Twenty-five years after Columbine, school shootings have become more frequent and more deadly. An entire generation of students have either been traumatized—or worse, taught how to be a school shooter—during lockdown drills. The status quo is not working.
On the EM Weekly podcast, Zack Borst and I discussed how schools are missing decades of best practices from overlooking the emergency management cycle (prepare, respond, recovery, mitigate) for school security planning. Effectively evacuating a school during an emergency requires planning and help from the ‘whole community’ just like a flood, tornado, or earthquake.
We also covered:
Benefits of collecting widely inclusive data
Planning for shootings at sporting events
Role of emergency managers in school safety planning and training
Persistent dangers from swatting and threats
Confusion during the response at Michigan State
Zack covers a wide variety of emergency management issues. Checkout his show.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.
Paradigm Shift: Planning for evacuation instead of lockdown during a school shooting