Sit and Dwell or Run Like Hell

At the start of each school year students enter their new classrooms with seemingly high aspirations, full of energy and look forward to meeting their new teachers and classmates. Traditionally, the focus of education has been delivering up to date curriculum so that our kids leave the classroom with knowledge, skills and abilities that make them marketable. We want them to be productive, law-abiding citizens. That's the way it used to be; it was the central focus. Today, there are competing influences within our local school districts other than offering a good education. Safety has become a paramount concern given the ever growing incidents of active shooters in our academic environments.

As a former law enforcement officer, police/security professional trainer, and current educator, I have a unique perspective on school violence. I know of other teachers whose number one concern isn't developing the young minds in their midst, but rather keeping their kids safe (and themselves too) for the 7 hours they have them. I've seen the trend and the resulting changes not only from an officer trained to respond to an incident in "Quad" fashion, but as a teacher performing lock downs. However, when evaluating the typical school lock-down procedure (as a teacher with the mindset of a cop) in response to an armed aggressor inside of the building, something just doesn't make sense.

The notion that students, staff and faculty should immediately take cover and hunker down when a gunman enters the school is based on the conventional physical security supposition, better known as the 4 Ds. Basically, Delay, Deter, Detect, and Deny, with great emphasis placed on Delaying the gunman from entering rooms packed with kids, via a locked door, and blasting away. As we all know, the strategy is to stall for time so that 3 - 4 officers can arrive on scene, form up, tactically enter, find and neutralize the shooter. My issue is not taking fault with the 4 Ds in general, because the concept is useful and well established, but I argue that lock-down procedures are inherently flawed, because we focus on the wrong D first.

Any basic police academy rookie will attest that shooting range qualification is rather easy when your target is standing still. Later in my career, when I went through the SWAT Qualification Course I found that my shooting skills were really put to the test when firing on the move in confined spaces. This simply highlights what common sense denotes to be true: If you are the shooter then you want your target to be standing still; if you are the target then you want to be moving.

Academia is filled with complex learning theories. Genetic Epistemology is one of them. To an educator it means there are studies that centralize the accumulation of knowledge and its limitations. Further deduced for the working cop, that same theory means that just because someone is smart doesn't mean they know everything. Instead of always being the instructor, educational administrators should be the student once in a while and learn from those who earn a-living dodging bullets, notably law enforcement and the military. Police Officers are trained to seek cover and concealment as they move. Small unit infantry tactics taught in the U.S. Army stress "Shoot, Move, and Communicate". The underlying principle: a moving target is hard to hit. Since this is true then why are we conditioning our kids through lock-down drills to stay still? Are school lock-down procedures leading them to the slaughter?

We need to focus on using the right D in its appropriate order, which begins with Detecting a threat before it arrives at your front door. What have we learned after enduring mass killings in our schools over the last decade? Someone always knew that someday it would come, because the killers told people. The victims chose to think the threat would never materialize. We need to develop situational awareness training for teachers, staff and faculty that serve as a means to cultivate, vet, process and disseminate information, much like debriefing confidential informants in the drug enforcement world.