This week the San Diego Tribune reported that an elementary school in America took 14 minutes to report a sighting of a gunman on school grounds to police.
This delay was apparently due to a misunderstanding of the school’s policies and procedures on what to do if that type of incident occurred.
The San Diego Police Department said that ‘fourteen minutes is a long time’ and as a result, the school in question is investigating how to improve security.
At a time when schools are facing increasingly varied risks to the safety of their students and staff, such as heightened terror alerts and knife wielding intruders, is your school prepared to quickly and efficiently handle a threat to security?
At 8:35 am on 31 August an employee at the elementary school saw a man riding a bike through the playground with a gun strapped to his back and was unsure who to tell.
The staff member first called the school district’s headquarters to report the incident and the district headquarters then called police, but by that time 14 minutes had passed and it was 8:49 am.
By the time the police arrived at the school the man was gone. The man was later arrested in a SWAT standoff.
The school district is still investigating the specific reasons for the delay in notifying the police. However the misunderstanding appears to have been related to the wording of the school’s policy. The school policy stated that the district office must be notified when 911 is called. This wording clearly proved ambiguous to the school employee.
The school district’s superintendent has now clarified that this wording means that the district should be notified after calling the police.
Lieutenant Neil Griffin of the San Diego Police Department has said that the procedure followed seemed unusual in ‘how it went from the school to the district to the police’.
School officials have this week scheduled a meeting with parents and police to discuss the incident and how to improve security at the school.
Unfortunately, these kinds of security threats are not confined to the United States. In the past year in Australia:
The need for schools to be proactive and vigilant is unfortunately increasing each year as these kinds of security threats become more common.
But what can schools do to help address unexpected threats to security?
In an example of schools going to new extremes to protect staff and students, the Age has reported that from this week, all three of Mount Scopus Memorial College’s Melbourne campuses will have guards with guns stationed on the grounds.
This significant boost to the school’s security, while not in response to a particular threat to the College, ‘reflects the heightened security levels now in place across Australia and worldwide’, according to Principal Rabbi James Kennard. Rabbi Kennard also said that the armed guard ‘best met’ the school’s security needs.
The Age reported that it is expected that other Jewish schools in Melbourne will seriously consider employing armed guards following Mount Scopus’ decision. Many of those schools have already ramped up their security after an attack on a Jewish school in 2012 in France that killed four people.
However not all schools will have the need or the resources to hire armed guards to meet their security needs during school hours. For those schools, there are other measures they can take to help improve their security in the event that an unexpected threat occurs, including having policies and procedures in place as part of a:
See our earlier article for more information on the design and implementation of those programs.
The Federal Government is helping schools to take appropriate security measures by providing funding as part of the Schools Security Programme. Earlier this year the Federal Minister for Justice announced that as part of that Programme, 54 schools, including 17 Jewish and 15 Islamic schools, would share in $18 million of funding to employ security guards and CCTV cameras to improve protection for schools at risk of attack of violence stemming from racial or religious intolerance.
Since 2007 the Programme has provided $35 million for security measures in 126 projects, at 76 government and non-government schools and preschools.
In addition to enhancing security using equipment and guards, schools must also ensure that they make their staff another key resource in the management of a security breach by training them on the relevant safety policies and procedures.
As the San Diego gunman incident demonstrates, training is crucial so that tragedies don’t occur as a result of staff ignorance.
The San Diego incident drives home the importance of educating staff on their obligations in critical incident, risk and business continuity management and that the policies on those topics need to be clearly worded and easily accessible in times of urgency.
The San Diego school was extremely fortunate that the time delay caused by a confusing policy did not lead to tragedy.