Reflecting on tragedy: What school shootings teach us about safety and prevention

With just days to go before winter break, another heartbreaking school shooting shook the nation. On December 16, 2024, a 15-year-old student opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and another student before taking her own life.

As someone who once called Madison home, this incident hit especially close to me. Many of my acquaintances have school-aged children in the area, making the tragedy feel all the more personal. In the wake of this devastating event, I reached out to security professionals with deep expertise in education security to gather their insights on what can be learned from this incident. Throughout the year, I’ll be sharing their perspectives in this column in the hope of fostering meaningful discussions on how to keep our schools safer.

We started this series in the February issue Kristen Devitt, a former city of Madison Police Officer and current Director of Campus Safety at Oak Park & River Forest High School in Oak Park Illinois, and a 2023 Women in Security honoree. Here we continue the series with an interview with Michael Dorn, Executive Director at Safe Havens International.

Security: Often, after an event like an active shooter, there can be a public outcry for immediate changes or action to a security program. What advice do you have for security professionals in the K-12 space when faced with this?

Dorn: First, I suggest that school security professionals have their general responses including what has already been implemented and what other measures have been evaluated and found not to be logical based on a proper comprehensive school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness assessment and/or an internal assessment using the free school security assessment tool available from the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Protection Agency (CISA).

For example, measures like clear bookbags, entry point (airport and courthouse style) metal detection, ineffective AI weapons detectors, active shooter training like Run, Hide, Fight and similar commercial programs which are either not effective for most K12 schools (entry point metal detection and clear bookbags) unreliable (AI weapons detection systems) or in some cases, have increased casualties (Run, Hide, Fight and commercial active shooter training programs). Be prepared to explain why these types of seemingly simple “solutions” are not the best way for your organization to expend its limited time, energy and budget.

Next, try to convince the organization’s leadership team not to give into public pressure to adopt knee-jerk reactions as this typically backfires in various ways. For example, many school leaders have been heavily criticized and even litigated for buying one of the new, unproven and very expensive AI weapons detection systems which has failed repeatedly to prevent school shootings and edged weapons assaults. Now that the FCC and FTC have launched investigations and the companies’ shareholders have filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging fraud, a number of school leaders have come under attack for wasting public funds on a system that is not reliable. In another example, more than $130 million has been paid out to date on school shootings where Run, Hide, Fight and one of the most popular commercial active shooter training programs have failed catastrophically with more than 50 victims shot in just four of the mass casualty school shootings I have worked. Another Run, Hide, Fight case I have been working just settled out of court but I do not know how much the case settled for.

Security: What are the pros and cons to this reactionary mind-set versus proactive?

Dorn: There are no advantages to reactionary mindsets for school security. To be blunt having been in the field for 45 years, the cons include many needless deaths, trauma, loss of public confidence, increased turnover among employees, in some cases, school leaders, careers being ruined along with increased insurance premiums, workers comp claims and of course significant litigation.

Security: How can security leaders balance fostering a welcoming school environment while maintaining a secure campus?

Dorn: By focusing as heavily on school climate and culture as on physical security and by utilizing the approaches that have been most effective in relation to cost and benefits for K-12 schools:

• Improved student supervision
• The use of surveys to measure school safety
• Effective self-harm prevention measures
• For school organizations that are large enough, development and consistent utilization of an effective multi-disciplinary threat assessment and management team.
• Basing the major acquisition of security hardware, software and technology on a comprehensive school safety, security, climate, culture and emergency preparedness assessment conducted by a private sector, non-profit or government organization that specializes in and has extensive K-12 specific experience.

This last point is very important as failure to have this type of assessment periodically (every two to five years depending on who you ask in the field) can result not only in a significant waste of time, energy and budget, a less safe environment, but also problems meeting the standard of care in litigation.

Security: What steps can schools take to ensure staff and students feel safe after a high-profile security incident?

Dorn: In my experience, it is what you do before the major incident that makes the most difference. Having properly developed policies, procedures and emergency plans, training staff on them and conducting fidelity testing in addition to the typical drill processes to test alignment between written safety measures and the reality of their implementation before a major incident is far more effective than anything you can do after a major event causes anxiety and fear. When I was a school district police chief, our surveys showed that our students, parents and staff felt reasonably safe in the wake of the Columbine Tragedy. We worked with the media on an almost weekly basis to communicate our capabilities, conducted employee trainings, delivered educational programs to multiple grade levels every year, had prominent signage and showed videos that we produced to demonstrate our highly-advanced capabilities while also explaining to everyone that there are no foolproof school security measures. But we did not experience the emergency school closures that our local Catholic school, a private school and several area public school systems were forced to have due to massive absenteeism in the wake of the Columbine attack.

Security: What role does mental health and behavioral threat assessment play in the overall security approach for schools?

Dorn: These are massive priorities, especially in relation to approaches like ballistic protection for glass, entry point metal detection (random surprise detection is usually more effective and less intrusive) etc.

Security: Anything else you’d like to add?

Dorn: U.S. schools actually have far fewer mass casualty school attacks than many other countries. The UN has documented over 10,000 mass casualty attacks in K-12 schools and institutions of higher learning worldwide in the past decade and the U.S. has the third largest K-12 school population of 55 million students and nine million employees. In my experience, our students and staff are much safer than they were in the 1970s and 1980s when from the best we can tell, we had twice as many homicides on K-12 school campuses annually with 15 million fewer students than we have experienced in the past 30 years.

While we have seen a bit of an increase in mass casualty school shootings in this time frame, our most deadly K-12 attacks occurred in 1927 Bath School bombing and car suicide bombing which killed 43 victims and the 1958 arson fire set by a deeply troubled 4th grader which left 95 victims dead. Like other countries I have worked in, the U.S. has had periodic mass casualty school attacks dating back to the first two mass casualty shootings in 1891 (five shot on the playground at a parochial school in NY and 14 shot by a white supremacist at an interracial school play in Missouri).

Our biggest difference has actually been the advent of 24/7/365 media, the Internet and social media making people much more aware of tragedies that have been occurring since the days of the one-room schoolhouse (1764 mass casualty attack on a school house in Western Pennsylvania during Pontiac’s War — only one child survived the brutal attack. We have worked in more than two dozen countries and mass casualty school attacks have been a concern of the school and police officials we have worked with in every one of those countries.

School safety has become dominated by terrifying inflated statistics, fear mongering by vendors, politicians and advocacy groups and massive disinformation on the internet. Rushed reporting by the media which is a reaction to consumer habits has done a great deal of damage as well and this has gotten much worse in the past two decades.