May 2007 — News
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Long Odds, Short Fuses
No matter what security measures you implement, many of us could come up with scenarios in which those measures would not prevent some sort of horrible incident from occurring at your school and probably cite examples from history to prove that those security measures are fallible.
Fortunately though, as we've discussed, the numbers are on our side as far as murder and non-negligent manslaughter are concerned. And it's their very rarity that allows us to name the handful of horrifying incidents we're all aware of off the top of our heads.
So, if you can't bank on being able to prevent a devastating disaster--natural or man-made--what is there to do?
You look to minimize the impact of an unpreventable crisis through effective response. You come up with plans to deal with broad categories of situations in the area of communications and emergency procedures.
And here, again, Virginia Tech's administration was widely criticized. Why wasn't the campus shut down following the discovery of the first two murders? Why weren't students notified immediately? Those are wonderfully critical questions to ask with the benefit of hindsight. Do you shut down a campus if an incident occurs that appears to be domestic violence on the surface? For how long? An hour? Two hours? Until the perpetrator is caught? And if the perpetrator is never caught, does the campus remain closed forever? And if you shut the campus down for a day, and the killer comes back the next day, do you get criticized for that?
And how close to the campus does such an occurrence need to be in order to justify shutting down the school? On campus only? In off campus student housing? In the immediate neighborhood? In the city? In the county? Within a day's drive of the school? What, precisely, is your security perimeter?
And when do you notify students? Prior to consulting with police, even if it means it could endanger the effort to catch the criminal? And if the police or campus security advise that the situation doesn't warrant shutting down the campus, do you still send out the notifications? Do you simply alert students of the possibility of a dangerous situation and allow them to skip school that day, then deal with the organizational issues of making up school work and exempting students from tests that were scheduled for the day?
Then, how do you notify those students? E-mail and text messaging might be ineffective to a large degree, even in times when students and parents are particularly sensitive to security concerns, though they could help.
Do you have an emergency phone notification system in place? If so, would an emergency message to a home with caller ID immediately call attention to a crisis situation, or would the caller ID just show the name of the district or, worse, the alert system vendor? Will parents seeing the caller ID message think it's just another PTA fundraising call, like the dozen other fundraising calls they've received in the school year?
