School Safety Training

Safety School Planning:
It is not easy to find the right balance between creating a safe and secure school and maintaining a welcoming and nurturing environment. Successful administrators choose creative ways to address this challenge. They face three demanding responsibilities. The first task is assessment: accurately identifying where the school is in terms of school violence and school crime prevention issues. This includes assessing the threats and the assets of the school within the context of the greater community. The second step is to identify there the school wants to be. The third phase, implementation and strategy, describes how the school will move from where it is to where it wants to be. A safe school plan can guide the school and community in creating a vision that is consistent with the community’s will and a process that allows the school to achieve the type of school climate it desires.

Safe school planning is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing, broad-based, systematic, and comprehensive process. A safe school plan includes both behavioral aspects and property aspects of crime prevention. The best safe school plans integrally involve the entire community.

Safe school planning is all about the art of the possible. The safe school planning process is not confined to this set of guidelines or any other special constraints. Each community has the opportunity to shape the type of school climate it wishes to create. More than anything else, a safe school plan is a function of the community’s will, its priorities, and interests.

School Safety for Emergency Response:
The school safety team must be composed of school personnel, local law enforcement officials, and representatives from emergency response agencies. A post-incident response team, consisting of appropriate school and medical personnel and mental health counselors, should also be established. Procedures to ensure that crisis response and law enforcement officials have access to floor plans, blueprints, and other maps of school property; establishment of internal and external communication systems in emergencies; and definition of the chain of command in a manner consistent with the National Interagency Incident Management System and Incident Command System must be included in the school emergency response plan.

School Annual Safety Training:
Schools should schedule annual safety training for all employees, including teachers. No one should be exempt from this training for any reason, including extracurricular duties. Additionally, in-depth mandatory safety training that is specific to individual duties should be conducted at least yearly. If the hazards change or increase, then additional safety training is needed. When new activities or equipment are introduced into the classroom, specific safety training on the hazards associated with them is needed. Science teachers who have a better content background and more specialized training and experience in their teaching field are less likely to have advertisements occur in their science classroom or laboratory and during field activities, whether in agriculture, art, photography, welding, auto mechanics, theater, chemistry, physics, geology, or biology.

Safety training for students, at a grade appropriate level, has been shown to increase awareness level, has been shown to increase awareness and decrease risk of injury. Many successful models are available. While safety training should permeate the curriculum, it is especially important to integrate it into hands on courses such as theater and science. The training should include practical information such as fire safety, which may be broadly applicable, given that many fires occur in the home.

Conclusion:
School administrators, together with federal and state agencies, community, must work toward the goal of comprehensive safety planning, school safety emergency response, giving safety training to students and teachers, integrating curriculum. With forethought and commitment, schools can be prepared to prevent and respond effectively to potentially terrorist attacks and crisis situations.