School Security After 9/11
Jun 1, 2011 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy (mkennedy@asumag.com)
The security improvements that schools and universities have embraced in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and other tragedies are keeping campuses safer.
At nearly all of its schools, such as W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, Va., Fairfax County Public Schools has posted signs that identify each exit door with a number. Photo by Donnie Biggs/Fairfax County Public Schools
More than 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, but the damage extended far beyond the physical casualties of that horrific day. The shock of the cold-blooded brutality and the devastation that resulted led to a grim realization that everyone was vulnerable to violence and tragedy.
Although other catastrophes and violent episodes have had a more direct connection to schools and universities—the shootings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech; the flooding that destroyed Gulf Coast classrooms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; the tornado that decimated several schools last month in Joplin, Mo.—the enormity of seeing those planes bring down the World Trade Center towers and damage the Pentagon on a Tuesday morning nearly 10 years ago crystallized for most Americans how vital security is and how costly it can be when security measures fall short.
Among the people who have absorbed those lessons and have focused greater attention in the last 10 years on bolstering security are the administrators from every school district and higher-education institution who are responsible for providing safe learning environments for tens of millions of students and staff members.
"It put the issue of safety and security on the front burner," says Fred Ellis, director of the office of safety and security in Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools.
Gradual changes
The Sept. 11 attacks shook many out of their complacency and ratcheted up the public’s awareness of the need for school security, but it did not bring about drastic changes in the security steps that students and workers see on school and university campuses.
"It was not a specific catalyst," says Ellis, "but it has been part of a continuation of evolving emphasis on school security."
Improvements in school security and emergency preparedness have been gradual over the last decade and become a normal part of school operations.
"The things that are noticeable to students have occurred over time," says Ellis. "Now, we have lockdown drills, but students already were used to fire drills. We have video intercoms for entering schools, and students going from portables to the main school building have to be buzzed in, but those have become a regular part of the schools that students have become accustomed to."
One simple improvement on Fairfax County’s campuses may not stand out to an occasional visitor, but could become critical if a crisis occurs. At all of its nearly 200 schools, the district has posted signs that identify each exit door with a number in a systematic way.
"For an emergency responder, if you’re not familiar with a campus, you might not know where to go if you’re told to respond to the gym or the cafeteria," says Ellis. "But when you say, ‘Come to Door No. 5,’ you know where you should go."
The signage also has made student transportation and parent pickup of their children run more smoothly, Ellis adds.
Federal response
Safety and school security already were priorities for education institutions before Sept. 11; administrators had seen enough instances of violence at schools across the nation to know that they needed to have plans in place to respond to emergencies.
Before the attacks, schools and universities may have had such plans, but many of them were inadequate to deal with the range of emergencies that an education institution could face. And many of the school personnel who were responsible for carrying out a crisis plan were not sufficiently trained to do so.
"It might have had a nice cover, but when you opened it up, it was hollow—there was nothing there," says David Burns, emergency preparedness manager at UCLA.
The Sept. 11 attacks were another reminder that violence could occur anywhere, but the degree of the devastation and the pain the attacks caused unnerved the nation in ways that other catastrophes had not. The belief that terrorism occurred only in faraway lands was shattered, and the need to re-examine security efforts to incorporate this new reality became critical.
The most notable change to emerge from the aftermath of Sept. 11 was the creation of a cabinet-level agency to oversee security—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. That has led to greater federal resources for preparing and responding to emergencies. Through the Homeland Security department, the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was developed to provide a structured approach for governmental and non-governmental entities to respond to crises.
Federal funds—through the U.S. Department of Education’s Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools grant program—have been allocated to numerous school systems to help improve emergency plans. Schools that have received such grants must comply with NIMS guidelines. Even for schools that do not have to comply with NIMS, the Department of Education says school officials can benefit by becoming familiar with NIMS and its six major components:
•Command and management. This includes the incident command system, multi-agency coordination systems and public information systems.
•Preparedness. This includes planning, training, exercises, personnel qualifications, equipment acquisition, mutual aid and publications management.
•Resource management. This includes the steps required to describe, request, mobilize, track and recover resources used during an incident response.
•Communications and information management. This includes radios, pagers and protocols used to ensure that key personnel get the information they need.
•Supporting technologies. This includes voice and data communications systems.
•Ongoing management and maintenance. This provides oversight and review of NIMS to improve and refine the system.
One drawback of having to comply with NIMS is that because it is designed to be used by a wide range of organizations, it may not translate easily to people who work in education. The Fairfax County (Va.) school system’s Crisis Management Workbook notes that the terminology and procedures in NIMS are different from those used by school administrators.
"Some of the language and organization structures are completely foreign to the education community," says Ellis.
He would like the guidelines to have more flexibility so that the response plans can be comprehended more easily by people who don’t work every day in law enforcement or emergency planning.
"People on a school campus may get involved in this kind of situation maybe once in their lives," says Ellis.
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
