School leadership is inundated with responsibilities and projects during the school year and is often pressed to find significant blocks of time it can devote exclusively to school safety. Yet, as schools continue to face a wide array of ever-evolving threats – of which gun violence is but one – schools must remain appropriately prepared for a potential critical incident.

With students and faculty gone from the school, the summer break offers school leadership a window of time to focus on improving and enhancing safety and security. It presents the perfect opportunity to review and refine the school’s crisis-planning efforts, upgrade security measures and systems, and conduct practice exercises to stay ready for common scenarios.

Best Practices for School Safety Planning and Preparedness

Crisis planning is an evolving process that must focus on existing and emerging threats and vulnerabilities. School leadership teams should consider the following planning highlights that can work to increase the school’s preparedness and reduce the chances that a critical incident will generate catastrophic outcomes:

• The Hazard Vulnerability Impact Assessment (HVIA). The HVIA is an essential first step in creating or updating an emergency preparedness plan. It provides a systematic approach to exploring the entire threat environment facing the school as well as an analysis of how likely each threat is to occur and a determination of the likely outcome if a threat were to materialize. The HVIA should encompass both manmade threats, such as violence and vandalism, and natural disasters, such as fires, floods, and weather-related events.
• Meeting with local first responders and emergency management professionals. First responders and local emergency management professionals play important crisis planning and critical incident response roles. Therefore, schools must collaborate with these resources when developing or refining their crisis plans. Some topics to be discussed during these meetings should include a review of existing response plans, access control to the school, evacuation routes/sites, the locations of potential incident command posts, assembly areas, and reunification sites.
• Testing and evaluating the effectiveness of all physical security systems. As physical security systems age and as technology evolves, schools must regularly assess how well their physical security systems are meeting the needs of their school community. Thus, during the summer break, a school should test and assess all locks, lights, keys, access control and visitor management systems, alarms, PA systems, and security cameras. The summer break also allows school leaders to develop or refine the policies and practices in place that provide the operational framework for these systems.
• Reviewing and revising cyberthreats and cybersecurity policies and procedures. As schools continue to be the victims of cyberattacks, school administrators can no longer ignore cybersecurity in their emergency planning efforts. In a 2023 report, the federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has provided actionable recommendations for enhancing school cybersecurity, including mandating multifactor authentication for logins, staying current with patching alerts from software companies, and creating training programs for cybersecurity awareness at all levels of the school community.

Planning Professional Development Safety Training

School leaders should utilize the summer months to develop a school safety training and exercise plan designed to test and evaluate the school’s ability to effectively respond to a critical incident. While schools must provide training for the most catastrophic events such as an active shooter, they must also educate and inform faculty and staff on the appropriate response actions to be taken for medical emergencies, mental health related events, transportation related incidents, custodial issues, and weather-related events.

Crisis communications Training

Clear communication is an essential element of an effective response to a critical incident. Yet, a crisis is a highly emotional situation that can create confusion and potential communication challenges. If school leadership has not undergone crisis communications training recently, the summer break can be a good time to do so. In addition to FEMA, DHS, and REMS, many state agencies and local emergency management professionals can provide this training at little to no cost to your school.

In addition to crisis communications training, schools should consider using the summer months to develop a set of communication templates that can be used to provide a framework for future crisis communication during a critical incident. These templates can be incident specific (bomb threat, swatting, medical emergency etc.) and can be quickly refined with incident specific details to help school leaders manage a critical incident under stressful conditions.

While the process of creating an emergency plan as outlined above may seem daunting, there are abundant resources to help schools achieve their safety and security goals – from federal agencies like CISA and REMS to state education agencies and local emergency management professionals. If your school would like to capitalize on the summer break to focus on enhancing school safety, we encourage you to connect with Robert Evans, Vice President at COSECURE, who specializes in safety, security, and emergency preparedness for public, private, and independent K-12 schools and school districts.