One year after the mass shooting at Oxford High School, educators and policymakers across Michigan continue to focus on school security – and Secure Education Consultants has walked alongside many of them.
Since November 2021, Secure Education Consultants has conducted security assessments for more than 1,000 schools and has worked directly with school personnel across Michigan and the U.S. to evaluate safety and security measures, build customized emergency response plans and provide critical incident response training.
In addition to physical security, SEC founder and President Jason Russell says it’s critical schools provide mental health and behavior support for students.
“Instead of just hardening the target, the idea behind behavioral threat assessment is to try to identify kids who might be on the path toward violence and intervene in a meaningful way so they don’t actually commit a violent act,” Russell recently told the Traverse City Record-Eagle.
He added: That work comes in the form of hiring more mental health professionals to work in schools and updating policies for addressing student needs and behaviors. This helps improve the school climate and make kids feel their problems are being addressed.
Russell also discussed the common reaction communities have following a school shooting: Parents’ concerns about safety rise in formal communications, public comment at meetings, emails or conversations or, in some cases, community members form groups to address school security.
“If there’s an incident, everybody has a panic reaction. They want to throw whatever at the problem they think will fix it,” Russell told the Record-Eagle. “And then the farther that incident gets in the rearview mirror, the less they focus on it.”
He added: Inevitably, people begin to think the prevention of violence is evidence that more or continued investments in security are no longer necessary, and those resources get allocated elsewhere.
Russell warns against this thinking and instead recommends routine re-evaluations of safety and security policies, procedures and infrastructure.
In 2022, Russell testified before and worked with the Michigan Legislature to bring forward critical funding for physical site assessments at K-12 schools throughout the state. He also was appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to the newly created School Safety and Mental Health Commission.
Read the full subscriber-exclusive Record-Eagle article here.