How Culture and Climate Shape School Security

My name is Guy Blissner. I am a school safety and security analyst for the State Board of Education in Idaho. I come to school security from a rather unique perspective. I was a long time coach and teacher at a high school level before I moved on to the administrative side of education and began my work in school security as the school safety and security coordinator in a midsized school district in Idaho. School security is absolutely incumbent on creating a climate and culture that does three things. It cradles and cares for children. It creates an environment where the use of the processes and procedures for security are commonly practiced and used with fidelity and it creates a environment that fosters effective education, absent any of those three things and we cease to be a school. We've become something else. So that's kind of my perspective on Climate and culture. It's the single most important element of creating a safe and secure educational space. Again, we have to focus largely on those three elements. First of all, students have to feel safe and encouraged to engage in their education. Twenty years of educational research by Robert Marzano and others have made that an educational absolute. We also know that most school security failures are human failures. They are not systems or equipment failures. Given that enculturation of the effective use of the security processes and procedures in a school are a critical element. And by that, enculturation, not only by the students. But the staff has to effectively use the tools that they're given and embrace the processes One of the things that's most regrettable in school safety and security in recent years is the overwhelming and nearly predatory approach that some have taken to selling schools the things that will make them safe. Too often, it's easy to be told that as an administrator, when you're dealing with, turn you the immediate and dealing with all of the problems that take place in education, and we have an an incident in a school. And the hue and cry goes out that you must make a safe school environment. It's often far too easy to simply accept something that you can buy will fix the problem. And that's being fostered by some less scrupulous vendors. So the decisions made by administrators are often made with the absolute best of intent. They want to create a safe and secure environment. Unfortunately, doing that they sometimes create a environment that is not psychologically safe for kids, overwhelming, visible intrusive security procedures from a practitioner's perspective makes a place safer. From a student's perspective or a teacher's perspective, it may psychologically make them feel less safe. Why would they do all of these things if there weren't on an imminent danger to my security. Here I like to look at the Disney theme parks. The happiest place on Earth is also one of the most secure places on earth. And it does not affect the participants inside the theme park. They're moving from place to place, having fun enjoying the the process, and it's still very, very safe. Schools need to mirror that approach as much as possible. Whenever possible, school security measures should be as close to invisible as we can achieve. It's absolutely critical. That we invest in staff. Not only staff training, staff professional development. We invest in staff by letting them help define how those processes will work. They're the ones who work in this environment and must deliver education. If we impede them in that process and don't engage them, we will have a climate and culture disconnect. Culture being the the common practices and ethos of a group and climate being the feeling of that group. If we say we do a lot of things, we can feel very safe, but if we don't do them with fidelity, we are actually less so. So inviting those people in having them engage with us as we develop those processes and procedures is a critical element. It's also relatively critical that we look at hiring those folks or partnering with our law enforcement agencies to bring in some security expertise. The Nasro model for school resource officers is, I call it community policing on steroids. They are embedded in the school climate and culture. They are simply a part, and we need to look at the potential based on the risk and exposure that we have identified, we can mitigate to an extent with those folks. There is absolutely a healthy balance of investing in school security with the understanding that we are a school first. We have to be able to provide and meet the mission of educating society's most important asset the next generation and providing a safe and secure environment in which that can take place, but safe and secure can be highly intrusive if we aren't careful of the educational process. We need to be very careful that we are not impeding that ability to teach. And I believe absolutely that the overwhelming marketing blitz that takes place following any security investment process. Our security failure is disruptive and unprofitable and takes a educators focus away from that which they should be focused on, the the education of students the data, the statistics, the understanding of acts of violence will help us mow or affect actively address those problems, understanding that almost sixty percent of school shooters are our own students. Means that effective behavioral threat assessment practices applied with fidelity are a critical element in creating a safer environment. Understanding that the largest part of these take place in unstructured time in that time before school after school, and in the passing times in the hallways means that student supervision becomes a critical element training teachers to effectively report deviance from baseline behavior in their students so we can get well ahead of the curve and intervene with those students who may be in need. So all of those elements of creating a safe and secure environment are an absolute necessity as we go forward with this.