Q&A: School Safety Directors Offer Perspective and Scope
School safety and security efforts are as multifaceted and complex as the students, staff, and families that make up a school and its community.
Jason Stoddard serves on the advisory council for ZeroNow, a national organization focused on safer schools. Stoddard is also the chair of ZeroNow’s National Council of School Safety Directors (NCSSD), a program that is creating a national standard, certification, advocacy, and continuing education for school safety directors. The council is based on three pillars—collecting and creating a comprehensive library of school safety, the creation of a credentialing program, and advocating for school safety and school safety directors. Stoddard is also the director of school safety and security for Charles County Public Schools in Maryland.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Security Management (SM). When it comes to creating standards, guidelines, and policies, what are the areas that you focus on to try to improve school safety?
Jason Stoddard. So, there’s an increasing drive in the space from a number of different places to create standards, physical security standards or, you know, minimum standards and things like that. While we support those ideas, I think it’s important that we understand that every school is unique. We have schools that were built in the 1800s all the way to schools that are built today, and every school requires a physical security assessment before we go start spending money. It does no good to have a standard that says you must have 6-foot-tall fences, but because your school is a historical school you can’t put a fence around it—and then we have a document that is seen as a legal standard that the school system can’t meet.
I know the word “standard” kind of drives people a little nuts, I guess, is the best way to put it. People see standards as being commands and demands. I would refer to them more as guidelines. Here’s where you should shoot for, these are the things that you should every school should have.
Truth be told, the four fundamentals of school safety are all free: positive relationships between staff and the student body, having a well-trained staff and student body, positive school cultures and climates, and the consistent enforcement of your student code of conduct. That last one not only drives reflection, and learning, but also has an accountability piece in there. If you don’t have those four things and you’re not working every day to master those four things, no matter what you buy, no matter what fence you put up, no matter what door lock you put on, no matter what—anything you buy is not going to work because you don’t have a policy and procedure base. You don’t have a people base. You don’t have a relationship base to make all those things work. And that’s the unique piece of schools is that it’s not driven by security professionals. We all work together as a collaborative team, and most of us are not like superintendents, so we can’t demand it. We have to figure out the best ways and things to do with the space that we have and with the money that we have. And that is different in every school.
We have to figure out the best ways and things to do with the space that we have and with the money that we have.
I can give you a great example. I was talking to a guy in Idaho, and we’re having a conversation about ballistic doors on interior classrooms and exterior doors. The reason that we’re having that conversation is the fact that for some of his schools the nearest police officer may be border patrol in the northern areas of Idaho that are that are two hours away. So, you can’t rely upon a shorter response time from law enforcement to an active shooter in those remote areas, compared to the urban areas of the United States. You may need to spend more money doing target hardening of the exterior of the school to make it more difficult for some somebody with ill-intent to get into the school.
Even inside of my own school district, I have schools that are right across the street from police stations. I also have a school that’s 25 minutes away from the nearest police officer running priority. So, I may spend more money and more time protecting the exterior of that school because I need to have that delaying ability. At another school that’s right across the street from the police department, I can spend more money on something else. So, there’s a balance in everything and every school is different.
The question of, for example, arming teachers always comes up. I think for a vast majority of the United States, that’s likely not a good option. However, I talked to a school security director in southern Texas, who has a county that’s bigger than Rhode Island and may have two police officers working at any given time. Who am I to say that if they have a retired Marine combat veteran who is a teacher there, who has done everything that they need to do to have a concealed-carry permit in the school, that’s not an appropriate solution for that specific school?
SM. You mentioned that there are certain things that are free and crucial to fostering a secure school environment. What are the biggest obstacles preventing schools from achieving that?
Stoddard. I think the first thing is just simply understanding the space and the scope. Schools are bombarded by vendors trying to sell you the latest solution—I mean, every day it’s 10 or 15 calls. And for schools that don’t have a school safety director to answer those calls, there may have been six or seven people that control different aspects of school safety, but no one person is responsible for the whole thing and bringing all the pieces together. So, when you don’t have somebody that’s dedicated to it, it becomes very difficult to make sure that everything is working together as an ecosystem.
So, a great example would be I, a school security director, want to buy new cameras and put them in the schools. Well, I may be asked where I want to place those cameras, but I may not be—it may be the IT department that oversees that project. And those folks are not camera experts and they’re not security experts, but the technology is there, so it’s in the technology realm. IT oversees it, and it comes out of the IT budget. It’s a budgeting issue, it’s an ownership issue, it’s an operationalizing issue, and it’s a noisy issue if I’m getting five or six or seven emails a day.
We also see a lot of “just do something” post-tragedy. Recently in Georgia, during the school shooting, there was a specific piece of technology that was got national news coverage and was said to have improved the response time of the first responders. A lot of superintendents—who are responsible for school safety but are educators who may or may not have somebody that’s an expert with inside of their school district to lean upon—said, “Well, we need to invest in that because it worked there.” But when you get down to it, the initial information that was put out wasn’t necessarily true or the whole picture. Had somebody been in some of these school districts to be able to sit back and go, “Yes, we probably need that. We could have something like that where we have a wearable device. But do we have phones in every classroom for somebody to call 911? Are we mandating doors to be locked during teaching time? What does our behavioral threat assessment piece look like? Do we have all these things instead of going out there and buying things?” If you don’t have anybody that’s controlling it, it’s just noise.
Many schools across the United States have a number of different great things that they’ve already put into place, but they don’t consider them security issues. For example, a behavioral threat assessment is a must, but it’s amazing the number of schools that don’t have that. The assessment isn’t complete unless the school psychologists, counselors, and a whole team are involved.
There are also some technology pieces that go to that. We may have all kinds of different pieces together, but somebody has got to be that coach for the district. And I think that’s what it boils down to. And I think that’s the biggest struggle for most school districts is they don’t have a coach. But if they have a coach, do they trust the coach? And is the coach in the proper place in the organizational hierarchy and have decision-making ability, or do they report to facilities and have no access to the superintendent? In some school districts that are very, very small, the person who’s in charge of security is also the facilities guy. He’s also the head of food and nutrition service and is also the bus driver on the weekends because they don’t have enough bus drivers. And that person got that job kind of by default because he or she has the most knowledge or they’re a retired police officer in the military.
We may have all kinds of different pieces together, but somebody has got to be that coach for the district.
And then how do I learn when I don’t know there’s other people out there for me, which is where NCSSD comes in, because it feels very lonely for many of those folks. It doesn’t matter what the background is. It just matters that you can come into a school which speaks a very, very specific language and be able to build those relationships and be able to all work together to make our schools safe. Because if schools aren’t safe, kids aren’t going to learn, and our teachers aren’t going to teach. It needs to be our number one priority, and there should be somebody who oversees it. But that person has to know how to work inside the school environment. Some retired cops or former military can’t do that.
NCSSD’s drive is to be able to bring all of that together, all the things that we’ve learned over the years. There’s nothing that all of us together have not experienced. There’s a lot of things that individually we haven’t experienced, but I need to be able to lean on other people.
SM. How have school safety threats evolved in recent years?
Stoddard. There’s really no operating definition for school safety or for school security. That’s one of the biggest problems that we face. What all does it include? Is it just shootings? That’s what you hear a lot about because it makes the news. Yeah, there’s a national database out there that would tell you that there were 349 school shootings last year. However, when you break that down, roughly 84 percent of those were after school hours and really had nothing to do with the operations of the school. You can break that down even further, and what you discover is, from my count, there have been three active shooter-style takeover attacks in K-12 spaces in the last two school years: Georgia, Tennessee, and one that happened in Wisconsin. But everybody hears that number of 349 school shootings, and they think each equates to Columbine, Uvalde, and things like that. You hear a lot of technology and solutions for school shootings, and many of them are unproven, many are very specific and only deal with one issue, but they’re being sold as dealing with multiple issues.
But ultimately, it’s not just about school shootings. It’s also drugs, vaping (which is a huge issue in schools), altercations, robberies, thefts, or employee issues. In 2004, which is the last study that was put out by the Department of Education, they said one in 10 kids will be the victims of sexual harassment or sexual assault by a school staff member. That’s 5 million kids annually that are abused by school staff members. That’s a school safety issue, too.
I think that the push of the media coverage has been predominantly of school shootings, and we’ve forgotten about everything else. Ultimately, whatever feeds your school, whatever is going on in the communities that surround your school will come into your school. It is not like schools have a big aura around them, and if the kids are doing bad things outside the schools, that they’re not bringing it into the schools. Those issues are happening in the community as well—the school’s just a location. In my opinion, schools are being blamed for a lot of things that they don’t control. I think what we fail to see is all the things that we have to deal with that affect school safety and security. And it is always an evolving threat.
Quite frankly, I can boil it back to the fact that we spend 90 percent of our time talking about 10 percent of our population. What we don’t talk about is the 90 percent of our kids that don’t cause any problems, that don’t have any discipline issues. And they are, by overwhelming percentage, the victims of school-based violence and school-based disorder. We don’t spend enough time talking about and protecting that 90 percent. We spend way too much time providing too many excuses and protections for that 10 percent. It really affects the learning environment of that 90 percent that are there for the right reasons. And when you really break down and look at school security and the press side of things and the media side of things, that’s where we spend a great deal of time.
SM. And out of all the emerging risks that you come across, which ones keep you up at night?
Stoddard. Intruders. We’re seeing more and more people that are coming to our schools, adults specifically, that don’t belong there, parents who come to the school to attack their students’ bullies, or even come to the school to attack their kids’ teachers.
One of the things that also keeps me up at night more and more is that because of the reduction overall in many places in the country as it relates to juvenile crime. We are seeing more and more violence as it relates to physical aggression, and the proliferation of illegal firearms. And if kids are shooting at each other in the community, the likelihood of a community-based gun violence shooting, I think, is much higher today than what we’ve ever seen in the past. I think we’ve done a real good job of lowering the active or mass shooter threats for a number of different reasons, but I think what we are seeing is the increase of community-based gun violence leaking into schools that we’ve never seen before. And the traditional strategies that we would use to reduce mass shootings don’t work on community-based gun violence. It’s a whole different set of solutions. That keeps me up. That’s terrifying.
And again, another thing that keeps me up is the fact that we don’t talk about the 90 percent of kids that are good kids. We just forget about them. And that really bothers me.
SM. So, in terms of measures that can be taken, which measures, practices, or policies do you think are ineffective, outdated, or overly hyped?
Stoddard. You can’t buy school safety. If you look at the five Ds—deterrence, detection, delaying, denying, and defending—I think we need to spend a vast majority of our time in the deterrence piece, which comes from talking about what we’re doing to keep our kids safe, talking about the preemptive technology that we put out there. The use of the student code of conduct to deter certain behaviors, being proactive, and the willingness to have tough and courageous conversations with parents about the realities of where schools sit and what we do and what we can’t do—that doesn’t happen very often. We have far too many people that believe we’re there to raise kids when, in fact, our teachers go to school for four, six, and eight years to learn how to teach them, not raise them. And that’s not a conversation a lot of people in public education are willing to have.
Between that deterrence and that of detection, those are preventive pieces. It’s not just the active shooter piece, it’s that behavioral threat assessment piece that not only deals with a kid that threatens to do something stupid with a gun, but also the suicidal ideations, kids that are having mental health issues and being able to get a hold of those issues as soon as possible. Those things pay off in the long run.
Being preventative is the best thing that we can do and the most effective thing that we can do to keep schools as safe as possible.
For this series on K-12 security and operations, Security Management spoke with 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. Read more perspectives from the series here.
Sara Mosqueda is associate editor for Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or send her an email at [email protected].
