Schools can be safer with some straightforward strategies if emergency responders and school personnel communicate directly and simply. Too often, law enforcement tends to speak in paramilitary jargon and acronyms, and legislation on school safety is linked to this kind of communication, but there is an easier way, said John-Michael Keyes, executive director of the "i love you guys" foundation, which tries to help develop school safety.
He was one of the guest speakers at the Colorado Briefing, an all-day workshop on school safety held at Morgan Community College Wednesday.
He was also the parent of Emily Keyes, the 16-year-old girl who was killed when a gunman came into Platte Canyon High School near Bailey.
Representatives of area schools and law enforcement learn about how to keep schools safe during various kinds of situations during a workshop at Morgan Community College Wednesday.
Since 1999, Colorado has experienced four high-profile school shootings, each with different outcomes and aftermaths, and the workshop was focused on helping school districts and law enforcement agencies to work together to create school safety plans.
Representatives from Fort Morgan, Brush, Wiggins and Weldon Valley schools were on hand, along with people from other schools districts, Morgan County law enforcement agencies and other agencies from other counties.
Schools must have school safety plans, but that does not mean that every teacher and staff member must become an expert on the legal language and tactics of emergency response, Keyes told the crowd. While the state requirements are tied to the National Incident Management System, not everyone has to know all the details of that.
After years of research and conversation, he discovered some simple strategies can be taught to teachers and students which will help prevent problems and respond to situations, he said.
Called the standard response protocol, school staff need to learn actions to respond to four kinds of responses: Lockout, lockdown, evacuate and shelter.
The response by students and teachers in classrooms is critical, Keyes said.
Lockout simply means to secure the perimeter when there is a hazard of any kind outside of a school, Keyes said. Students need to learn to go inside or stay inside the school building. Teachers need to recover students from outside the building or keep them inside, make sure they have a student roll on hand to account for every child and become aware of the situation.
Lockdown means teaching students to move out of the sight of anyone who might be inside a building and to remain totally silent. Teachers learn to lock the classroom door and not to open it for anyone except law enforcement or the school administration, turn the lights out, get out of sight, maintain silence and make sure all students are accounted for, he said.
Students also need to learn that evacuation means leaving everything behind, forming a single file and listen to what the teacher might tell them to do. Teachers need to grab a student roll sheet if possible, lead students to an evacuation area and to take roll, Keyes said.
Shelter is needed when personal protection is necessary in case of events like tornadoes, bombs or hazardous material spills, he said. Kids need to learn to drop, cover and hold in silence. Teachers will need to know the correct response to various dangers.
These are fairly simple and direct actions, and do not require extensive training. Administrators may need to know all the legislative jargon, but teachers and students just need to know how to respond, Keyes said.
About 13 percent of teachers are substitutes on any given day, but they can be trained and a simple pamphlet can inform them of how to respond, he said.
The idea for the i love you guys foundation came in response to what happened when his daughter was killed Sept. 27, 2009, he said. While he was outside the high school, he had a local reporter text a message to Emily, and she responded with "i love you guys," which was the last communication she ever had with her family.
From eyewitness accounts and surveillance footage, law enforcement learned that the school's resource officer had left the building for an interview in town just before a gunman came to the school and stepped out of a Jeep just after 11 a.m. that day.
The gunman went into room 206 and fired a round into a wall. He ordered the boys and the teacher out. When the teacher would not leave, he threatened to kill one of the students if she did not go. He also said he had enough explosives to level the building.
The gunman held seven girls, and by the time literally hundreds of responders, a bomb squad and a SWAT team arrived it was a barricaded hostage situation.
Law enforcement personnel learned the lesson from the Columbine High School incident to respond, not just wait, Keyes said.
Over the course of the afternoon, the man released five of the girls, but the situation was tense, because the gunman had hinted that something might happen at 4 p.m., and officers decided they had to intervene.
It only took 3.7 seconds for six officers to crash into the room through a door and another two through a window, but that little time allowed the gunman to shoot Emily and point the gun to his own head before rounds from the officers hit him.
"I think they did everything right," Keyes said in a TV interview later.
Instead of carrying anger and blame, he set out to find ways to make schools safer, he said.
The Colorado legislature has established a number of requirements to make schools safer, but often these are unfunded mandates, Keyes noted. However, some simple things can make schools safer.
It is important to take steps to keep intruders out of schools, but it is also vital that schools are not turned into fortresses, he said.
Teachers and other staff members will always be the first to respond to any incident, and cope with the aftermath later, Keyes said.
Keyes also offered a range of resources for those who want to keep schools safe, most of which are displayed on his foundation's Web page at http://iloveyouguys.org. Among those resources is a triage card, which has a green page to indicate that a class is safe and accounted for, a red page to indicate the class needs help and a page with a medical emblem to indicate medical care is needed. This simple method is meant to help emergency responders to know what is needed in a swift manner.
The site also offers guidance on getting started, student-parent handouts, classroom posters, pre-packaged presentations and a workbook to help people learn how to respond in emergencies, among other things, Keyes noted.
Perhaps most crucial is that schools need to practice their emergency responses to all possible scenarios, he emphasized. Everyone who is involved needs to be working for the same outcome, and to be on the same page.
Keyes has been promoting these simple methods and now close to half the 1,656 Colorado schools have them in place, he said. There are more than 2,000 schools across the nation that use the system.
Some may worry that this would scare kids, but they are already aware of the dangers, Keyes explained. In fact, he played a rap song that was written about the dangerous situations kids think about.
Authorities warn kids about dangerous things like fire and offer them survival strategies, but often do not talk about what they should do if they are under gunfire, he said.
It is important to talk about all the dangers and how kids can make themselves safer, although schools do not have to paint the world as a scary place, Keyes said.
One of the best programs in place is the Safe2Tell program, which is an anonymous tip line. This is necessary to crack the teen code of silence, and these tips are always acted on, he said.
Studies show that in 80 percent of shooting incidents someone knew in advance that something was going to happen, and this is a way to intervene, Keyes said.
The tip line does suicide interventions almost every week, and in 28 cases uncovered specific plans to attack schools, complete with hit lists and sometimes explosives, he said. There were nearly 1,700 tips last year.
Unfortunately, some communities have the attitude that school violence could never happen in their towns, Keyes said. He gave the crowd homework to watch TV news and write down every time someone says they did not think an incident would happen in their community, because it will quickly fill up pages of a note pad.
Bailey was a beautiful little town, but tragedy struck there and it could happen anywhere, he said.
Communities and schools have to own the fact that every person is responsible for school safety, Keyes said.
Workshop
The purpose of the workshop was to bring school personnel and emergency response teams together for the cause of safety, said psychologist Linda Kanan, the director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center, which operates under the Colorado Department of Public Safety.
This center was created in 2008 to create safe and positive school environments. Its aim is to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies and situations, she said.
Early intervention is key to preventing violent incidents, although the situation is not as dire as some may think, Kanan said.
"The good news is school violence across the country is not on the increase," she said.
In fact, it has decreased over the past 20 years, Kanan noted.
Since the Columbine High School shootings, the Colorado legislature has crafted 19 pieces of legislation related to school safety, but it is crucial to deal with kids' health and behavioral needs before they escalate to the point of violence, she said.
Part of any comprehensive plan is prevention, Kanan emphasized.
That means thinking through responses ahead of time, and not just to violence but to all kinds of situations like suicide, bullying and hazardous materials incidents, she said.
It is important for schools to collaborate with emergency response agencies to create an all-hazards response plan, and that should come with exercises to practice responses, Kanan said.
Good communication between schools and emergency agencies is a part of that, she said, which was the point of this workshop.
Besides the straightforward plans of moving kids and protecting them, plans must be customized for different sites, Kanan explained. For instance, schools need to take into account what will happen with kids and adults with special needs.
"Everybody needs to be trained," Kanan said, and that means doing actual drills, although tabletop discussions are a good place to start.
Fire safety inspectors will be checking to see what kinds of drills schools are doing. While school districts have local control, and this is only data gathering at this point, these drills are important, she said.
Kanan noted that fire officials allow schools to substitute other kinds of drills for their monthly fire drills during two months each year.
John McDonald, Jefferson County Public Schools executive director of safety, security and emergency planning, spoke on the Deer Creek Middle School incident.
Teachers and emergency responders split up in the afternoon. Educators discussed implementing the system Keyes talked about and strategies for bringing schools back together after incidents. Law enforcement officials had debriefings on Columbine and Platte Canyon to discuss the features of these incidents.
