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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to ASBO International's School Business Insider. I'm your host, John Brucato. Each week on School Business Insider, I sit down with school business officials and industry experts from around the world to share their stories and explore the topics that matter most to you. Find out what it means to be a school business official and get your insider pass on all things school business. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to School Business Insider. School safety is not hypothetical. It's a current and deeply pressing concern. With a tragic mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where two children were killed and 17 others injured during a school mass, many districts are asking what more can be done to prepare for crisis. Today we talk to Frank Uglieri, Director of Regional Safety Services at PNW BOCES in New York. Frank brings insight and leadership in school safety planning. We'll discuss what happens when alarms feel real rather than theoretical, analyze recent incidents, and explore how school business officials can strengthen readiness in response in their school districts. Frank, welcome to School of Business Insider. I'm happy to have you.
- [01:20]
B
Thanks, John. I appreciate it. I'm really happy to be here today.
- [01:23]
A
Yeah, as we were talking offline, you were like the guy in our area when it comes to school safety. So I appreciate you making time for me, and I'm really excited for our listeners to get to know you and really have an opportunity for you to share your expertise. So with that, can you maybe give us a little bit of your background, your role at PNW BOCES and really how you've gotten into the school safety and why it's such a big thing for you?
- [01:47]
B
Sure. Thank you. So I think, you know, with a lot of others that have passion for all the different kinds of work that's out there, you know, my passion was always in school safety and preparedness, even back when I was, you know, in high school. And my transition from elementary to high school, I had. It was a very different transition moving up from the Bronx to Carmel, New York. You know, it was just a different kind of atmosphere that I was in. And then I ended up going to college, student taught. And three days into my teaching career was 9 11. And I just saw the response and what needed to happen with parents rushing to the building. You know, we live in the Hudson Valley, so we had a lot of parents that were affected. We had some parents that were lost, you know, in the tragedy of 9 11. And just the needs of not only the preparedness, but the response and the recovery, you know, kind of really resonated with me. Starting out.
- [02:38]
C
And then I.
- [02:39]
B
In my 17 years of teaching at both the high school and then the college level, I took any opportunity I could to be involved with school safety, to help support it. It was something that I really just liked to be integrated into the school community. And then we were very lucky where I was because we had a really close relationship with the New York State Police. We were able to do a lot of co training together. I learned a lot of what they did on their side. We learned a lot of what we did on our side as educators. We did have SROs at the time. And then as the landscape of safety evolved with other tragedies, so did our response tactics, and so did our need to be proactive. And then this opportunity at Putnam Northern Westchester, BOCES popped open about eight years ago now. And one of the troopers who I worked with, who has since retired and now works with me, had said, there's a job at boces, it might be right up your alley. I think you should take a look at it. And lo and behold, eight years later, here I am sitting with you on this podcast.
- [03:44]
A
Awesome. And so you. You essentially liaise with a lot of the school districts in the area, provide consulting services. Tell me a little bit more about your relationship with the school districts in the Hudson Valley.
- [03:56]
C
Sure.
- [03:57]
B
So, you know, BOCES is. Is a cooperative service, which, again, was another draw of. Of me coming down here. I like to be. I like working with a variety of others. So we work with 18 component school districts, and then we work with another 13 that are kind of in our geographic area. You know, being part of boces, we also have a BOCES organization that I work with as well, and we're actively supporting 13 BOCEs in this safety realm, you know, especially in the behavioral realm, the Behavioral Threat Assessment, which I, you know, hopefully we'll talk a little bit about later. But we support the school districts in any sort of health, safety, or security questions or needs that they may have. And that ranges from anything from the physical to the virtual to the behavioral, you know, need there. So that's kind of where we come into play.
- [04:48]
D
Great, great.
- [04:49]
A
And speaking firsthand, you've been an incredible resource, not only just for our school district, but all my counterparts in the area. So thank you. So tell me, why is school safety so critical right now? For school business officials, It's. It seems like every week there's a new crisis. Every week there's something that may have been or could have been prevented. Why is school safety so critical right now?
- [05:10]
B
I think school safety is so critical because it goes back to that hierarchy.
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C
Right.
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B
Like, you can't learn if you're not fed and you're not safe.
- [05:17]
C
Right.
- [05:18]
B
And you can't exist. And I think that it's one of the foundational pieces that we want to have for our students and our staff and our school community at large. And I think for school business officials, you know, particularly.
- [05:33]
C
Right.
- [05:34]
B
You know, you all are being hit up for the money all the time, right. And there's a lot of money that is either out there on the grant side or out there to be spent on the cost side, you know, for helping and. Or mitigating some type of, you know, incident that may arise. And I think, you know, you're bombarded with a whole different slew of things. There's somebody out there, you know, working to sell the next thing or to have the next thing, or you need the next thing. And I think that, you know, understanding what works, what doesn't, what are best practices, what are practices that are going to be better are helpful. And I also think that in looking ahead, right, we want to be progressive, we want to be proactive. We don't want to be reactive. And I think for so long, for school safety, we have been reactive. And I think we have the opportunity to be proactive. And I really do think that's where the business officials can come in and help us, Helping us be proactive in making our school safer places.
- [06:32]
D
Yeah.
- [06:32]
A
So two follow ups I have for what you just said. So you had mentioned kind of two funding sources, Whether it be grants or just really the general fund budget. Are you finding that there are more grants becoming available for schools to take advantage of to increase their security presence?
- [06:50]
B
I find there's more money and there's more grants. And the reason why I kind of space that out is because I feel like some of the grants are opening the doors a little bit wider, you know, and in making those funds available, I do think that the. Some of the difficulty is in just writing those grants appropriately. You know, I almost kind of wish that, you know, all the grants for safety were, you know, very similar to the safe schools. I think it was the Smart Bond act or whatever. You know, it was kind of very easily accessible to schools. And I wish there was more grant funding that would be easily accessible in the safety realm.
- [07:28]
D
Yeah.
- [07:28]
A
And then the second question I had, you had mentioned there's all different technologies and products and services coming out. The cynic in me, I mean, a red flag goes up. Are, do you feel like companies are just kind of coming out with stuff to say, like, you need this. This is what you need to do. And how can you say no to making your schools more safe? And in reality, whether that product or service really does, who knows? Are you seeing kind of companies maybe take advantage of these crises?
- [07:55]
C
I do.
- [07:56]
B
I see a lot of them. And it's actually really sad and tragic because they're tugging on our heartstrings right where we're most vulnerable. And I think the good companies and the good technology is kind of getting lumped in with the fly by nighters, the people that are just trying to make a quick buck on something that disappear tomorrow. So I want to qualify my answer with, yes, I do see it. But I also think there is. There are some good technologies out there that are really helpful in this whole realm of school safety.
- [08:30]
D
Good, good.
- [08:31]
A
So on the top of the episode, I had mentioned the Minneapolis school shooting that recently had taken place. There was another prevented incident in San Antonio. A lot of these have been raising alarms, as these events typically do. You know, from your perspective and us now knowing a little bit more about what you do for school districts, what lessons stand out for schools, looking back on these two. These two events.
- [08:55]
B
So thank you. So I would say, you know, with these two events in particular, you know, these two incidents and even, you know, other ones that have been most recent is when we look at school safety, we've have. You have a timeline, right? And you have benchmarks in that timeline. And, you know, you have Columbine, you have Virginia Tech, you have, you have Parkland, right? And these are names of tragedies that everybody knows, right? And then obviously we have the most recent. One of the things that I will say is that while we have evolved in our prevention, our response, and our recovery, I will say that these two most recent ones kind of hammer home what we have been saying for. I wouldn't say recently, I would say for the past 10 or 15 years, or all of those best practices that have been developed and have been evolved have just been confirmed, right? So if we're looking at the averted San Antonio threat, right. Like, I believe it was the grandmother, if I have it correctly, right. Forgive me, because sometimes I get things confused, but the grandmother was the one who saw something and said something, right? And we know when it comes to someone who's targeting any type of place, location or person, right. We call it targeted violence, and the Secret Service calls it targeted violence. We know that there is usually leakage present, right. Some type of behaviors, some Type of concerning communications. And if people see something and then know what to do with it, which is report it, we can avert these school tragedies. Right. We can avert these types of critical incidents. So this is something that we've been doing for years. It's just trying to get that into the mainstream. You know, lock doors. We know that, you know, to date, no school shooter has penetrated a closed, locked, close classroom door.
- [10:46]
C
Right.
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B
So if we can do that and we can train people to be situationally aware, to respond, avoid, deny, defend. I think those are what the two most recent incidents really hammer home for me is that I wouldn't change any of our training or tactics besides just learning from these particular incidents and how the people came into it.
- [11:07]
A
You said something that really strikes a chord with me and is a point of frustration as a practitioner and somebody who works in a school district. And I'm speaking somewhat anecdotally because it just feels this way. But a lot of these kind of post mortems on these events, a lot of it points back to there were warning signs, there was leakage, as you said, but no one said anything. No one really took it that seriously. Are you finding that that is a, is oftentimes a common denominator of why these events happen? Because it seems that there's always some instance of, oh, we knew this kid, he was kind of a loner then he was posting pictures of guns online. It's like all of the data points were there to say this could be a real threat, but nothing was really materialized. Are you, are you seeing that as kind of a commonality amongst a lot of these events?
- [11:51]
B
I would say, you know, 100% of the time.
- [11:53]
C
Right.
- [11:54]
B
I mean, and it's, it's. There was some leakage.
- [11:57]
C
Right.
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B
So we define leakage as a communication or expression that's either shared intentionally or unintentionally with a third party of an intent to do harm to a target. And the number one reporter of leakages is peers.
- [12:11]
C
Right.
- [12:11]
B
So if we can. And this is in school specific.
- [12:14]
C
Right.
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B
And again, I always want to cite my sources.
- [12:16]
C
Right.
- [12:16]
B
The FBI has been phenomenal about providing us resources, making prevention a reality. It's a report that they had put out, I believe it was 2013.
- [12:25]
C
Right.
- [12:25]
B
It still holds true today. They have been, you know, putting out updated statistics. But there is, when it comes to school attacks in particular, warning signs all over the place that people, if they see something, they should be saying something. And we tried to. The FBI has a prevent mass violence campaign and it's called see something, tell who, and it's basically trying to get that information into the hands of the people that can work to prevent that act of targeted violence. And for us, crisis response happens when prevention fails. So what we look to do is we look to prevent, not prosecute.
- [13:06]
C
Right.
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B
And so if we can pull them off that pathway to violence, which is a well documented pathway that has these warning signs, we can prevent an act of targeted violence from happening.
- [13:16]
D
Yeah, yeah, it's a great point.
- [13:18]
A
So I want to dive into kind of the anatomy of a crisis a little bit and just really kind of dissect some different pieces that school business officials and district leaders should really be kind of be aware of. So starting kind of at the top, what really happens in the first few hours of a school crisis, you know, from the perspective of a school leader or staff on the ground, what is that like? I don't know that if you've been necessarily a part of it. I know you had mentioned 9 11, but you're also providing a lot of these postmortems to us as school leaders on different events throughout the nation. Tell me what it's like kind of on the ground in those first couple of hours.
- [13:55]
B
Sure. So if I could just actually step back on that timeline for a minute, if you're okay with that.
- [13:59]
C
Right?
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [14:00]
B
So I think there's four parts, right. If I was going to timeline a crisis, I think there's the before the crisis, right. Which is so crucial, is that planning.
- [14:09]
C
Right.
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B
What are we doing to get ready for this potential crisis? So, like, again, I'll use the 911 example, right. I don't know that we were necessarily prepared for that influx of parents.
- [14:19]
C
Right.
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B
But moving forward, when we did the after action review, the postmortem, as you call it, we said, okay, how do we get better from this? So I think there's that big piece before the planning, and then the big piece after is, okay, what went right, what went wrong and what can we improve? But I think at the first hours of the crisis, I think sometimes what's taken for granted is there's, I think, two time frames. There's the when the crisis happens, right? So that immediacy of it, right? I hear an alarm, right. All of a sudden the lockdown is called. You know, there's the parents just showing up and we don't know why. What happens in that? Almost like rote type of response, right? So I see this happening. I hear the alarm, I get up and I leave my room. I Leave the building. And then there's the ongoing part of that crisis. There's the, during the crisis. So I think in those first few hours is trying to understand that I have to have my training readily available so I can respond in the immediacy.
- [15:17]
C
Right.
- [15:17]
B
And we normally train people to understand that what are our priorities? And in emergency response, there's very clear priorities. The first priority always is life, safety. And I just tell people, if I had to train you on an elevator in two minutes on how to respond to a crisis, the first question you want to say to yourself is, how do you keep everybody safe? I see a fire, I pull the fire alarm. That's how I'm going to keep everybody safe, get them out of the building. I smell smoke, I smell fumes, or I hear gunshots, I'm going to lock everybody down. What's that immediacy of it after that? We want to prevent the situation from getting worse.
- [15:52]
C
Right.
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B
So we call it incident stabilization.
- [15:54]
C
Right.
- [15:54]
B
You know, and I think so, as we look at those first few hours is how do we keep everybody safe? And then how do we keep the situation from getting worse? And intertwined in all of that, part of that is preventing things from getting worse is accurate and essential communication to all parties involved. And I think, you know, if I can, you know, just get a message out to everybody.
- [16:18]
C
Right.
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B
Like those are the things that I would say would be priorities in trying to beef up your response. Right. Train people in that way so they can respond appropriately.
- [16:27]
A
Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that sticks out to me is, you know, when we do a lot of our trainings, especially with you involved, we do prioritize incident command and who's saying what to whom, because you don't want to flood the zone with information, because first responders are going to be relying on that information to, like you said, prevent any further incident. So being able to communicate effectively and accurately is critically important, 100%, you know.
- [16:54]
B
And if, if, if again, I can give any, anybody on here advice, please make sure you have a trained public information officer and a public information strategy that's trained for crises.
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C
Right.
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B
So I think, John, early on you asked like, you know, for the business officials. Right. Like, what can I say?
- [17:10]
C
Right, right.
- [17:11]
B
Is, you know, invest in a good strategy and invest in a good person, because if you lose credibility, we all know, right. Like, it's very hard to regain it. And I think sometimes, you know, in the moment we have really great people that are communicating out the high scores, the football game, you know, all the accolades and the science awards and the art awards that the school got. And now we're turning to that same communication person to say we have a crisis and we need you to communicate. And it's a very different style of communication.
- [17:39]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You had mentioned a couple of those different segments in terms of a crisis. What would you say is maybe the most challenging for a school leader? Is it that first initial finding out that an incident has happened? Because I'm thinking you're relying on your muscle memory and all of your training and it's not, hopefully you're not dealing with school incidents like that all the time. So it may be brand new but also familiar. In the same instance, what is kind of in your experience, the most challenging for school leaders?
- [18:08]
B
I think for school leaders the most challenging is trying to balance all the buckets that we have to work with.
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C
Right.
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B
There's the law enforcement bucket, there's the fire bucket, student bucket, there's the parent bucket.
- [18:18]
C
Right.
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B
So I think the school leaders.
- [18:21]
C
Right.
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B
Have a necessary inclination to protect the children. But in that being said, we have a team and you mentioned ics. That's where the incident command structure comes in because that's somebody else's role. We need the school leader to lead.
- [18:36]
C
Right.
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B
That incident that's taking place and at the same time they're trying to communicate with their superintendent, they're trying to get a message out to parents. So I think those are the challenges that try to exist is they're trying to juggle too many things at the moment when they're really. Their focus should be that particular incident that they're dealing with.
- [18:55]
A
Yeah, you had mentioned really trying to mitigate anything escalating. But that isn't always going to be the case in these situations. When do they tend to go from bad to worse and why is that?
- [19:07]
B
I think they tend to go bad to worse is one way that I've seen it is just by prolonged time.
- [19:16]
C
Right.
- [19:16]
B
So disruption of schedules to anyone is difficult.
- [19:20]
C
Right.
- [19:21]
B
So I think when the longer an incident and some incidents do have to last for a long period of time for, you know, everybody listening. One of the things I'll say is, you know, in our region we've had to do six reunifications that were non violent, non school related events. So like for instance, there was a car accident on a major road that the road was closed so we couldn't get buses to the school.
- [19:44]
C
Right.
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B
The average that we've dealt with here and just because of traffic has been five hours.
- [19:48]
C
Right.
- [19:49]
B
That's A prolonged event. Students need medication. They're, you know, they're getting antsy. They need entertainment. You know, being in school for five hours extra is a long period of time. I tell people, you know, think about being at work for extra five hours. Sometimes you don't want to be there. So I think that's what sometimes causes the incident to destabilize itself if the school's not prepared appropriately. And some of it is just based on normal, everyday issues. Teachers have to leave to get their own kids. There's all these other factors at play, and the larger a institution is the exponential increase in those potential issues creeping in. That's where I see it, quote, unquote. Normally the abnormally is just those incidents that, you know, the car accident that, you know, caused a reunification was actually a car accident involving a parent, which is now the crisis for that particular student, which is now related to people posting stuff on social media. So now we're trying to deal with the media side. So those are the other challenging crises that we deal with that just evolve as normal crises will evolve.
- [20:51]
A
Are you looking for ways to save your district time and money on purchases while ensuring full compliance with state and federal procurement laws? The association of Educational Purchasing Agencies, or aepa, connects schools with competitively bid contracts across the nation. From technology and facilities to classroom essentials and services, AEPA helps you stretch your budget further and simplify the buying process. Trusted by schools across the country, AEPA brings the power of cooperative purchasing to your district. Find your local state agency and learn more@aepacoop.org and then what about situations that may be out of the school's control? One example that comes to mind is the Uvalde incident. You had mentioned that trying to shorten these incidents as much as possible is one of the priorities. But in an incident like that, it really was out of the school's hands. There was a lot of seemingly miscommunication from law enforcement. What is the school leader's role in a situation like that where it's really seemingly law enforcement that's slowing things down and maybe not responding appropriately.
- [21:57]
B
Yeah. And I think that's where.
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C
Right.
- [21:59]
B
So, you know, it's very hard, you know, sometimes for me to play Monday morning quarterback.
- [22:03]
C
Right.
- [22:03]
B
Because I wasn't there. But what I would say, right. Is like, when we look at some of those things, right. And I won't comment on the law enforcement response just because I'm not a. I'm not a smart.
- [22:11]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [22:12]
B
But, you know, but you. I think you ask a Great question. Because that is a great segue to what could the schools do, right? So, you know, one of the things that we train people in is, you know, while we know help is coming, right? And I am confident, right, at least in this region, that help will come is what can you do if help doesn't come?
- [22:31]
C
Right?
- [22:31]
B
And that's the hypothetical that we give. So, like, we tell the teachers and the staff and the principals and the superintendents, you are the immediate response. What do you need? So if we just look. And again, just because we're looking at Uvalde, where those people tragically lost their lives, is there may have been some mitigation. If there was a way we could have had people that were trained in stop the bleed and things along those lines, right? So, you know, again, outside of all the other agencies, what can we do?
- [22:58]
C
Right?
- [22:58]
B
We can have go bags in the classrooms. We can have, you know, you know, extra food and water. We can have extra medications in our nurse's office. So, you know, like, those are the kinds of things that we look at from our lens. You know, and I'll take a term that I love you guys kind of coined and I really like is, you know, the cops have to own the crime, the fire have to own the flames, the paramedics own the patient, and the school has to own the student, right? So at the end of it all, that's what I would say. So, like, even with like a Uvalde type of situation where it was locked down for hours and law enforcement had to do their thing and there was miscommunication, all those pieces, right? Like, what could you do to kind of stabilize your own group, whatever group that is, if you're a teacher of 30 kids, if you're a principal of 200 kids, you know, what is that kind of look like? And that's how we try to train people to think, respond and prepare.
- [23:53]
A
So being prepared is a crucial piece. You know, what are some important, some of the most important trainings that schools should really prioritize for staff, admins and really students.
- [24:04]
B
So I would say a couple of things. I think, you know, even before preparedness, we would talk prevention, right? So I think for prevention, you know, I'm a. I'm a huge fan of behavioral threat assessment. You know, there's a lot of good models out there. We use comprehensive student threat assessment guidelines. That helps us to really, you know, focus on students that we might have some concerns of. So that's a big preparedness piece, threat assessment. There's resources all over the country for it in a variety of different ways. You know, I'm very thankful. Here in New York, we have not only our local, our county and our state police who have bought into these systems, these behavioral systems to help us, you know, work and triage these threats, but also we have support from the domestic terrorist Prevention Unit up in Albany. They have been a wealth of knowledge and resources for us. I think on the preparedness side is having your teams trained in emergency response in command, have the supplies they need, like radios, like go bags to do those kinds of things, have MOU set up with sites where if you need to evacuate, relocate, reunify from, have your, you know, again, you know, just looking at it, a really low impact, but, you know, maybe having a first responders breakfast or lunch just to walk through buildings, to familiarize themselves with buildings.
- [25:25]
C
Right.
- [25:26]
B
You know, you and I may know the art wing, but, you know, you know, a cop running in an emergency may not know where the art wing is.
- [25:32]
C
Right.
- [25:33]
B
So, you know, the more we can get people familiar with that. I mean, I do, like I said before, I think appropriate technology is good and helpful in the preparedness side, you know, in the response side. And then I think just investing in the human side of it, the mental health. There's a lot of trainings out there on mental health, first aid, on suicide, safety for teachers. I think there are age appropriate programs out there ranging from Internet safety to just healthy behaviors and things like that for students as well. Looking at it holistically.
- [26:08]
D
Yeah.
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A
So you just listed a lot of great resources and options for school districts to consider. So I have to ask, how do you balance all of that in effective drills with, you know, drill fatigue and just being able to consume all this and keep it and not say, well, it's maybe it's a boy who cried wolf situation. It's like whatever. We do these drills all the time, it's never going to happen here. How do you balance all that?
- [26:35]
B
Yeah, and it is tough in some places, you know, and again, we have, you know, tragedies that have hit very close to home here, you know, so again, it's, it's. We've had people that have lived through them. I think for us is we try to not over drill, but not under drill.
- [26:51]
C
Right.
- [26:51]
B
And I, and I do think the New York drill schedule makes a lot of sense. You know, we have, you know, eight evacuations, four lockdowns, which roughly is about a drill or so a month. You know, we have lockout drills, shelter in place, drills, and we have cardiac response drills. I think where we have found the best response is in drilling authentically and in adding complexity as people have gotten better to drills, because it forces them to think outside the box. So I'll just use a very, you know, simple sophomore example where, you know, when you do the evacuation drill, you know, five, 10 times, everybody gets it. Now let's start blocking exits. Now let's do a little bit different here and there, you know, and that does help, you know, with the fatigue because it causes people to think a little bit and they don't have to be just blindly wrote responding kind of.
- [27:42]
A
How the interstates are curved so you don't get bored just driving in one direction.
- [27:47]
B
Exactly. Yeah. It's something simple like that, right, that you just change up. You know, we put, you know, door tables in front of doors, and now all of a sudden you can't go out that door and you're like, oh, I never really how to think this out. And it does spark it. And we have hacks, we ask for feedback after drills. And that is some of the positive feedback, is empowering people to kind of think outside the box and letting them know that you're going to make the best decision you can in that crisis. And afterwards, we'll figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how can we improve that.
- [28:16]
A
And to that point in an incident, in a real incident, where do protocols most often break down?
- [28:23]
B
I think protocols most often break down when people aren't trained appropriately and they haven't drilled appropriately.
- [28:30]
C
Right.
- [28:30]
B
You know, just to hammer that drill piece home, you know, And I also think where people are not empowered to think outside of the box.
- [28:38]
C
Right?
- [28:38]
B
So again, just another emergency management, you know, concept that I just want people to understand. You know, you have a variety of strategies to respond to an emergency. So very simply, you have a lockdown, you have an evacuation, you have a shelter in place. Those are your strategies.
- [28:54]
C
Right?
- [28:54]
B
So, you know, but what you need to understand is that using those strategies is often tactical and the tactics are dictated by the environment.
- [29:04]
C
Right?
- [29:05]
B
So thinking outside the box, when we had to evacuate because of the fire, but now there's freezing rain, what are we going to do?
- [29:11]
C
Right?
- [29:12]
B
We're going to, you know, try to get kids onto buses or get kids to our relocation, you know, site or our staging area. It's that type of stuff. I think where it breaks down is allowing people to think outside the box. And. And I think you can respond better during. If you drill and have those conversations before.
- [29:31]
A
With the increasing concern of mental Health for students is there discussion and consideration for how you drill, what you drill, and, you know, trauma towards kids and scaring young kids, like what, what. What's coming of that?
- [29:49]
B
So, you know, also just to kind of qualify, my background is, you know, I've been, you know, not only a teacher, you know, I was a chemistry and forensics teacher, but I was also a special education teacher for years. You know, I've done work with a special needs population for a long time. I have a very soft spot for that population. I work very closely with our special needs. We have a medically fragile program here, we have behavioral programs here. So we have it all here. So there's a couple of things that I might, I may go a little counter narrative is when you have a challenging topic of anything, you know, outside of emergency response, anything you do, you don't get better at it by drilling less, you get better at it by drilling more.
- [30:29]
C
Right.
- [30:30]
B
And again, mindfully.
- [30:32]
C
Right.
- [30:32]
B
I'm not saying you have to drill once a day or once a week, but you get better with drilling more. So with populations that need a better or a higher level of comfort, we do drill more and we do have positive outcomes from that. But because they get comfortable in that situation. The other thing that I will say is that drills have gotten a bad rap because I think people haven't done them appropriately.
- [30:54]
C
Right.
- [30:54]
B
Like they haven't done them with that trauma informed lens. So, you know, I know everybody wants to go to lockdown and I'll talk about that in a minute. But so, you know, I'll just talk about, you know, the evacuation drills. We've gotten really good at evacuation drills. And the reason why we've gotten good at evacuation drills is because we practice them in an authentic, appropriate way. We told people, you're going to hear the alarm. This is what the alarm sounds like. And we need you to get out of the building. We're not pumping smoke into the building.
- [31:20]
C
Right, Right.
- [31:21]
B
But we're preparing them for that. And it's the same thing for lockdowns. What do we need you to do? We need you to lock the door and get undercover.
- [31:28]
C
Right.
- [31:28]
B
That's what we want people to do. Or you know, to avoid, deny, defend, run, hide, fight, whatever those strategies are. We're not sitting there, you know, shooting off, you know, blank rounds. We're not, you know, throwing, you know, noisemakers down the hallway.
- [31:41]
C
Right.
- [31:41]
B
Like, there's not a need for. For that. There's just a need to get people into that muscle memory to do that when that Action is called. Just like in an evacuation, when they hear the alarm, they know how to respond. And then we add the authentic piece so that they could think outside the box. Right. Okay. So this is what you should consider during this type of drill. Consider if you had to turn around very quickly or this door was blocked, or something along those lines. That's what I would say to that kind of question.
- [32:09]
A
Got it. So I'd like to talk about the relationships with different law enforcement agencies you had mentioned. Everyone from the FBI to local to county. How important are relationships with local law enforcement and crisis planning and response?
- [32:22]
B
I think they're incredibly important.
- [32:24]
C
Right.
- [32:24]
B
And I will only say that involving them from the ground up will only enhance your response and will not hinder it. We have a saying here is we want to shake hands before, so we're not pointing fingers after. And I think that's where, like, if you can get them into your buildings, I mean, we have relationships with, you know, our local and our county police departments, our state police departments. We've invited them in. They have been so gracious, you know, in kind of walking through, you know, we've opened our buildings up to them to do training when students are not there, or even just to kind of running through tactically when students are not there, like on breaks and summer vacation and stuff. That's been helpful. We've had ems, you know, we have a variety of, you know, paramedics and emergency response services and volunteer ambulance corps. We've invited them in. You know, one of the big learning points from that is, you know, they said, we didn't realize that schools had a lot of gear that we would need in the event of a crisis. You know, so that was, like, helpful for them to see, understand staging areas, understand some challenges of getting patients in and out. You know, fire is usually in and through the buildings because that's just part of their normal protocol. You know, for us, again, in New York, the FBI, our local FBI agents have been really great because we have. And if people aren't aware, there are county threat assessment management teams that the governor had signed in as an executive order after the buffalo shooting that had been very helpful and have brought more stakeholders together. Our district attorney's offices are part of them. Our domestic terrorist prevention unit partners are part of them. And I would have never thought, as an educator 10 years ago, when I was doing emergency response till now, that we would have had such strong partnerships where I can pick up a phone or I can shoot a text to our quote, unquote, local FBI agent or the lieutenant who's in charge of the real time crime center to just say, hey, we got a thing. Can I just run it by you really quick? And everybody has been so supportive of what goes on in schools, and I think a lot of it is because that's what they're here for, to protect the most vulnerable.
- [34:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So what does a best practice in school safety look like today, and how has it really evolved over the last 10 or so years?
- [34:38]
B
I think it's evolved over the last 10 or so years because we have, and I'm going to venture to say there's something like 75 different benchmarks that a school could try to hit. And I think that's one of the things that I will also say is we always have to get better. And we do that through setting goals for ourselves. We all know this. One of the things that we did out of this office is we basically set these benchmarks again with all of our agency partners, our school partners involved to say, okay, what is the ideal school safety look like?
- [35:13]
C
Right.
- [35:13]
B
In a building that's built in the 1920s or that's built in 2024, you know, that has 100 students or that has 10,000 students. So we really try to kind of come up with this framework, and then what we work with schools is on, you know, on an annual basis is basically, hey, let's just pick three bullets. Let's just target three things. If you don't have a good threat assessment process, that's the focus for the year. If you don't have a good reunification plan or your MOUs are out to date, or you want to do some authentic drilling, let's start that from the year. But we usually advise people to pick one or two or three areas that you're going to make a focus on for the year and set that as your overarching goal. And we found really good success in people being to meet those goals because they're measurable and they have set objectives that they want to reach to.
- [35:57]
D
Right, Right.
- [35:59]
A
Well, I'd be remiss if I don't ask you a financed data question, our main audience being school business officials, after all. But how can school business officials really measure whether their investment in safety is making a difference?
- [36:12]
B
I think the best way they can measure their investment is by testing it.
- [36:16]
C
Right.
- [36:16]
B
And that's where, you know, I mean, again, that's part of what we do. But I'm sure, you know, the schools can even just, you know, create some internal testing controls just as an Example, you know, we have, you know, we have some schools that have invested in the artificial intelligence overlays for their cameras.
- [36:34]
C
Right.
- [36:34]
B
And one of that is motion tracking.
- [36:36]
C
Right.
- [36:36]
B
So one of the things that we do is we test motion tracking during a lockdown drill after everybody locks down. What does that motion tracking look like and is it going to be helpful for first responders?
- [36:45]
C
Right.
- [36:45]
B
So I would say whatever, you know, thing that you invest in, set up at, you know, right after it's set up, the testing plan, you know, and we always, you know, again, a best practice at least twice a year. But it's going to be dependent on whatever metric you're looking at.
- [37:01]
A
In school districts, as you know, don't have unlimited resources. So what are some low cost but maybe some high impact steps districts can take to improve their readiness in the event of a crisis?
- [37:12]
B
Training and drilling. Best thing I can tell you is training and drilling. And I'm going to apologize to your listeners if I sound redundant, but I would say the more training you can do with the staff that you already have and the drilling that you can do with them, I think are the, some of the best, low cost things that you can do. Because one of the things that we have and we know is with all of the tragedies and the incidents that have happened is a variety of governmental agencies have put out those after action reviews that we can look at and learn from. So it's a very easy thing at a monthly safety team to pull that report, look at that report and say, okay, what went wrong here? How do we get better? You know the Rich Neck Elementary School shooting where the six year old brought a weapon in and shot his teacher, Abby Zwerner. You know, they, you know, they released the special grand jury report and I'll caution the listeners on here, it was not written by safety experts. It's a special grand jury report. But just the testimony of the special grand jury was eye opening.
- [38:13]
C
Right.
- [38:14]
B
Where the assistant principal, you know, did ignored warning signs, where the staff member had to restrain the student. So you know, if you, if you're in that position or would that happen here and if it would, how do we fix it or if it wouldn't, let's test those systems that we believe it would.
- [38:30]
D
Right.
- [38:31]
A
So what would you say is the single most important step that a school business official should take after listening to our conversation today?
- [38:38]
B
Good question. I think after listening to our conversation is I would look at our, you know, or their district and building level safety plans and response. Right. And do they have goals and objectives each year. That's what I would say to walk away with. And that they're building on those objectives year to year to year, whether it's cost involved or no net cost attached to it. It could be just working on their behavioral plan or their recovery piece or their mental health crisis team, but that's what I would want people to walk away with. And I don't know if I'm allowed to do a shameless plug on here, but I would be happy to share with you or your listeners that document where have those best practices, you know, And I would say to take that document and look at if it's aligning with what they have set up as a district, as a building, you know, as, as a unit.
- [39:30]
A
And what about you, Frank? How do you personally stay motivated and focused when dealing with such heavy topics all the time? I mean this is difficult and tragic work sometimes. How, how do you stay in it all the time?
- [39:43]
B
Thank you, John. That's a great question. I think is just trying to balance the normal work life balance as best as we can do. But I will tell you what is the biggest driver for me is when we have our success stories. When there's a student who was on a really dark pathway to violence and we were able to pull them off and the counselor texts me, just so you know, so and so graduated and he's happy and he got him into college or he's on a much better pathway. Those students success stories are the biggest motivators because we know this works. Even when the monitor comes to me and says to me, after your situational awareness training, I've been checking doors and this past week I found this door open three times. And we were able to figure out why this door was either being left open or the faulty mechanism behind it. So it's little things like that. Just as an educator that I really appreciate the message is getting home.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah. So what you're preaching is actually being absorbed and put into practice. You gotta ask for better validation than that, right?
- [40:44]
B
Not at all. Not at all. So that, that, that's what keeps me going.
- [40:46]
D
Yeah.
- [40:47]
A
So as we wind down here, you've provided us with some great resources and information and there's a lot of information out there, good and bad. Where can school business officials go for resources, guidance, support when looking to develop their, their safety plans?
- [41:05]
B
So that's a great question. I mean again, I know you know the, the widespread reach of this podcast. Right. So I want to be mindful of that. So what I would say you know, if you're local to here, you can call me. If you're in New York, call your folks, these people. But no, like, you know, what I would say, though is the three and four letter agencies have been super helpful to us.
- [41:26]
C
Right.
- [41:26]
B
So there's a National Threat Assessment center, there's the United States Secret Service, there's the FBI. And they basically on their website, they have tons and tons of resources. I think that there are a few other agencies out there that are good when it comes to mental health stuff. So I'll give an example. We have the national association for School Psychologists. They will put out a lot of some really good one or two sheets on mental health. In New York, we have niasp, which is the state chapter. I know there's a lot of those type of professional organizations. Nasro, the national association of School Resource Officers. And then even in certain states, they have their own version of nasro. Like Pennsylvania has pasro. They're phenomenal. In New York, we have the Juvenile Police Officer association, we have CPAs. So I think part of the conversation is working with those agencies or your local reps. Department of Homeland Security has been phenomenal for the threat assessment side. And then in New York, it's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services and the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Unit. So it's understanding what those, those agencies exist. But the really, the governmental agencies have been super helpful to schools, again, because they're concerned about the schools and they're the most vulnerable.
- [42:50]
D
Yeah.
- [42:50]
A
Well, Frank, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your knowledge. This has been an incredible conversation and it's always a pleasure when our paths cross, my friend.
- [42:59]
B
Yes, you too, John. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and I hope you have a great day.
- [43:03]
C
But you thank.
- [43:03]
B
This was, this was awesome.
- [43:05]
A
Thank you for tuning in to School Business Insider. Make sure to check back each week for your favorite topics on school business.