As featured in Education Week’s blog…

Every time there’s a shooting in a school, many principals and district leaders feel the responsibility—and pressure—to take action to ensure that gun violence doesn’t happen in their schools. 

But it’s not always easy to find proven, research-based safety practices that work. It can be difficult to tap into experts who can help them make sense of state mandates and make good decisions about purchasing products that claim to keep schools safe. And it’s not a given that they can connect with principals and district leaders who have developed successful local practices. 

It’s not there isn’t research-backed and tested practices that are known to prevent and reduce violence. Too often, though, they are often inaccessible to principals—not in one place and in multi-page documents that busy school and district leaders don’t have time to read and absorb, much less take the steps to put the proven strategies into place. And many of those strategies don’t take into account the resources—in money and staff—to make those things work.

“The issue that we face is not necessarily a shortage of answers or ideas, it’s the lack of dissemination of evidence-based practices,” said Danny Carlson, the director of policy and advocacy at the National Association of Elementary School Principals.  “There is work to be done to ensure that district leaders and folks on the ground are making decisions about these programs that are actually evidence based.”  

Frustrated by that gap, the National Association of School Resource Officers is leading a new effort to create the first-ever national set of best practices for preventing school violence. The goal is to create an accessible and easy-to-use guide and curriculum for districts, and training for district and school leaders to put those practices into place locally. The organization recently got a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department to develop the violence-prevention protocol for K-12 schools.

The Alabama-based NASRO is partnering with the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, Boulder; the National Police Foundation; Safe and Sound Schools; and the “I Love U Guys” Foundation. It is forming an advisory group that will include teachers, principals, and school mental health professionals.

“If we can create more consistency in how schools and districts prepare for and try to prevent violence from occurring, I think that’s a pretty big accomplishment,” said Mo Canady, NASRO’s executive director.

Looking Beyond Building Security

It’s early in the process of what’s likely to be a two-year project, but Canady said the core group will take a comprehensive approach to school safety—beyond hardening buildings. It will include creating positive school climate, bystander response and threat reporting, information sharing, and threat assessments. It will provide best-practices for conducting lockdown drills in ways that do not traumatize students and adults, Canady said.

There will also be training for teams of educators and law enforcement representatives from local districts on how to implement these strategies in ways that make sense for their communities, said Beverly Kingston, the director and senior research associate at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. In larger districts, the district safety teams that will receive the training will include other key people, like the school psychologist, she said. 

A Focus on Preventing Violence  

A myriad of reasons—from 50 different states with their own laws and policies, to local control that gives districts, and in some cases, principals, autonomy to pick and choose what they’ll implement, to a lack of resources—help explain why there hasn’t been a one-stop shop of best practices for districts and why there isn’t a national standardized protocol on school violence prevention, Kingston said.

“From our center’s perspective in studying this for so many years, we really do know what it takes to prevent violence, and our goals are to prevent the violence from occurring in the first place,” Kingston said. “So, preventing someone from having the motivation to want to carry out a violent act, really addressing it much more upstream.”

The core group will comb through research for effective strategies. They’ll be looking at state, local, and districts policies as well as scientifically-backed approaches. The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, for example, has a list of programs with evidence behind them, including Botvin LifeSkills Training program, a violence and substance abuse prevention program aimed at middle school students. Colorado’s Safe2Tell program, a tip line which grew out of recommendations from the Columbine High School shooting, allows students and others to anonymously report concerns about safety is a prevention program that works, she said.  

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