ACAP Solutions
Considerations from the Review of the Oxford Shooting
Expert Insights
After reading through the report discussing the events leading up to and occurring during the attack at Oxford high school, including the findings of the authors, providing commentary from a school-based, multi-disciplinary group seemed necessary. This paper addresses points of concern with that publication in several areas: expectations, perspective, bag searches, camera monitoring, training, suicide and threat assessment, and omissions. It then concludes with suggestions for districts in their approach to school safety.
As a school-safety-focused group, our greatest concern with this document is that of expectations for performance and implementation which it sets forth on all those involved in the school. In the overall publication, all expectations are set without providing a foundation for where those came from; were these the expectations from the reviewing company representatives, or were these expectations provided to the individuals, and if so, how were they given this expectation. At the individual level, any expectation – which there are many outlined in the report – to supersede the authority given them and initiate actions beyond the scope of their standard practice is unreasonable, save where notification of that expectation can be shown. No indication that such documentation was found is given in this report.
Michigan state law mandates that schools provide for the safety and mental health of their students. School Boards thus have the responsibility to create policy to carry out these mandates. Similarly, superintendents’ contracts generally specify enacting programs and methodologies to carry out those policies. However, without documentation showing that the Oxford High School (OHS) administrators, much less their staff, were notified of a responsibility for knowing and implementing the board policy, it is unrealistic and improper to hold them accountable to such a standard. Furthermore, any individual or administrator implementing programs without Board approval would not be protected from any claims of wrongdoing and would open themselves to sanction for their actions. Many people, especially in education, are wary of taking initiative because of similar worries.
Addressing the admonition claiming building administrators should have taken it upon themselves to engage threat assessment procedures goes further. Public education continually runs on a shoestring-budget, with minimal allowances for spending at the building level, especially where district matters are concerned. Thus, beyond the problematic expectation of insubordination, the restrictions of funding the project remain.
More restrictive than finances are the limitations put on an educator’s time. Regardless of the position, educators have more mandates for services than time allows, so the few options for anything else, including training, are limited. To provide for training, not only must the training be approved, scheduled, and paid for, someone must also fill the position of the person leaving for training. This requires additional staff or substitutes or at the very least, overtime hours, requiring contract allowance, human resources approval, and funding; so the entire proposal becomes a loop of problems.
Moving to the broader application of the school as a whole, the problems listed here apply similarly. To expect that every district, of its own accord, would fully implement a comprehensive threat assessment program – inclusive of every step, documentation, and sufficiently trained staff – without appropriate state and federal direction and support (which our education system does not have) is ludicrous. That the information was available is not in question, nor is the validity of the National Threat Assessment Center’s work in creating a process. However, having worked in schools since 2018, well before this massacre, we are familiar with the choices schools have to make between educational services and anything else. While not easy, especially where safety and mental health are concerned, education is the primary mandate and focus of efforts and expenditures.
All of this raises the issue of perspective. Certainly the background of those writing the report is not in question: their expertise in security and prosecution is noteworthy. However, the school environment is unique, presenting issues and concerns in a myriad of options unlike those of business; so much so that pre-school safety is different from secondary school safety and both different from university safety. The problems of the education industry: funding, implementation, authority, knowledge, staffing, providing for minors, dealing with parents, the rights of both, contractual provisions and limitations, mental health, training, and many others, differ significantly from private industry and so solutions require special approaches.
In this writing, the authors are clearly knowledgeable in matters of security and investigation. While questioning the findings presented by those authors is a portion of the purpose of this writing, perhaps it is the perspective of their approach that is more relevant. Where the authors commonly deal with private entities, where decisions can be made quickly and every position connected to implementation of policies are responsible for doing so, schools are a very different environment in which to apply safety and security measures. As Idaho School Safety and Security Regional Lead Guy Bliesner says, “high schools are like small cities where the entire population moves every hour.” Thus, their findings would be completely appropriate in another venue, though they do not apply here in the same way.
In our society, problems are usually addressed so readily that the process of doing so is often overlooked. It is one thing to identify the problem, another to find solutions (reviewing data on possibilities, vendor vetting, administrative and board approval), yet another to fund those solutions, and another to implement them (policy and procedure creation, with training and support), and finally another to maintain those solutions (this requires initial training of new staff and ongoing training of current staff, program support and administrative review). In schools, all of these steps have been an issue, especially with safety matters; this is not to say that schools do not care, they simply do not have what is needed for them to work through the process of resolving safety concerns.
Inarguably, in this incident, there were issues. The perspective of which the events are viewed, however, changes whom is held accountable. Consider only the matter of funding (setting aside issues of staffing, institutional requirements, contracts, training availability and the like): in the first three months following the Oklahoma City bombing, the federal government allocated $95 million to improve federal buildings, almost three-times what it offered schools nationally following Parkland; comparatively, the U.S. Congress allocated $75 million in school safety grants for fiscal year 2018 and $100 million for fiscal years 2019 through 2028.*1 Much (if not all) of this money was allocated to states and their agencies, not to schools themselves. The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services has also announced nearly $50 million in school safety funding through its School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP).*2 In Michigan, money was issued to individual districts through the Competitive Safe Schools Grant Program, administered by the Michigan State Police. While leading the Michigan School Safety Task Force in 2018, whose final report advocated Comprehensive School Safety Planning, the organization’s grant approvals followed the tradition of physical security improvements, not providing for much of what is cited in the report, nor providing standardly for all schools across the state. As a result, local school districts were – and are – left to their own determination of solutions and their communities for funding the chosen avenues.
The report further made specific critiques regarding some of the physical security measures and responses to the crisis. As Oxford High School (OHS) had more security measures than were readily available in the vast majority of districts in Michigan, this response will focus on the discussions of bag searches and camera monitoring.
As recent incidents in Newport News, Virginia*3, and Denver, Colorado*4 show, searching bags or backpacks at schools is not an automatic guarantee to prevent school shootings. Shooters may use the search as the initiative to attack. Those conducting the search must be properly trained to do the search, as well as be thorough in the search. Staffing must be provided for searching, as searching must be applied to all students meeting the criteria. Of course, school districts must outline that policy and designate which staff will make the determination and which staff will search.
As school staff are frequently criticized for their actions, consideration for human behavior must also enter the picture. Behaviors likely to have immediate or certain consequences have greater engagement than behaviors with future or uncertain consequence. When considering searching a student or their belongings, it is human nature for school employees to worry about what will happen as a result of their search; given that the likelihood of parental complaint or even lawsuit is high, while that of a school shooting is low, people will be inclined not to search. Clear direction, administrative involvement, board policy, training and support are all needed to expect actions differing from that inclination.
The immediate search is complicated by other factors as well. If security is lacking at the building outside of the school day, the opportunity for attack in those hours, or the use of that time for preparation for a school day attack, can lessen the reason for school day searching. The policy on searches – especially regarding indirect cases such as this – and instructions for process in making the determination to search, the frequency of similar searches, the familiarity of the staff member with searching, the availability of support for the staff member and that person’s familiarity with searches, the tools available to be used in the search and staff training and familiarity with them; these are all additional considerations for searching. In this report, only the schools’ use of searching students for vapes is mentioned, without addressing individual familiarity and training.
The report also gives extensive criticism of OHS staff for not monitoring cameras during the incident and providing announcements of the murderer’s location and actions, citing the acronym under which the training given to the school staff is commonly known. However, the specific training provided to OHS staff was not reviewed, nor were the consequences of such an implementation discussed. Training in any activity is always an issue with school staff, as their time is so limited and opportunities for training are scarce. In general, when active violence training is provided to schools, it is in lecture format (“sit-and-get”), limiting retention. Due to time restrictions, such training is usually focused on “Run-Hide-Fight” responses to active shooters. As the training provisions for OHS were not included in the report, these concerns linger.
This training provision is more poignant in relation to the announcing staff. As which staff would be responsible for the camera monitoring and announcements are not specified in the report, clear direction on who should do this and how it should be done were likely not found by the authors. As schools are just beginning to grasp the implementation of “Run-Hide-Fight” (Avoid- Barricade-Combat are terms which provide more clarity) and – for a plethora of reasons, whether arguably valid or not – there is limited training on the basics, much less the complicated aspects of active violence survival, the expectation that school staff would be prepared to engage in such action is exceptional now, and bordered on unrealistic in 2021. Further, to accomplish these announcements, school staff would need the wherewithal to calmly operate the relevant systems in the most traumatic life-threatening emergency conceivable. This is an unlikely expectation at best.
As school safety consultants ourselves, we must consider the ramifications of suggestions we make or contest. As such, if a school were to provide the direction to staff to engage in such action, there are components of implementation that must accompany the training and practice which would be necessary. This would begin by engaging in the announcement for every emergency and drill, not just active shooter, as should be the case with emergency practices. Next, the technological components of cameras, monitors and public address systems must be in place and fully functioning. As many schools have problems with their announcement systems, this is not a given factor. The camera system must be able to cover all areas of the building and campus; given the cost for such systems, most schools have significant gaps. Third, access to monitor the cameras must be given to enough people, with enough equipment, in enough locations, to ensure that access is available whenever the crisis occurs. Also, staff must be trained to use the system, with enough equipment, to effectively follow the event anywhere on the campus. While technology is available to provide this information, it is rare to find in schools; regardless, the staff must then also be able to share the location through the announcement. Finally, this must all be provided in locations which increase the safety of those expected to make the announcement, with consideration given that this may cause an attacker to focus on the office and announcing staff. Not providing for these foreseeable issues causes further complications and liability.
The issue of suicide assessment and Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management, the provision for them in schools, training, use, documentation and support is addressed in the report. Thanks to Oxford Community Schools’ use of a third-party policy provider a thorough policy was available and, according to press conferences, adopted in 2004, with an update in 2011 reflecting the best information available currently. The report correctly notes the obvious gap between the policy and practical implementation. The challenge when using third-party policy provisions is in reviewing each and every policy that is adopted. According to press conferences, this was not done, both by board members and the superintendent at the time of adoption or at the time of the incident.
However, the report not only blames these individuals for not implementing this policy, it further assigns responsibility to everyone who had assigned contact with the attacker. Yet there is no documentation given to indicate those staff had such expectations defined for them. Such direction needs to be clearly stated and verified to demonstrate accountability. If this was done, training and process would need to be provided through the district, also with documentation, none of which is noted in the report.
The federal Safe Schools Initiative, post-Columbine, had several recommendations for schools; many are not implemented due to the time, money, and effort they would require, as no provisions have been made via state or federal government policy or funding for the schools to do so. “There are people with the background, knowledge, experience, and expertise who should be providing the direction – and steps to take – to schools.” *5 Where states like Virginia or North Carolina made this a portion of the education process early on, and states like Maine have created state programs to provide training and support (schools must still choose to take the training, select staff and send them to sessions), Michigan only began initial efforts after the attack at Oxford. “Schools are doing threat assessment constantly, informally or formally; they need assistance in the understanding, standardization, and documentation of the analysis and efforts.” *6
There is no indication in the report that guidelines were promulgated, that process was conveyed to staff, certainly where BTAM was concerned. There is no indication that training was or was not provided staff responsible for identifying and assessing concerning behaviors. That training in general was not addressed in the report seems a drastic oversight. It is essential to every staff expectation noted in the report.
A further omission in the report was referenced in press conferences: the findings of a previous third-party threat or risk assessment. This was not included in either of the reports issued this year, a deviation from standard practice; conducting an assessment always provides notation of improvements or declinations. Whether such an assessment considered these policies, whether implementation of the policies was included, and most certainly the findings of the assessment, whatever it entailed, along with any suggestions or recommendations, are relevant information and provide perspective to the actions of OCS and staff.
Schools and school staff have more mandates on activities than time allows them to complete. While school safety matters to them, this results in seeking a “silver bullet”: looking to spend what little money they have on the latest and greatest product to minimize impact and achieve safety. As educators, not safety experts, they are too distracted sorting through the offers of solutions and not asking what they should engage in.
The solutions to school safety are myriad and complex, as evidenced by this attack at a school which was generally ahead of Michigan schools in security matters. As an organization promoting Comprehensive School Safety Planning, we received widespread support in every conversation with school administrators. However, they were then faced with the choice to spend district funds on safety items and consulting or educational items; there was little choice for them to make: they needed to follow their mandate.
As the funding for school safety assessments and per pupil safety funding was standardized, schools readily engaged in the safety process. This is the first and foremost indication that it should be a standard. If the desire is to create equal educational opportunities across the country regardless of community affluence or location, this should begin with state and federal funding for 21st-century buildings, redesigned with technology and safety as primary considerations. Most schools are struggling to maintain structures originally build in the 1950s; they cannot continue to cover the operational costs and fund appropriate new structures.
For schools, this review of the findings at Oxford can be summarized in several bullet points:
- School safety does not come from a device or even a secure building; it takes a comprehensive plan that involves everyone connected to the school.
Implementation of a comprehensive school safety plan takes expertise, authority and dedication of resources, given in the appropriate perspective for the school and community.
Policies should be reviewed to be appropriate and implemented.
Risk assessments do not create liability – they point out areas to seek solutions. Schools are responsible to show action to address the issues found.
Devices and programs should not be instituted without consideration of the comprehensive engagement and effect for overall school safety. This means:
There are no single-source solutions: no one device, tool, technology, program, process or person is the answer to making schools safe.
Clear backpacks, backpack searches, no backpacks, or allowing backpacks must be given due consideration in the implementation, effect, challenges, and desired environment of the comprehensive school safety plan.
Response programs, protocols, and assigned actions must be discussed thoroughly, to include the staff and structure, and evaluated and improved through scenarios.
BTAM and suicide assessment are not new methodologies, though they are new to some staff. Implementation should be part of district-wide safety plans, including standard training, documentation and support.
- BTAM and suicide assessment, along with information gathering and sharing, should be standardized throughout the district (state and country)
- Training is not an option.
In every expectation, people need to know the expected behavior and have that expectation clarified through training.
Crisis will happen to everyone in some form at some point in their life. Studies show that people do not enter “fight or flight” but “fight, flight, or freeze” *7. The way to overcome the tendency to freeze is to train.
Footnotes:
Jackie Noto, CBAC; interview 12/19/2023
Dr. Karen Barnes, clinical therapist; Threat Assessment/Mental Heath Coordinator at Maine School Safety Center/ Maine Department of Education; interview 12/19/2023
- Noto, J.M. (2019) Behavioral skills training for active shooter scenarios: Human service staff (Publication No. 135) [Master’s Thesis, Florida Institute of Technology]. Theses and Dissertations. https://repository.fit.edu/etd/135