear their voice, what their desires are, what their information is. We’ll also have not only help us, inform us as we invest those resources, and as Jonathan said, so well, we have a fiduciary duty to our communities to keep our children safe and to spend their money well, and so we need to hear from them what their priorities are and communicate that back. The second piece that this will help with is we’re an environment where we are constantly fighting not just misinformation, but disinformation, intentional, inaccurate information, and we can’t let that get us off base. We’ve got to make sure that we stay focused, but we breaking down some of that disinformation, those disinformation attacks starts with building those strong, transparent conversations with our community members.
Negron: I would add too, Melissa, I’d really strong. Yes, for me, on the community stakeholders, that’s extremely important, especially in planning and speaking. We all have limited dollars to carry out our missions, right? There’s one set of education dollars, but don’t forget, law enforcement has its own dollars, right? The health department has its own, and they have their own piece of the critical mission, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, talking to the other folks in your community, talking to the other agencies, the other, particularly the first responders, but all of the different folks that you may need in the event of some sort of safety issue, whether it’s a critical immediate one, like a shooting or something that’s the result of a natural disaster, which also happens pretty quickly. You’re going to need those folks and they’re going to have access and lines to federal dollars, to state dollars to all kinds of resources that we as a school may not have, so rely on them. That’s why it really is not just a school district problem or a town problem or a campus university problem. It’s a problem for the community. And that’s really how we need to approach it as a community approach. Just like the All hazards, it’s an all community, all hands on deck approach.
Kassa: If I might build on that, there’s some practices that boards can consider or superintendents, and I’ve seen some superintendents really lead this facilitation. I mentioned in the beginning, do you have a Safe Schools committee? Does it meet regularly? Start there for your board. But beyond that, what are we doing to connect as many times as possible? Don’t just stick that antenna in the air to listen to messages once a month when only those with the opportunity can maybe speak to the board or who are able to, what are we doing to reach our entire community, underrepresented populations, different languages, different socioeconomic status, so that we’re as inclusive as possible in putting all of the various lenses together for the most clear vision for what your community needs. And when you’re able to do that, it means perhaps having some school safety forms for the community at different times, not just in the evening when some families may be working. Spread it around, make sure that it happens annually. Have the opportunity to email directly to your superintendent or Safe Schools director, multiple modalities for the community to engage, right? Most of us have maybe an anonymous tips line as well. This goes beyond that in building engagement, because I know across our 21 some buildings and 13,000 students, if no board director, no superintendent is going to have it figured out. It takes everyone knowing that their eyes and ears are on the school safety issue and that they will be listened to.
Hattersley: Thanks so much. So many questions have come in, and we’ve only gotten to maybe a quarter of our presentation, so we’re going to have to have you guys back because you guys have done such a great job. But I want to get to some of the questions that have come in. And the first one, Jonathan, I want to address to you, because the question is, what is a school safety committee? And I know your district is really involved with that, so can you tell us a little bit about that?
Kassa: Sure. I look at that structurally, it’s whatever the board and the school district and community decides the focus will be for the governance and oversight of Safe Schools initiatives. It is not to micromanage the school board and any subcommittees. If you’re a director, you’re the flight control tower. Your superintendent is the pilot of that plane and with their staff taking the district where it needs to go. So it’s not to get in the weeds, but if you’re not having that monthly meeting, which hopefully leads to other maybe discussions, ad hoc discussions as well, between maybe certain board members and your administration, then you’re not really expanding the amount of repetitions or the knowledge base that the board needs to have to inform its annual budget to decide where the proper dollars need to go into this approach to sometimes change direction based on what maybe the community needs. Because perhaps there’s a change every few years in board leadership, and that’s a good thing. But you have to adjust. Don’t just be let around by the nose with the status quo. And that’s not questioning any of our administrators or staff, but each party, administration and board should be challenging each other. And to have that hour long meeting with the opportunity for public comment, to put items on the agenda for oversight, aggregate information, trend analysis to hold the mirror up and have an honest discussion about safe schools. That’s what a Safe Schools committee is.
McDonald: If I can jump in on that, one of the issues that often happens in board meetings is school safety and mental health get combined into… So to Jonathan’s point, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, the school safety committees and the school safety conversation with boards often combines mental health and school safety because there is a lot of crossover, but there’s also distinct differences between the two. So when we’re having the school safety conversation with the school boards, that needs to be separate and distinct from the mental health issue. So we can focus on mental health, we can focus on school safety, then it’s what we do separately and then what we do together. But there’s such big important topics that often they just get combined, and we really never get to the root of the problem that we’re seeing.
Hattersley: Thank you, John. Next question. How important is the relationship between the board, the superintendent and the safety director?
McDonald: It’s everything. You can’t have a safe school environment if you don’t have good relationships. And if you don’t have good relationships, you better fix it today because when the tragedy happens, it’s too late. And four things come out of tragedy, loss of life, lost trust, litigation and legislation. So whatever you can do on the front side on the prevention piece, you do as much as you can. You run hard and you build relationships, and you’d better have open, honest dialogue where you’re comfortable talking to each other and you’re unafraid of that conversation. Sometimes school safety directors hold back. They don’t want to tell everything, or they’re told not to scare people. Frankly, if you’re not having the hard conversations, then you’re just not giving yourself any benefit because the superintendent and the board can be your advocates, or they can look at you and say You’re crying wolf. Again, how we sell our vision, the trust that we build, the conversations that we have often define how far we get and how much emphasis is placed on school safety in our districts. So those relationships are as essential as the relationship between school safety and first responders.
Negron: Thanks, John. Robin, if I could sort of tie what John just said to what Jonathan was talking about earlier, because this concept of we tend to call those citizens advisory committees or something by that name, those are sort of a key sort of valve or vehicle for not just building relationships, but doing exactly what John and Jonathan are talking about. And we tend to think, a lot of people tend to think that when it comes to school boards, for instance, the only time they do your input is at that once a month or twice a month workshop, and you go in front of the whole school board. But there’s a lot of work that school board leaders and school leaders are actually doing in between those monthly or bimonthly meetings. They’re actually holding things like Citizens Advisory committees. That’s a great place. They tend to be smaller venues where anybody from the public comes in and they hear the reports.
I mean, they’re open to the public. And that’s where you have those real one-on-one conversations that aren’t generally limited to two minutes at a podium, and you ask those real questions and you express those concerns. For school board members, this is essential because unlike the principal or the superintendent or all these folks that have their areas of responsibility, the linkage to the community, the representatives of the community or those school board members. So that’s how they lead one of their jobs, is to go get that input because they represent these folks, these families as community members. And so serving, sometimes it’s just one school board member per citizens advisory committee, sometimes more. They can all go, but this is the time to engage those conversations, get out into the community, ask what folks are thinking, come to our advisory committee meeting. We’re going to talk about our plan.
They might not talk about the specifics of how we’re going to stop a school shooter for obvious reasons. And laws in different states may allow you not to do those, but there’s no reason why we can’t talk about what you’re going to do if there’s a tornado or a pandemic, right? Or if there’s something else. And I’ll tell you one other thing that, and it’s not for this conversation. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but we haven’t even begun to touch on the question of what to do around disabilities, right? Oh, yeah. Adults and students. Everything from how should we include specific avenues or ways to manage students with disabilities with IEPs? Do we put those in IEPs? Do we have a responsibility to communicate some of those pieces out? So it’s very complex. I think the one thing I would say is that there’s, so that the area of school safety touches just about every aspect of the school environment. So they’re comprehensive conversations. It’s not just a one size fits all. They’re constant continual conversations. So I wanted to emphasize that part about the fact that these plans are perishable, that they’re, we should not think about this as one and done. We should think about this as a relationship. And in a relationship, you don’t just get married and then you’re good.
You get married, and then you work with your spouse for the next however many years to make sure you have a good relationship and that all of the goals of that relationship are being met. So that’s sort of my way of thinking about the approach to all hazards. It’s a relationship and it involves lots of conversations, making sure that we are all in agreement about the goals and where we’re going and what the best way to get there is.
Hattersley: Thank you, Francisco. Melissa, I want to throw this question to you. I know we don’t have a whole lot of time, but I think this is something that you can touch on quite well with the speed of response. So important today. How do you best coordinate the authority to respond to an incident among the district, the school administration, individual staff members, and external first responders?
Randol: Well, I think that really goes back to what we just started the conversation around and we’ll need to build on in our next webinar, and that those conversations need to take place now and not during an incident, or while you’re being warned about a potential incident, we need to have those roles, responsibilities clarified, expectations defined as part of these conversations and these plans, they need to be built out. Now, I’m being very brief because this could take another 15 minutes just to talk about that issue, but just about everything we talked about today, conversation, communication structure is so critical to both prevention and adequate response,
Hattersley: Right? Maybe we need an incident command system for school boards and superintendents, right?
McDonald: Yes, they need to be part of the incident command system for sure, but you also have to test it, right? And to Melissa’s point, all of that’s important. And then you test it, and you test it again, you test it again, because as Francisco said earlier, these are perishable skill sets, perishable plans, and they change, and we better stay on top of ’em. Otherwise, you’re going to try to justify what you didn’t do instead of trying to justify what you did, and that’s never a good place to be.
Hattersley: Francisco, Jonathan, Melissa, and John, thank you so much. We have run out of time.
