Over the past 45 years various reports of school shootings have been documented, but the defining moment for a significant change occurred on April 20, 1999, with the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. This incident was the result of more than a year of planning by two students who wanted to kill 500, blow up their school, and kill responders as they approached the school.
In the decade since the Columbine catastrophe, school personnel, law enforcement, firemen, emergency medical service personnel, and others have learned many lessons. These lessons have been taken by many groups and incorporated into comprehensive emergency response plan programs. These programs have been endorsed or adopted by national, state, and local school organizations for use to improve the safety and security in schools. The work that remains to be done is for the school community to take these programs and incorporate them into their emergency response plans. Many schools have embraced these programs and used them to their advantage to update their plans to bring them up to the latest thinking of the safety community.
At the same time, there appears to be reluctance from a significant number of school systems to use these programs. The reasons vary, but a false sense of security is being conveyed to the public that schools are doing what is necessary to protect the students and staff from catastrophes. Some reasons have been the denial that an incident of this magnitude could occur to a school in their system. The lack of resources is another reason. Schools are so regulated that every effort is prioritized, so that they are not identified as underachievers. This paper describes how these obstacles can be overcome in an effective cost-efficient manner.
This paper is divided into three distinct parts: the first addresses the lessons that have been learned throughout the years since Columbine; the second reviews how these lessons are incorporated into new or existing programs that have been developed or upgraded by various organizations for school systems; and the third addresses the approach schools can take to use these programs to improve their overall safety and security, to meet their goals and requirements and expectations of their respective governing bodies. A method that can be used to assess the effectiveness of these plans will also be shared.
