Safe Schools

Vossekuil, B., Reddy, M., Rein, R. (2000) Safe School Initiative. An interim report on the ptevention of tatgeted violence in schools. Presented at Awesome Adolescents Confetence, McLean Hospital, Boston, MA. 

Students who engaged in school-based attacks typically did not just snap and engage in impulsive or random acts of targeted school violence. Instead, the attacks examined under the Safe School Initiative appeared to be the end result of a comprehensible process of thinking and behavior that typically began with an idea, progressed to the development of a plan, moved on to securing the means to carry out the plan, and culminated in an attack. The Safe School Initiative found that the time span between the attacker s decision to mount an attack and the actual incident may be short. Consequently, when indications that a student may pose a threat to the school community arise in the form of information about a possible planned attack, school administrators and law enforcanent officials will need to move quickly to inquire about and intervene in that possible plan. 

Source From Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2008). PRIMER To Design Safe School Projects in Case of Terrorist Attacks FEMA 428. U.S. Department of Flomeland Security, Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Department of Education. (2008). A Guide to School Vulnerability Assessments Key Principles for Safe Schools. Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, Washington, D.C. Vossekuil, B., Fein, R. A., Reddy, M., Borum, R., and Modzeleski, W. (2002). The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States. U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secret Service, Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Secret Service, National Threat Assessment Center, Safe Schools Initiative, http //www. secretservice.gov/ntac.shtml... 

Recent literature has focused on prevention and early intervention efforts in promoting school safety. In fact, programs have been developed, such as the Safe Schools/ Healthy Students Initiative, funded by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and Justice, to provide programs to school districts at the prevention, early intervention, and treatment levels to address social, behavioral, and mental health issues in cooperation with community partners and law enforcement agencies (U.S. Department of Education, 1999 Thornton et al, 2000). 

Dwyer, K., Osher, D., and Wagner, C. (1998). Early Warning, Timely Response A Guide to Safe Schools. U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Department of Education, Health and Human Services. (1999). Safe Schools/ Healthy Student Initiative. Accessed May 4, 2012. http //www.sshs.samhsa.gov/ initiative/default. aspx. 

The interview with Wanda Johnson, Safe Schools Coordinator, Pulaski County, Kentucky School District (2011) included below helps to identify practical challenges in being awarded a REMS grant and implanenting an anergency management plan in a school district. 

This case stndy concerning the Apex, North Carolina/Wake County School District is adapted from one inclnded in the Center for Snstainable Community Design report Safe Schools Identifying Environmental Threats to Children Attending Pnblic Schools in North Carolina (Salvesen et al., 2008). 

Interview with Wanda Johnson, Safe Schools Coordinator, Pulaski County, Kentucky School District, November 1, 2011. 

Lott, M. (2009). Obama s safe schools czar admits he poorly handled underage sex case. Fox/Vcw s.com. Accessed Match 14,2012. http //www.foxnews.eom/politics/2009/09/30/ obamas-safe-schools-czar-admits-poorly-handled-underage-sex-case. 

Salvesen, D., Zambito, R, Hamstead, Z., and Wilson, B. (2008). Safe Schools Identifying Environmental Threats to Children Attending Public Schools in North Carolina The Center for Sustainable Community Design, Institute for the Environment, University of North Carolina at Chapel Etdl, Chapel EtiU, NC. 

Oreta, A. 2010 Advocacy Guide, one million safe schools and hospitals campaign. UNISDR Asia and Pacific, 48 pp. 

Box 10.8 bnilds on the Frameworks three sections, their main elements and these qnestions to provide detailed suggestions about research evidence that is likely to be readily available to practitioners in schools. This is then divided into interviews, observations and documentation although, of course, there are other types of research methods which practitioners may wish to use. The information provided here is intended to be developed in ways which suit different practitioners particular research concerns, interests and resources. So, for example, if the research focused on creating and maintaining a welcoming and safe school (as part of access to spaces and places ) in addition to the suggestions given in... 

Comprehensive school safety Critical infrastructure Safe school construction Safe school facilities School construction... 

Under most circumstances, young people do not lobby for their own rights to health and safety. Children cannot refuse to go to school because a building is unsafe. By law, they must attend school, though teachers, parents, and others may advocate on their behalf. Faculty and support staff in schools should also be concerned for their occupational safety and theoretically be natural advocates of safe school facilities. Yet there are no examples mentioned to date of teachers unions becoming involved in the issue of school disaster vulnerability. 

Thus schools have a value in the social fabric of a community, providing adult education, promoting public health, building and maintaining sustainable livelihoods, and protecting people. The monetary value of those social gains defies estimation but clearly adds value and further justifies investment in safe school construction and maintenance. 

Assessing School Safety from Disasters, A Global Baseline Report (UNISDR 2012) foimd several consistent threats to safe school facilities ... 

Failure to assure every new school is a safe school Neither donors, governments, nor NGO associations have xmequivocaUy committed to providing evidence or assurances or submitted to monitoring to assure that every new school is a safe school. Many small-scale... 

Some of the major policy and programmatic endeavors to assure seismic resilient construction of schools, worldwide, as of 2013, have involved important steps such as providing risk maps for safe school site selection, construction guidelines, standards, and oversight and commitments to safe school construction in the context of both post-disaster reconstruction and new school construction to meet Millennium Development Goals. 

Clear warrants and commitments from donors IGOs or INGOs when it comes to safe school constmction are still clearly much needed. 

There have also been too few and/or too quiet commitments to safe school construction in the context of the Millennium Development Goals, in spite of the fact that the Global Partnership for Education states as its first strategic goal the provision of a quality basic education in a scrfe environment. The most important and notable has been in Uttar Pradesh, India, where 23.5 million children attend school in this moderate to severe seismic risk zone 21,000 new school buildings... 

Initial programs and guidance for safe school facilities have been provided by OECD (2004), UNCRD (2008), INEE/World Bank GFDRR/ UNISDR (2010), and several other programs, with modest support of donors and lenders. These approaches experiences are now ripe for implementation at scale. These include regional hazard mapping and revision (where necessary), the potential for crowd-sourced... 

Pandey B (2013) Political economy study on safe schools. World Bank, Global Facility for Disaster Reduction... 

US 430 million. Additionally, this program was based on the implementation of a teaching strategy to incorporate risk management into the culture. Both structural and nonstructural objectives were implemented to obtain a comfortable and safe school enviromnent and a high-quality education service. 

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