Campus Safety Voices Campus Safety Magazine

Much of today’s focus regarding K-12 school safety and security is on emergency response. Various stakeholders, including district leaders, parents, and school boards, want to know if a school is prepared to respond to an incident, particularly those involving violence.

However, prevention should be at the forefront of the rhetoric and school safety plans, and behavioral threat assessments play a pivotal role.

During the pandemic, the United States saw a significant uptick in homicides, shootings, and aggravated assaults. While FBI crime data shows overall violent crime returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey found violent victimization rate for people between the ages of 12 and 17 doubled, representing the age group that saw the biggest increase in violent victimization. The survey also found fatal and non-fatal gun violence increased by more than 10% for those under the age of 18.

Campus Safety spoke with Lew Robinson, a retired U.S. Secret Service who specialized in behavioral threats assessments, and Kirk Cerny, COO of Secure Passage, a public safety company, about what is causing an increase in violent crime among young people and leading practices and resources for addressing the issue.

Additional topics covered include:
A scenario that highlights the importance of identifying concerning or prohibitive behaviors and initiating the intervention process (4:44)Three ways schools can mitigate threats of harm (8:33)Common errors schools make regarding behavioral threat assessments (11:49)What makes Secure Passage's SBTA unique (20:13)Hopeful thoughts for the future of school safety and student wellness (25:08)How schools can access fiscal and human resources to improve behavioral threat assessment capabilities (31:32)CAMPUS SAFETY SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:
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On March 5, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education issued Liberty University a $14 million fine over its violation of the Clery Act for its handling of sexual assault allegations. Liberty also violated the Clery Act in 2010, and the latest review found the school failed to initiate and sustain remedial action from those findings.

The penalty is the largest Clery fine in history, dwarfing the Department's second-largest $4.5 million fine levied against Michigan State University in 2019 over its systemic failure to address longstanding sexual abuse allegations made against former sports doctor Larry Nassar. Before that, the largest fine was $2.4 million against Penn State in 2016 for its mishandling of abuse claims against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. 

The increase from 2019 to 2024 begs the question: Why have Clery violation fines grown exponentially in recent years?

In this interview, Kyle Norton, director of regulatory compliance at the Healy+ Group, and Jenn Scott, a regulatory compliance consultant, share:
Why Clery Act fines have gotten so big (00:52)Common Clery Act violations (02:34)Why higher reported crimes aren't necessarily a bad thing (05:31)What Clery-compliant schools are doing right (09:07)Advice on how campuses can keep up with the many requirements of the Clery Act (11:41)What to expect from their upcoming 2024 Campus Safety Conference presentation, "$37 Thousand or $37 Million? The New Cost of Violating the Clery Act" (13:54)CAMPUS SAFETY SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:

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Being proactive with a unified approach to school security and safety is critical to preventing and responding to incidents. However, historically most school districts have taken the exact opposite approach. Traditionally, they’ve waited to address their pressing safety and security vulnerabilities until after a major incident has occurred, according to Michael Garcia, HID Global’s safe schools national end user director. 
“Force protection, defense in depth, qualitative third party, independent verification and validation -- the necessary things for a risk assessment -- were never on the school budget,” says Garcia. “So, they could never be planned for, they were always reactively financed.”
What followed would usually be a piecemeal approach to school security upgrades. Cameras would be installed at one time, intrusion sensors would be installed at another, locks would be installed on classroom doors the following year, and so on. Although the installation of this equipment was a significant improvement over what was protecting the campus before, the systems that were implemented often wouldn’t communicate or integrate with each other.   
Another challenge with the traditional way of handling school security, especially as it applied to access control, was that very often first responders would have difficulty accessing the scene of an emergency because they didn’t have the right keys or access control credentials.
To be fair, it’s understandable why the reactive approach to school safety had traditionally been school districts’ modus operandi. K-12 campus protection is a relatively new field, and the recent changes to it seem to have come at lightning speed. What’s more, the vast majority of school board members don’t volunteer for their positions to become security experts. The same goes for administrators and educators, who have been trained to focus on academics, not active shooter response.
However, Garcia says all of this must change. Mental health, behavioral interventions, mitigation efforts, risk assessors, people, processes, and security technologies must all work together as an “orchestra” with one conductor. Doing so will help prevent school security incidents from happening in the first place, mitigate them when they do occur, and ensure first responders will be able to quickly and appropriately respond.

Inclusivity is the practice of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for those who might otherwise be marginalized. An inclusive school safety plan accounts for everyone’s individual needs and abilities — including students and staff — when and if a school is faced with an emergency.

We spoke with Dr. Roderick Sams, a former educator and administrator of 20+ years, about ways schools and districts can create a more inclusive safety plan by:

1. Removing language barriers (0:01)
2. Improving accessibility (04:36)
3. Ensuring emergency alerts are multisensory (08:56)

Sams also spoke about the importance of an overall inclusive campus culture that listens to student and staff voices and accepts and accommodates differences, which has proven to reduce violence (16:15).

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In the three months following the start of the Israel-Hamas war, anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. increased by 360% compared to the same period one year prior. Anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian incidents increased by 178%.

Some of these incidents occurred on K-12 and college campuses. In Georgia, a middle school teacher was fired for allegedly threatening physical harm to a 13-year-old girl. In Indiana, a woman was arrested for intentionally crashing her vehicle into a school because she thought it was an "Israel school." On Feb. 19, anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. college campuses since the start of the war passed 1,000.
Educational campuses have also made recent headlines for protests and administrators' handling of them. Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups have sued their schools, claiming they haven't protected them from hate crimes or have violated their First Amendment rights by having the groups suspended.

All of these hate crimes and clashes raise many questions, including:
What have K-12 and college leaders done right and what have they done wrong in how they respond to these incidents?How can they better mitigate and respond to them in the future?To answer these questions, Campus Safety spoke with Jason Russell, former Secret Service agent and founder and president of Secure Environment Consultants.

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Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation on college campuses are at an all-time high. More than 60% meet the criteria for at least one mental health problem -- a nearly 50% increase since 2013.

College students are also seeking support at an unprecedented rate, openly discussing their struggles with professionals to formulate a game plan for improving their well-being and overall educational experience. Although student affairs offices are overwhelmed with the influx, many are working to find creative ways to properly support students seeking resources -- including the University of California San Diego's Student Affairs Case Management Services (SACM).

SACM is the winner of the Clery Center's Campus Safety Impact Award, an inaugural award that recognizes higher education programs or initiatives that demonstrate innovation, collaboration, and equity in improving campus safety.

Hear from SACM's director, Andrew Hua, about how the group has been able to quintuple its case management team in just three years, as well as the challenges that came with it and how they continue to evolve to meet students' needs.

Hua also discusses:
How the team has addressed spikes in student caseloads (06:04)How the team has created a path for students to become part of the staff (14:45Tips for garnering support from leadership for student well-being initiatives (16:43)SACM's signature training program, which has trained over 1,200 faculty, staff, and student leaders to recognize signs of distress (22:10)Notable statistics, including student testimonials, that highlight SACM's impact (24:26)Tips for schools overwhelmed with student needs' caseloads (27:36)CAMPUS SAFETY SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:
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