Leadership Matters: Making School Safety A Top Priority

Every day we are faced with the challenge of keeping our students and staff safe. It is beyond alarming the number of school shootings and violent incidents that are occurring in our schools. There are many contributing factors to this, but I am not going to reach into that conversation now. I would rather focus on being intentional about solutions for our students and staff. What is the solution? What matters most? My opinion is very simple on this. While there is no “fail safe” 100% guarantee to any one effort, we can implore a host of small things every day that will make a difference. You have to first establish a culture and mindset of safety in your schools. What does this mean? You have to have everyone on the campus understand that we are all responsible for safety. It is in the details like: checking doors, looking for strange or unusual things on a campus, stopping visitors and making sure they have checked in at an office, knowing what to do in drills, and having conversations with students about what’s going on in the building. Trust me they know. These are all free. They set culture and they change mindset. While there are a million devices and products available to support school safety efforts, it is paramount to have first a mindset and culture that supports any of these efforts. Over the past few weeks I’ve had the privilege to address several leaders in the state of Arkansas about their school safety efforts. In every discussion I fully support mindset and culture first and then explore other solutions. One of the top solutions out there now that I fully support is the Safety Badge Response system implemented by CENTEGIX and Five Stones Safety group. There are links below that explain this system but I want to reiterate in closing without a solid culture and mindset firmly in place any efforts may be less effective without these pillars in place. “Good people can fix bad systems, Bad people can ruin good systems.” - Anonymous.