School Safety in 2021: A New Framework by Ann Marie Cotman

After the school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas (1998) and Columbine, Colorado (1999), the school safety agenda almost became a single item: protect students from gun violence on campus. In response, efforts were made to “harden the targets” of school campuses and improve building “access control.” Locked doors and strictly enforced badge systems became best practice almost overnight, and secondary school students reported rapid increases in the presence of security cameras and school police, among other measures (NCES, 2020).  These initiatives were largely intuitive, rather than research-based and often focused on providing a “visible” response to assuage parents’ (and others’) fears (Perumean-Chaney & Sutton, 2013).  

Research in the field of risk assessment shows that people perceive risk and craft reactions through mental processes that are layered with affective responses, superficial knowledge, social influences, and differing grasps of quantitative data (Slovic, 2010).  In contrast to shootings, for example, school bus accidents are responsible for about the same number of student deaths and far more injuries, but the national imagination does not as readily conjure a list of deadly crash locales (Injury Facts, n.d.; Education Week, 2021). The perceptions of risk and safety depend on complex calculations that clearly include more than actuarial accounting.

What does this mean to school leaders responsible for school safety? The characteristics of mass shootings match perfectly with an outsized assessment of the threat they pose.  The devastatingly tragic results offer media outlets emotionally significant, high-impact content that is viewed and shared widely, qualities that increase perceptions of risk.  The availability heuristic (see Kahneman, 2011) layers onto these attributes; mental lists of events and images associated with school shootings are readily available and make their occurrence feel more present and likely. Other qualities of school shootings push them to the front of the mind when calculating the risks compared to other potential school safety concerns: the severity and immediacy of consequences, perceived newness as a phenomenon, involuntary nature, and unknowability and uncontrollability. (See Fischhoff et al., 2000 for more details about hazard characteristics that impact perception of risk.) 

Dangerously, the risks assumed by hazard mitigation initiatives often go under-evaluated, particularly when the framing of a situation makes some fear factors explicit while others are left implicit or ignored (Slovic, 2010). Recent attention to the harmful effects of school-shooter drills offers a perfect example of this effect (Moore-Pentinak et al., 2020). Other school-shooter centered safety initiatives raise their own concerns.  The National Association of State Fire Marshalls (2018) has been issuing advice about how barricading and locking classroom doors can compromise safety in the case of a fire emergency. 

Most concerning may be the exponential increase in school-based law enforcement officers. School Resource Officers, the fastest growing segment of police in the U.S. according to the National Association of School Resource Officers, are often installed on campuses without substantive evaluation of the risks of this initiative (Weisburst, 2019).  Researchers now are pointing out real dangers that police presence pose, particularly to Black and Latinx students as compelling evidence correlates their presence with even higher rates of exclusionary discipline and arrest than these students are already subject to (see Fisher & Hennessy, 2016; Ryan et al, 2018).  More insidiously the presence of SROs may be re-shaping campus cultures in ways that marginalize many students by dismissing concerns about racist policing in the US as “the result of a rare ‘bad apple’ officer” (Kupchick et al, 2020), reclassifying student misbehavior as criminal (Cheely et al., 2012), and increasing the suspicious gaze that already falls on students of color, LGBTQIA students, and students with disabilities.

The Covid-19 pandemic and robust public attention to the topic of police reform make this the perfect moment for schools to re-evaluate safety practices, substantively and critically. The following framework offers some important first considerations:

1. How is safety defined?  Is safety a feeling of security? Is it preservation of life and limb? Is it improving health outcomes? Are both mental health and physical health important? Does safety only concern immediate outcomes, or does it include long-term effects? Are incremental and nonlethal negative impacts of hazards part of the safety picture?  Can it be measured?
2. Whose safety is paramount? One consequence of failing to define safety is that the implicit definition will almost certainly support dominant social structures. For example, mid-pandemic research points out substantially different safety concerns for parents in different racial and ethnic groups (Gilbert et al., 2020; Mott Poll Report, 2020). As over three-fourths of school boards members and school principals across the nation are White, hazards more central to the experiences of students and families of Color are in danger of being consigned to the margins or ignored (NCES, 2017; NSBA, 2018).
3. Initiatives must be evaluated for cultural responsiveness.  Policies and practices must actively resist excluding some students and instead “promote inclusivity, Indigenous youth identities; and integrat[e] student culture in all aspects of schooling” (Khalifa et al., 2016, p. 1296-1297).  Safety initiatives, like all school programs, must be evaluated and assessed for potential ramifications across the school community, including unintended consequences.  We must, for example ask how police presence might impact students of color, LGBTQIA students, and students with disabilities.  Failing to explore how these new high profile members of the campus community will impact all aspects of the school experience, through negligence or fear of the answer, means failing to prioritize equity.
4. Initiatives must be implemented with an eye toward how effectiveness will be evaluated, including how unanticipated consequences will be recognized.  Before implementing a safety initiative, school leaders must be clear about the project’s goals and how progress toward the goals will be assessed.  Sharing these goals and processes with the school community will help gather information about effectiveness and unanticipated consequences.

In the absence of careful consideration, safety resources and efforts will center on the concerns of those in power and exacerbate inequities in schools.  The remedy lies in being intentional with safety decisions, explicit with definitions and descriptions of concerns, and vigilant about unintended consequences of safety policies.  The history of school safety in the U.S. is a history of pinballing from one high profile concern to the next.  In the 1910’s worry about water-borne illness transformed how students ate and drank at school.  In the 1950’s mushroom clouds and school fires haunted the nation giving rise to emergency drills.  Yesterday school-shootings consumed the national conscious, but the current pandemic may well replace that concern. Just as Black Lives Matter powerfully calls for defunding school police and March for Our Lives shuns showy school shooting responses over true reform, we are in danger of turning attention away from the cameras, badges, and police programs that will remain as vestiges of this moment in school safety history. To create safe schools, we must be more deliberate. Interrogating implicit assumptions about safety and examining how we direct school safety resources will improve not only school safety, but the entire school experience.  

Ann Marie Cotman researches school policy, particularly safety policy, from a critical perspective and with an eye toward remedying inequities. An experienced teacher with an M.A.T., she is now a doctoral candidate in School Improvement at Texas State University studying the training curriculum for School Resource Officers and other school policing policy documents. A single mom, Ann Marie lives in Austin, Texas with four amazing young people, two silly dogs, and two bored cats. Twitter: @AnnCotman

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