Making
Schools
Safer:
IT’S THE NEW NORMAL
How one school
district used a
potential tragedy
to build a holistic
approach to
assessing campus
vulnerabilities and
communications
models.
22
Leadership
On a beautiful, sunny October af-
ternoon, after the hustle and bustle of a busy
middle school lunch period, a 7th grade
student that had gone home ill returned to
school with his parent indicating that he felt
better. Instead of going to class, however, he
went to the restroom, put on a Halloween
mask, and proceeded to knock on a class-
room door requesting entrance. The student
was let into the classroom and once in the
classroom, he pulled out a loaded gun and
pointed it at the students and the classroom
teacher. Thinking it was not a real weapon,
the students did not show fear and told the
assailant to go ahead and use the weapon.
At that precise moment, the classroom
phone rang. It was the school office looking
for another student. The call was enough to
frighten the would-be assailant, preventing
a potential tragedy. The masked student ran
out of the classroom, across the campus and
climbed the fence onto the street where he
was eventually apprehended by the police
department. The loaded firearm was located
in his backpack.
Unfortunately, situations such as this one
have been happening across the country,
many times with much more tragic endings,
causing schools to be prepared for the un-
thinkable. In the case of the Ontario-Mont-
clair School District (OMSD), the district
started the wheels in motion long before
this incident. Nevertheless, it did not miss
an opportunity to learn from this incident
to help fine tune and improve the district’s
emergency plans and protocols. The follow-
ing steps are some that have been developed
by OMSD in an effort to increase campus
safety while continuing to demonstrate a
welcoming community environment.
1. Assess the vulnerability of the
campuses.
Fully assess the access to the campus. Ei-
ther professionally or through your mainte-
nance department, identify the access points
to the campus. Can unauthorized individu-
als enter the school campus? How do parents
and volunteers enter the campus? Are there
areas on campus that cannot be fully seen
or supervised? Over the years we evaluated
each of our campuses and identified certain
steps that made our campuses less vulner-
able to entry. We identified entry points that
By Marco Villegas