Q&A: A Psychologist's View of School Security Highlights the Value of Collaboration
School psychologists have a unique view of a school and its student body. They recognize that threats against students can come in several shapes and sizes, including bullying, physical or sexual abuse, and mental or behavioral health issues—whether big or small, these threats all impact students in the near- and long-term and can threaten their physical safety. Psychologists are also aware that all invested parties need to work together to create a supportive community and a safe learning environment. Reaching that outcome relies on the stakeholders working together on everything from behavioral threat assessments to post-incident resilience.
Emilie Ney is the director of professional development for the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP). The organization represents roughly 25,000 school psychologists and creates professional standards for the industry. The association also provides a school safety and crisis response curriculum that its members can apply to promote school safety from prevention through recovery, including how to create safety plans and mental health response plans. Ney was a school psychologist for 12 years prior to joining NASP staff in January 2023.
The conversation was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Security Management (SM). You mentioned previously that NASP helps create guidance and policies. So, when it comes to creating guidance and policies, what are the areas that you tend to focus on to try to improve school safety?
Emilie Ney. As mental health providers, a lot of what we are looking at is school climate—the type of an environment that the school has. Is it a welcoming environment? Is it a place where all students feel welcome, where they feel cared about? Does a student feel that there is a trusted adult in that school who they can go to if they heard their friend make a comment about wanting to engage in violence, and trust that the school is going to do something about it? So, this applies to things like bullying and runs through all types of safety. That’s a big part of the psychological safety of students, but it also trickles down to impact the physical safety of students.
If you know your students, you know their families, you know what’s going on in their lives, and you have those relationships with them, then students are less likely to be slipping through the cracks. And if there’s someone who is having a hard time with something, there’s someone there in the school that’s going to be able to support them. Obviously, that’s not the sole approach to school safety, but it is something that we think is very important and really essential in combination with the other types of school safety procedures. As a prevention piece, just having a positive school climate is kind of setting the stage for all the other aspects of school safety.
We also advocate for a very structured mental health response that provides support to students who may have been impacted by any form of trauma. And that aside, we also are focused on prevention in more traditional ways, such as the types of safety drills that schools use. When we start talking about some of those more high-profile types of crises, the things that get the most attention are, unfortunately, shootings. They’re relatively rare, but very high impact. Of course, it’s very important to give attention to preventing and handling those types of crises.
SM. It sounds like there’s a wide range of concerns that you’re keeping tabs on. In recent years, have you seen threats or risks to school safety evolve?
Ney. I can’t specifically speak to the trends that have evolved over time, although that’s definitely not to say that there haven’t been trends.
I think there is a really big risk for a lot of students from marginalized populations—ones that have recently been seeing changes in laws that previously protected them, plus rhetoric that is very openly and outwardly not validating them. It’s kind of a double negative there. I think this presents a real need that our profession has to deal with right now, both from the side of students who may be immigrants or may identify with the LGBTQIA+ population or any racial or ethnic minority where they’re not feeling as safe as before. Aside from their own internal feelings about it, there’s also a real threat from people who may feel validated in their hate, whichever kind of hate it might be, to become aggressive to these individuals.
SM. In your role, what do you see as the primary pain points when it comes to school safety today? And out of these, which are the ones that keep you up at night?
Ney. I think a lack of preparedness—the sense that it’s not going to happen here, and schools not necessarily having the policies and procedures in place that they need to have to be able to keep their students safe.
Along with that, the sense of checking a box. Sometimes, out of the best of intentions, schools are faced with a very real situation where they have limited funding and they have to figure out where to allocate that. But a school may decide to take one approach or get one program in place to say, “OK, we’re doing something about school safety,” and they’re maybe not looking at it holistically. They’re maybe not recognizing that whether it be physical equipment or a program that they purchased and enacted—the one thing that they’re doing may not be comprehensive enough to cover all of the aspects of school safety. They’re kind of creating a false sense of security and false sense of safety. Again, because while active shooters are high impact, they’re not the most frequent type of threat that schools face. But schools are vulnerable to all different types of threats and may not be just aware of the fact that they’re not addressing all of those threats.
SM. What policies or practices do you think have helped improve safety without generating fear, anxiety, or disruption?
Ney. I think when a threat assessment is done well, it has the real potential to promote safety and provide support. When done well, a behavioral threat assessment is not focused on punishment. It’s focused on keeping the environment safe and supporting the students. So, within a threat assessment, the person who made the threat or the perceived threat should receive support and to help identify why they made that threat, why they made that comment, and provide the support they need to be able to get to a better space.
SM. It’s interesting that you used security language just now. Is there a reason for that?
Ney. Well, a behavioral threat assessment involves behavioral health, right? So, school psychologists are a very big part of a behavioral threat assessment team and work in a multidisciplinary group. In fact, the author of one of the most widely known behavioral threat assessment models is a clinical psychologist. The model features a multidisciplinary team aimed at supporting the concerning student as opposed to focusing on law enforcement and other kinds of school hardening techniques. I think when a multidisciplinary approach is taken and you have law enforcement working together with mental health providers, working together with school administrators, with everyone bringing their expertise and respecting the expertise of each other to really provide a comprehensive school safety solution—this is a kind of success.
I think another really big success is when we ensure a comprehensive approach and not just slapping up a metal detector—understanding these different techniques that we use to try to keep schools safe, what impact those have on the school population, and recognizing that different school populations are going to respond differently to different types of measures. For some students, having a uniformed officer present adds to their sense of security and safety. For other populations, it does not. And the same with some other types of practices. So, I think it really takes getting to know the population to find the solutions that are going to be the best match for that specific school culture.
SM. So, it doesn’t sound like that’s a one-size-fits-all, silver-bullet kind of solution then?
Ney. No. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, I really, truly believe strongly in [NASP’s] PREPaRE model because it is not one-size-fits-all, but a framework that schools can use to apply all of the principles to the needs of their school. So, I think the important part is being able to know the structures that you need to have in place and be able to adapt them to your specific school. I think we are making a mistake if we just bring something in that works for one school and try to make it fit in another school without really understanding the needs of that school.
SM. We’ve covered what works. What about what doesn’t work—are there measures that you think are ineffective, outdated, or overly hyped?
Ney. I think exclusionary practices for students are never going to be helpful. We want to keep kids in school—we’re not helping the school climate by expelling students or kicking them out. We want to instead focus on support. I think that a shift we’ve really seen over time is the recognition that it’s important to keep kids in school and provide support instead of excluding and expelling.
And another kind of change I’ve seen over time is that it’s harmful to think of one solution in isolation and trying to apply that solution to all different populations. I think there is the recognition that we need to balance while staying away from just focusing on only law enforcement, only metal detectors, only locking doors. Some of those are very useful, just not in isolation. And some of the environmental design principles are extremely important to school safety. They also need to be used in coordination with some of the other school safety procedures that give a little bit more attention to the human element—the people that are inside that school instead of just the physical aspect of that school.
SM. If you could implement one change in every school’s safety policies, what would it be and why?
Ney. It’s not just a policy alone, but collaboration among professionals. If there was one thing that I could just wake up tomorrow and find every school is doing it, it would be that all of the professionals are collaborating, sharing their expertise to really work towards that common goal.
SM. Thank you. That’s it for me, but was there anything that I didn’t ask you about something that you wanted to touch on?
Ney. I guess, maybe the one thing that I haven’t mentioned goes back to your question about things that are harmful. Highly sensorial active shooter type drills are something that we really strongly advocate against. Any type of drill like that is going to potentially cause trauma to students. The trauma-sensitive approach to all of school safety is very important, and I think that’s particularly evident in those school safety drills. Maybe it hasn’t been announced that there is going to be a drill—so students don’t know if it’s real or not—or maybe there are people walking around with fake guns. That can be very trauma-inducing for some students. We advocate more towards staying away from even referring to guns and shooters, instead talking more about it in terms of scary events.
School safety and security efforts are as multifaceted and complex as the students, staff, and families that make up a school and its community. For this series on K-12 security and operations, Security Management spoke with different stakeholders and professionals that are invested in making schools safer and vying to create a learning environment where students and educators can focus on learning. Explore the series here.
Sara Mosqueda is associate editor for Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or send her an email at [email protected].
