SHARING

IDEAS & 

RESOURCES

to Keep Our Nation’s

Schools Safe!

VOLUME V
CONTACT 

INFORMATION

Michael O’Shea, Senior Law Enforcement Program Manager

National Institute of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice

810 Seventh St., NW.

Washington, DC 20531

(202) 305-7954 

michael.oshea@usdoj.gov

Lance Miller, Director

Justice Technology Information Center

700 N. Frederick Ave.

Bldg. 181, Rm. 1L30

Gaithersburg, MD 20879

(800) 248-2742

(301) 240-6731

lmiller@justnet.org

Visit http://www.schoolsafetyinfo.org for access to up-to-date 

publication and website resources. New success stories similar to the ones in this publication are added on an ongoing 

basis. To suggest a success story topic, contact Senior Writer 

Becky Lewis at rebecca.l.lewis@lmco.com
INTRODUCTION • i

INTRODUCTION

In this fifth volume of Sharing Ideas and Resources To Keep Our 

Nation’s Schools Safe, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and 

the Justice Technology Information Center (JTIC), part of the 

National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center 

(NLECTC) System, present a new compilation of articles posted 

on the SchoolSafetyInfo.org website in the past year. While 

at first glance these articles seem to profile a wide variety of 

projects and programs, all of them have at least one thing in 

common. That is, their planners, coordinators and organizers 

told us the same thing: We want to help other schools. We want 

them to know what we’re doing, and we want them to feel free 

to call us with questions, to help them start similar projects of 

their own.

In 2017, schools, law enforcement agencies and communities keep on coming 

together across the United States as they create innovative and groundbreaking 

solutions to the persistent problems of violence, bullying, security breaches, 

gang tensions and social media abuse. For the past five years, SchoolSafetyInfo.

org has worked toward ensuring that schools and school administrators, local 

law enforcement agencies and school resource officers know that they’re not 

alone in their quest to make their schools safer, that others are working toward 

the same goal. We reach out to small rural school districts and to federal 

government agencies, and we always get the same answer: “We’re taking a 

proactive approach here, and we want the rest of the country to know about it.” 

These are just some of the projects you’ll read about in this fifth volume:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Training for school bus drivers that emphasizes good communications skills 

and situational awareness.

A free video on how to handle bomb threats.

A simple reverse checkout procedure initiated by a school in rural Alabama.

A New Jersey program for a new class of Special Law Enforcement Officers.

A wide-ranging bullying prevention program that started with a group of 

concerned students.
Through the five volumes of Sharing Ideas and Resources to Keep Our Nation’s 

Schools Safe! and SchoolSafetyInfo.org, we let you know about the people 

who are searching for, and finding, positive ways to address school climate and 

school safety. We also want to hear from you about what’s going on in your 

area. We continually post new success stories on SchoolSafetyInfo.org, which 

also includes links to a wide range of resources and materials produced at the 

federal, state and association levels, and provides access to school safetyrelated publications and videos from NIJ and the NLECTC System. There, you 

can also learn about School Safe – JTIC’s Security and Safety Assessment App 

for Schools, and obtain instructions on how to download it. 

We encourage you to investigate and decide what is right for you and what has 

a place in your school setting. First responders, school staff, students, parents 

and community leaders continue to work cooperatively to combat the myriad 

safety issues that affect our nation’s schools and provide safe and healthy 

environments in which to learn. As your schools and your communities work 

together with local public safety professionals to do the same, we hope that 

you will continue to use NIJ, JTIC and SchoolSafetyInfo.org as resources.

Sincerely,

Lance Miller 

Director, Justice Technology Information Center 

lmiller@justnet.org

ii • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CONTENTS

Youth Court in Schools Project Produces Positive Results.................................. IV

Using Technology to Prevent Violence in Schools ............................................... 4

Field Search: Field-Based Computer Forensics Software 

Widens Its Scope.................................................................................................. 8

New Jersey Launches Program for SRO-trained 

Special Law Enforcement Officers ..................................................................... 12

New FBI Resources Provide Best Practices for SROs......................................... 16

An SRO Talks About Female Body Armor.......................................................... 20

Marion Community Schools Recognized for Bullying 

Prevention Efforts............................................................................................... 24

Cranford Community Embraces Anti-Drug and 

Alcohol Abuse Message..................................................................................... 28 

“Plan, Prepare, Act” Wins Award, Encourages Planning................................... 32

University of Central Florida Leads Development of 

Bomb Threat Training Video .............................................................................. 36

Idaho Takes Systematic Approach to School Safety Planning ........................... 40

Indiana County Implements “One County, One Protocol” ............................... 44

Cooperation, Partnerships Lead to Creation of 

Yakima Valley Center.......................................................................................... 48

Fast, Free Reverse Checkout Plan Recognized as Best Practice ....................... 54

Automated Student Management System Brings 

“Peace of Mind” to Kentucky School ................................................................ 58

Missouri School Bus Driver Training Emphasizes 

Situational Awareness, Communication Skills.................................................... 62

Free Mobile Phone Safety Application Tracks Location, 

Sends Alarms and Records Data........................................................................ 66

Michigan School Introduces Naloxone Kits, Training......................................... 70

CONTENTS • III
CHAPTER 1

YOUTH COURT IN SCHOOLS 

PROJECT PRODUCES 

POSITIVE RESULTS

By Becky Lewis

June 2017

The sanctions came down, taking no more than 

15 minutes each to decide: Write a letter of apology. 

Clean graffiti off the bathroom walls. Assist the 

basketball coach and team. Paint the bleachers. 

No, this isn’t municipal court, nor is it some new 

television show a la “Judge Judy.” It’s school-based 

Youth Court, and it’s proving to be a success in 

North Carolina’s Robeson and Columbus counties. 

i
Funded under the National Institute of Justice’s Comprehensive School Safety 

Initiative, the Youth Court in Schools Project involves four high schools and 

eight middle schools each in the two low-income, racially/ethnically diverse 

rural counties where incidence of youth violence high. For the length of the 

three-year study, schools were randomly assigned to either a control or an 

experimental group, and results indicate that the Youth Court Project reduced 

violent behavior, bullying, rejection by friends and anxiety.

Dr. Paul Smokowski, lead researcher 

from the University of North Carolina at 

Chapel Hill, explains that both counties 

had previously used the concept of 

community-based teen court, and 

a group of school administrators 

and school resource officers (SROs) 

approached the university about 

applying for CSSI funds to initiate the 

concept in schools. Referrals to Youth 

Court come from principals, assistant 

principals and SROs, and to participate, 

students must admit both their guilt and 

their willingness to accept their peers’ 

sanctions. Parents/guardians must also 

give consent. Some offenses, usually 

first-time ones, that merit referrals 

include disrespecting a teacher, skipping class and other behavior that might 

previously have earned the student a trip to in-school suspension. 

“The dispositions don’t involve punishment. They involve what the student 

needs to do to restore and repair the situation,” Smokowski says. “One of the 

powerful aspects of Youth Court is you have other teens serving as jury members 

who ask the defendants why they did what they did and what they think they 

could have done differently. They hear that sort of thing from adults all the time, 

but they don’t often hear it from their peers, and it really makes an impact. They 

take peers’ opinions very seriously.”

The students participating as legal counsel, defense advocate, jury members 

and so on take the task equally seriously, Smokowski says, and they benefit from 

the process as well by sharpening their public speaking and critical thinking 

skills. (A school staff member serves as judge and program coordinator.) Most 

schools designate a specific class to take on the task of running the Youth 

Court, and juries often are a mixture of students from that class and previous 

Youth Court defendants. Some of the latter participate as their disposition, 

while others simply want to assist with the project because they’ve seen the 

benefits themselves. But both Smokowski and Dr. Martica Bacallao, director 

of implementation for the project and assistant professor at University of 

North Carolina, Pembroke, say that getting principals on board with accepting 

those peer-directed sanctions is the biggest challenge in a school’s successful 

implementation of Youth Court. 

CH. 1: YOUTH COURT IN SCHOOLS PROJECT PRODUCES POSITIVE RESULTS • 1
2 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5

“Some principals wrestle with what they see as surrendering control of the 

discipline process,” Smokowski says. “Ultimately the administration and SROs 

decide what kids are eligible for Youth Court, but if there are no referrals, the 

court won’t work.”

Bacallao says that principals often open their minds after watching a Youth Court 

hearing, and she thinks it is necessary to get principals to buy into the Youth 

Court Project as they are an important referral source for it. 

“The whole purpose is to engage students in a way that repairs the damage 

or hurt that they have caused in the school community while also being held 

accountable for it. In traditional punishment approaches, the students don’t get 

an opportunity to make amends or reflect on the consequences of their actions. 

That approach is sometimes an adjustment for principals,” she says.

But once that buy-in takes place, Smokowski says Youth Court is very easy to 

implement: “All it takes is training for a teacher coordinator and placing it within 

a class that’s stable, like social studies, or making it an extracurricular activity and 

developing a referral process. We did give a small amount of the grant funds to 

the schools to give the coordinators a stipend, but overall, it’s one of the least 

expensive interventions I’ve ever seen – and its results are dramatic.”

One of those teacher coordinators, Bobby Godwin of Tabor City Middle School 

in Columbus County, agrees with that assessment of results: “My kids really 

grabbed hold of it. We used the seventh and eighth grade studio and media 
CH. 1: YOUTH COURT IN SCHOOLS PROJECT PRODUCES POSITIVE RESULTS • 3

classes as the host classes. The eighth graders served in the key positions, and 

the seventh graders served as jurors and shadowed the positions they were 

interested in filling the next year. The second year, those students were ready 

to take on those positions right from the start of the school year, and we plan 

to continue that process past the end of the grant.”

Godwin explains that Tabor City used Youth Court for first-offense cases that 

normally would have been sent for in-school suspension, such as talking back 

to a teacher, horseplay or otherwise disturbing class.

“We saw a huge decrease in repeat offenders and we were able to keep the 

kids in the classroom and engaged in learning. Youth Court only pulled them 

out for about 15 minutes instead of the two to three days they would miss with 

in-school suspension. And receiving consequences from their peers instead of 

administrators really hit home to them,” he says. “It allows them to realize ‘if my 

peers think this is wrong, I definitely need to change my actions.’ “ 

An example of an action that needed changing could involve being disrespectful 

to a teacher and disturbing a class. The student might be tasked with writing 

a letter of apology, which must be well thought out. And Godwin reviews and 

revises initial drafts to ensure that plenty of thought takes place.

“We had a kid writing profanity and drawing pictures on the bathroom walls. 

He was tasked with cleaning up all of his graffiti and other areas of the school 

as well,” Godwin says. “It’s been really good to see that they take it seriously. In 

fact, as we moved into the end of the school year, with testing and other winddown activities, we had to stop court cases, and the students were upset about 

that. They’re already looking forward to continuing it next year.”

At Robeson County’s Red Springs High School, however, although coordinator 

Eduardo Torres says the program was a great experience for those involved, 

he would have preferred for the administrators to send more respondents their 

way. Students there put in a lot of time training with some experts from the local 

judicial system, but spent more time conducting mock trials than actual ones.

“The program itself is really great. The students who made up the court took 

it very seriously and thought it was an important thing for them to do for the 

school and for the other students. The respondents came in feeling nervous, 

but once we started working with them, they realized this was better than being 

taken out of school,” Torres says. “And for myself, it was a great experience too. 

We did 14 cases, and 11 of them stayed on a good track.”

Keeping students on track and letting them know that “they are worthy, they 

are valued members of their school community and they can fix the damage” 

is what Youth Court does very well, Bacallao says, adding, “The whole idea is 

moving away from a punishment mentality to restorative justice actions within 

the school and holding students accountable for repairing the hurt or damage 

they’ve caused.”

For more information on the Youth Court in Schools Project, contact 

Dr. Paul Smokowski at smokowski@ku.edu
CHAPTER 2

USING TECHNOLOGY TO 

PREVENT VIOLENCE IN 

SCHOOLS

By Becky Lewis

March 2017

Incidents of extreme violence in our nation’s schools 

have helped lead to an increased emphasis on school 

safety, which in turn has spurred an accompanying 

wave of school safety-related technology development. 

School districts across the country now commonly 

employ technologies to prevent, respond to and 

mitigate criminal acts of violence.

As part of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, 

NIJ funded two complementary projects to help 

answer some basic questions: What technologies are currently in use and how 

are those technologies being used? What factors may affect the deployment 

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CH. 2: USING TECHNOLOGY TO PREVENT VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS • 5

of those technologies? What are the limits of those technologies and what 

improvements are needed? And ultimately, how much is known about the 

effectiveness of those technologies in keeping schools safe?

Results from The Role of Technology in Improving K-12 School Safety 

Technology, completed by the RAND Corporation, include recommendations 

for researchers and technology developers, as well as for school administrators. 

With regard to research and evaluation, the study recommendations include the 

need for more evidence as to what works in the area of school safety technology. 

The study team notes the need for rigorous research designs to instill trust in 

school safety technology evaluation results, including measures of proximal 

outcomes that might be used to assess the effectiveness of new technology. 

They also note the need to test technology solutions outside the laboratory in 

real-world settings because of the many factors that affect the implementation of 

safety technology in schools.

RAND’s research indicated that 

technology developers should turn 

their focus to the general area of 

communications, including:

• Devising low-cost ways to allow 

teachers to have direct, layered, twoway communication with a central 

command and control system.

• Making anonymous tip line 

technology easier to monitor and 

permitting uploads from multiple 

media.

• Creating “all-in-one” portals that 

provide access to changes in state 

and federal laws, training modules, 

violence alerts, prevention information and incident response information.

• Developing sophisticated social media scanning tools.

The report recommends that technology solutions be tested in real-world 

settings that include environmental challenges and the potential for human error.

The second study resulted in A Comprehensive Report on School Safety 

Technology by Johns Hopkins University, which presents a detailed picture 

of existing school safety technology at a particular point in time. The report 

examines the technologies currently being used, how they are used, how those 

technologies were chosen, legal considerations and how technology is used in a 

sampling of countries from around the world.

JHU’s research classifies the technologies currently in use in schools under 

the headings of access control, alarms and sensors, communications, lighting, 

software applications, surveillance, weapons detection and “other;” although a 

thorough evaluation process is key prior to administrators selecting a technology 

appropriate for a particular school or district, and numerous tools and literature 

references are available in print or electronic form to assist with this process, the 

usefulness of these tools often has not been evaluated.
The two reports share the conclusion that the recent increase in the use of 

technology has not been accompanied by rigorously designed research into 

its effectiveness. Study participants that helped inform both reports indicated 

a need for information on what works that is evidence-based, vetted and 

presented to the audience of school administrators, IT planners and safety 

professionals in clear, easy-to-understand language. This research should 

include design outcomes. 

Both reviews of school safety technology also shared another major conclusion: 

that no one technology, school climate intervention or other school safety 

strategy can guarantee school security or eliminate the underlying causes of 

school violence. An integrated approach that includes emergency response 

plans, drills, a positive school climate and situational awareness is called for, 

and plans need to be tailored to the needs of each individual school.

NIJ is taking steps to remediate this lack of research through its Comprehensive 

School Safety Initiative; learn more by visiting its page on the NIJ website. 

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CH. 2: USING TECHNOLOGY TO PREVENT VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS • 7
CHAPTER 3

FIELD SEARCH: FIELD-BASED 

COMPUTER FORENSICS 

SOFTWARE WIDENS ITS SCOPE

By Becky Lewis

January 2017

A school resource officer (SRO) and an administrator 

reviewing content on school-issued tablets. A soldier 

doing a field check on a computer recovered at an 

improvised explosive device (IED) explosion site. A 

police officer doing a “knock and talk” investigation. 

A computer forensics expert doing triage on a number 

of suspect computers. A federal agent searching for 

intelligence related to counterterrorism activities. And 

a probation and parole officer, checking up on a sex 

offender’s Internet use.

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CH. 3: FIELD SEARCH: FIELD-BASED COMPUTER FORENSICS SOFTWARE WIDENS ITS SCOPE • 9

What do they all have in common? They’re all using Field Search, the free 

forensics software provided by the Justice Technology Information Center (JTIC).

When the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center 

(NLECTC) System began providing Field Search in 2006, probation and parole 

agents who needed a nontechnical tool to check up on client computers while 

in the field made up the target audience. As the software has morphed through 

five iterations — the most recent (5.0) released in 2016 — more and more users 

in a wider variety of criminal justice fields and including those involved in school 

safety, and even the U.S. military, have found that Field Search meets needs far 

beyond the suite’s original scope.

Field Search, provided by JTIC to only 

vetted active professionals, allows 

users to quickly and efficiently search a 

target computer and create a detailed 

report of the findings. Originally 

developed with funding from NIJ and 

since upgraded by the developers at 

no charge to the federal government, 

Field Search can be launched from a 

USB drive and works live on a suspect 

computer to quickly find potential 

evidence such as Internet histories, 

images, multimedia files and results 

from text searches. 

For Version 5.0, the software 

developer completely recompiled, 

recoded and rebuilt Field Search to improve its compatibility with today’s 

hardware and software. Although those changes aren’t apparent to the end user, 

the end result still allows the software to run a complete scan of a hard drive, 

analyze the contents and produce a report in less than an hour – even though 

the hard drives of 2016 are much larger than those of 10 years ago, and even 

though the Field Search of 2016 has vastly expanded capabilities compared to 

those of the original version.

“Field Search was originally developed Field Search to help monitor sex 

offenders and protect children,” says Joe Russo, the JTIC corrections technology 

subject-matter expert who has worked with the software since its initial 

development. The developers have also provided numerous train-the-trainer 

sessions to criminal justice professionals over the years, equipping them to 

return to their agencies and share their knowledge as Certified Field Search 

Instructors. “As its use expanded into school safety and law enforcement, 

military, border security and counterterrorism arenas, we realized the need and 

importance of providing quality tools for nontechnical users at no cost, and even 

after the initial funding ended, we remain committed to this project because it’s 

the right thing to do.”

 Although many of Version 5.0’s changes run behind the scenes, it includes a 

number of new features and upgrades that will directly benefit users. One of the 
most significant expands the keyword search function to include the capability 

to search for a word or phrase in any language. Not just any language that uses 

the Latin alphabet; that function came with Version 4.0 in 2012 (see “In Any 

Language, Field Search Translates to Success,” TechBeat, Summer 2012, https://

justnet.org/InteractiveTechBeat/summer_2012/FieldSearch.pdf.) Rather, Version 

5.0 adds the capability to query in any language spoken on this planet, whether 

it uses the Latin alphabet, the Arabic, Cyrillic or Eastern language characters, or 

anything else. 

A second major change adds chat history tools to allow users to examine 

activity for Skype, Windows Live, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger. The tool provides 

information on who the user sent messages to, what they said and when they 

said it. Another new addition is a search function that provides the ability to 

scan a drive for hits against HASH sets. A HASH, Russo explains, is a virtual 

“fingerprint” of a computer file. Each computer file, via a mathematical 

algorithm, produces a unique set of letters and numbers that identifies it; 

change one letter in a file or one pixel in a picture, and the file generates a new 

HASH. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children maintains a 

HASH database of all known child pornography files, and if a law enforcement 

agency has access to that database, analysts can use Field Search to compare 

the files on a computer hard drive and locate matches. This function can also tell 

probation and parole officers if clients have downloaded software they are not 

permitted to access.

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CH. 3: FIELD SEARCH: FIELD-BASED COMPUTER FORENSICS SOFTWARE WIDENS ITS SCOPE • 11

Yet another significant change makes 

Field Search fully compatible with 

Windows 8 and 10, as well as the 

most current versions of Internet 

Explorer, Edge, Opera, Chrome and 

Mozilla Firefox. The software maintains 

compatibility with older versions 

as well. 

Additional new features/upgrades 

include:

• Pictures in the Image Gallery can 

now be sorted by date accessed, 

allowing Field Search users to see 

which pictures were accessed most 

recently. 

• When a user is running Field Search off one computer and remotely searching 

a hard drive, the registry tool now pulls the registry information (e.g., when 

a drive was installed, the user’s email address) from the remote drive rather 

than from the computer running the software. Improved reporting speed and 

greater ability to export reports as PDFs.

• Improved and faster media rendering.

“The upgraded Field Search software allows agencies access to an easy-to-use, 

yet powerful, forensics tool, and the best part is that it is completely free,” he 

says. “We are deeply indebted to the developers for their tireless dedication to 

the Field Search effort. They both have a deep desire to support public safety 

and have each volunteered countless hours to improving Field Search and 

keeping it viable.”

Field Search is available free of charge to qualified professionals. For more 

information on Field Search, including how to download a copy, please visit 

www.justnet.org/fieldsearch/fs_main.html.
CHAPTER 4

NEW JERSEY LAUNCHES 

PROGRAM FOR SRO-TRAINED 

SPECIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT 

OFFICERS

By Becky Lewis

April 2017

There will be new faces at many New Jersey schools 

when the 2017-2018 school year starts. But unlike the 

students attending new schools for the first time, these 

Class III Special Law Enforcement Officers (SLEOs) will 

have already completed their classwork.

Their School Resource Officer (SRO) training, that is.

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CH. 4: NEW JERSEY LAUNCHES PROGRAM FOR SRO-TRAINED SPECIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS • 13

With the official start of a new 

academic year on July 1, 2017, New 

Jersey schools looking to add to, 

or implement, a law enforcement 

presence on their campuses have a 

new option: Schools may now hire 

retired law enforcement officers who 

meet specific conditions. And thanks 

at least in part to the actions of the 

New Jersey Association of School 

Resource Officers (NJASRO), these 

officers will go into their new posts 

with the same training taken by 

sworn SROs.

Requiring that training played a key 

role in Gov. Chris Christie’s eventually 

signing Bill S86 on Nov. 30, 2016; prompted by NJASRO, he had conditionally 

vetoed the measure in September 2016 pending restoration of the training 

requirement. The law permits the hiring of a third special classification of officers 

in New Jersey (Class 1 officers have no law enforcement powers and are used in 

some jurisdictions to write parking tickets, while Class 2 officers, hired to expand 

shore town police departments during beach season, have law enforcement 

authority only when performing their seasonal duties.) The new Class III SLEOs 

can be hired to work as SROs under the following terms:

• No benefits.

• Can work full-time hours, limited to when students are present in the schools.

• No older than age 65.

• Retired within the past three years (with a one-year start-up exemption of five 

years for the 2017-2018 school year only.)

And most importantly to NJASRO – according to Executive Director Capt. 

Patrick Kissane of the Ft. Lee Police Department – certified as having completed 

the association’s SRO training.

“New Jersey was one of the first states to make training mandatory for SROs, 

in 2006, and we had to put up a fight to keep that training requirement for 

the Class III SLEOs, but we knew it was necessary,” Kissane says. In 2006, the 

Police Training Act (N.J.S.A. 52:17B-66 et seq.) required the Police Training 

Commission, in consultation with the New Jersey Attorney General, to develop 

a 40-hour training course for school resource officers. A course developed by 

NJASRO was then implemented in police academies throughout the state, and 

before SROs can begin working in New Jersey schools, they must complete 

this comprehensive training. The 40-hour course, currently in the process of 

being updated, covers areas including the roles and responsibilities of an 

SRO, such as instructional time, threat and risk assessment, and working with 

school personnel; legal issues, such as search and seizure, outreach programs, 

interviews and processing; teaching methodologies, such as lesson plan 

development, classroom management and how children learn; mentoring; 
working with administrators; bullying prevention; and a new section on 

community college policing and how it differs from policing in public schools. 

“This is an opportunity to get more cops in schools, which we want, but we want 

it to be with the right model. I want a cop in every school, but at the same time, 

I want less policing. I want our SROs to be community police officers, mentors, 

coaches, teachers,” Kissane says.

“I hope this new program piques a lot of interest. I hope there will be officers 

all over the country saying ‘Did you see what they’re doing in Jersey? They’re 

recognizing the value of using retired cops in schools,’ ” Kissane says, adding 

although other states may already allow schools to hire retired officers, no other 

state has a formalized program like the one in New Jersey.

The majority of just-retired officers range from their mid-40s to early 50s, he 

says, and they have years of valuable experience. However, these officers need 

to learn all the ways that school policing differs from what they’ve done in the 

field as SWAT team members, detectives and narcotics officers. Most schools 

are safe places, Kissane explains, and the NJASRO training focuses on the need 

to put the right officers in the right schools so that they can help shut down the 

“school-to-prison pipeline” by not criminalizing petty offenses and keeping the 

students from becoming adult offenders.

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CH. 4: NEW JERSEY LAUNCHES PROGRAM FOR SRO-TRAINED SPECIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS • 15

“This isn’t a security guard post. We 

want them to go back to the roots 

of walking the beat and we want 

them to be a member of the school 

community,” Kissane says.

That position agrees with the one 

taken by the New Jersey Safe 

Schools Task Force in its April 

2013 report, which states serving 

as an SRO is essentially a type of 

community policing where the officer’s 

beat happens to be in a school. 

Emphasizing positive interactions 

with students and staff allows them 

to understand that SROs are much 

more than armed security guards, and the resulting trust can help make students 

comfortable sharing information that might help stop bullying or violent 

behavior before it escalates. 

“The new Class III SLEOs will be playing a valuable role. It will make students 

and staff feel good to know the new SRO has 25 years of law enforcement 

experience, and we hope they become the ‘Andy Griffith’ for the school 

community, the good cop that’s a helpful resource,” Kissane says.

For more information, contact Capt. Patrick Kissane, executive director of the 

New Jersey Association of School Resource Officers, at flpdsro@gmail.com.
CHAPTER 5

NEW FBI RESOURCES PROVIDE 

BEST PRACTICES FOR SROS

By Becky Lewis

May 2017

Like any other morning, the school resource officer 

leaned comfortably against the wall near the main 

entrance, responding to and calling out greetings with 

the arriving students. Like any other morning, some 

answered, some ignored him, and they all rushed on 

past, anxious to get to their lockers, to meet their 

friends, to get to class.

Except on this morning, one girl hesitated, walked 

past, came to a stop and slowly walked back. And 

soon, the SRO had details about a planned cafeteria fight between two 

squabbling groups of eighth-grade boys. 

And all it took to get that information was eight months of “good mornings.”

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CH. 5: NEW FBI RESOURCES PROVIDE BEST PRACTICES FOR SROS • 17

In a two-part series available online, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 

interviewed experts in school security, who pointed out that one of the most 

important aspects of being a good SRO is playing a part in fostering a healthy 

school climate, and it can all start with something as simple as greeting students 

by name. Following that and some of the other simple tips provided can help 

SROs build trusting relationships. Those trusting relationships can in turn help 

create a healthy school climate with reduced tolerance for bullying and violent 

conflict resolution, and a greater 

likelihood of students’ reporting 

threats and suspicious behavior. 

These tips come from the second 

article, “School Resource Officers and 

Violence Prevention: Best Practices 

Part Two,” found on the FBI website 

at https://leb.fbi.gov/2017/may/

school-resource-officers-and-violenceprevention-best-practices-part-two. 

Part One, located at (https://leb.

fbi.gov/2017/april/school-resourceofficers-and-violence-prevention-bestpractices-part-one), provides basic 

information on how schools and law 

enforcement can work together to 

establish strong working partnerships. 

The two articles grew out of a follow-on effort to the 2013 Comprehensive 

School Safety Program, a U.S. Department of Justice funding incentive for 

more schools to hire SROs. Realizing that these new SROs needed training and 

support, FBI staff interviewed a group of SROs with more than 150 years of 

combined experience, then compiled the results of these individual interviews 

with research to produce the two-part series. The FBI also summarized the key 

points from both articles in a new free guide, Violence Prevention in Schools: 

Enhancement Through Law Enforcement Partnerships (https://www.fbi.gov/filerepository/violence-prevention-in-schools-march-2017.pdf/view.)

“We’ve been working since 2013 on the whole concept of how to make not only 

schools, but everyone in the nation, safer. This effort has allowed us to target 

the group that serves schools and provide them with best practices,” says the 

FBI’s Katherine Schweit, co-author of the articles. “Many of the SROs who we 

interviewed were recommended by the U.S. Department of Education, and the 

group includes some of the finest and most forward-leaning officers working in 

the field. It’s important for the FBI to look for best practices conducted by the 

people who know the business. There’s no better resource for us to go to.”

And when it comes to establishing a good working partnership between law 

enforcement and school administration, some of the key points noted by 

those subject-matter experts included determining a school’s specific needs, 

involving the administration in selecting the officer and writing a memorandum 

of understanding that outlines roles, responsibilities and duties. SROs also need 

specialized training in school policing, covering areas such as privacy, search 

and seizure, and information sharing laws regarding juveniles; being sensitive to 

cultural and linguistic differences; problem-solving skills; and threat assessment. 
School discipline and code of conduct policies, and access to services such 

as drug and substance abuse treatment, mental health services and diversion 

programs, are also key (more details can be found in Part One.)

“I think the idea of how to communicate with the school officials themselves to 

set up a quality SRO program is something that hasn’t been put out before,” 

Schweit says. “And we tried to ensure that the article provided concepts for 

school policing whether your school district has a full budget for SROs or 

simply officers working with schools on a more limited basis. I think that will be 

very helpful because it’s broad based. We didn’t want to create an ideal plan 

for school resource officers that many districts couldn’t afford to execute. We 

wanted a plan that all schools could use regardless of their budget.”

Regardless of whether the relationship is a full-time one, or one where officers 

stop by schools as part of their patrol duties, good communication plays a key 

role in success. It’s also important to maintain a distinction between school 

disciplinary matters and actual violations of the law; Part One points out that 

“School administrators and teachers, guided by district and school rules and 

procedures, hold responsibility for disciplinary actions, while the SRO addresses 

legal violations and threats to the security of the school, students, 

and employees.”

Schweit adds to that by saying: “It’s not unusual for an outsider who doesn’t deal 

with school discipline matters to say the easy answer is to call the police officer. 

But it’s just exactly like a home situation: you discipline your child, you don’t call 

the police.”

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CH. 5: NEW FBI RESOURCES PROVIDE BEST PRACTICES FOR SROS • 19

Once that relationship is in place 

and the officer’s duties are clearly 

understood, the tips in Part Two 

come into greater play. Using the 

healthy school climate and their role 

in establishing it as a basis, SROs 

can help schools in areas such as 

crisis response training and bullying 

prevention. Part Two notes that 

although rates of violence in schools 

continue to decline, 65 percent of 

schools still report incidents of serious 

violent crimes such as use of weapons, 

robberies and sexual assaults. 

Confidential/anonymous reporting 

mechanisms can help bring threats 

to the attention of SROs and administrators, and threat assessment teams can 

use established policies and procedures to address them, but it all starts with 

promoting and maintaining a healthy school climate.

“I think it’s easy for anyone to say it’s important to keep track of the kids and to 

make sure that they’re not at risk, but those are just concepts. I think the officers 

provided us with very practical ideas based on their experience with students, 

and that’s one of the things I think is most valuable about this project,” Schweit 

says. “We hope this will be a valuable resource, and we’ll continue the effort as 

an ongoing project.”

For more information on FBI efforts in the area of school safety, please 

contact the FBI’s Office of Public Engagement at FBI_OPE_Information_

Sharing@ic.fbi.gov.
CHAPTER 6

AN SRO TALKS ABOUT 

FEMALE BODY ARMOR

By Becky Lewis

April 2017

Check out information on proper fit for female officers 

on the Justice Technology Information Center’s 

Policearmor.org website, and it will tell you: “Proper fit 

is an important element of the protective capability of 

any officer’s vest because it helps to ensure sufficient 

coverage of the torso and vital organs, while allowing 

range of motion to perform expected tasks. Proper fit 

is even more important for female officers because of 

their unique features.”

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Deputy First Class Teresa Holland of the Frederick County (Md.) Sheriff’s Office, 

assigned as school resource officer (SRO) for Walkersville High School and its 

feeder schools, couldn’t agree with those statements more. The 14-year veteran 

says wearing a vest was uncomfortable at first, but she realized she just had to 

get used to it. She chooses to wear her gender-neutral vest in an external carrier 

to increase her comfort while maintaining her safety: “I like the outer carrier 

because I’m able to breathe more easily. I have worn an internal carrier and I 

had issues with it being uncomfortable. Also, as an SRO I’m on my feet a lot and 

moving around all the time, and wearing the external carrier gives me a lot more 

mobility.

“I love Walkersville and the kids are 

great, but I still have to get in there 

and de-escalate things sometimes, 

and when I do, I need to be mobile,” 

she adds. “There are times the vest 

does limit movement, but I’ll take that 

any day as opposed to not wearing it 

and having no protection.”

In addition to learning that she 

preferred the external carrier, 

Holland also learned that the type 

of undergarment she wears has 

an impact on the vest’s comfort: “I 

learned that I can’t wear a “normal” 

bra with it. I need to wear a sports 

bra because it doesn’t create any 

contours. If a female officer changes around and wears different bras that have 

different contours, they can change the shape of the vest and overall, it won’t fit 

as snugly. Sticking with the sports bra helps it maintain the same fit day in and 

day out.”

Just like male officers, female officers come in a wide variety of body shapes 

and sizes, and it can be difficult for them to obtain armor that fits them properly. 

Holland has noticed those difficulties in other areas as well; for example, she 

orders her uniform pants “big and baggy” to accommodate the difference in 

female shape.

“Because I’ve aged in this job, I see changes in my body over time,” says 

Holland, who served as a military police officer, tried a government desk job 

and then ended up in law enforcement, first in narcotics and now as an SRO. 

“Women who have had babies while they’re serving in law enforcement also 

face changes in their bodies, and all of those issues need to be considered when 

developing equipment that meets our needs.”

Still, even while acknowledging the issues, Holland says she would feel 

undressed if she were ever to put on her uniform without her vest. Frederick 

County has a mandatory wear policy, which she likes and honors, and “I’ve 

never faced gunfire, but I trust that if I ever do, my vest will protect me.” 

CH. 6: AN SRO TALKS ABOUT FEMALE BODY ARMOR • 21
In her attitude toward vest wear and the way she goes about her daily duties, 

Holland sets a good example for her students and for others in her profession, 

says Lt. Mark Landahl, formerly supervisor of the county’s School Resource 

Officer Unit and now its Homeland Security Coordinator.

“I can’t say enough good things about her. She’s a terrific role model for the 

students,” he says. 

For more information on female body armor and body armor in general, 

including how to determine proper vest fit, visit Policearmor.org. For more 

information about the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, its SRO Unit and its 

mandatory wear policy, call (301) 600-1046 or visit https://frederickcountymd.

gov/677/Sheriff-Adult-Detention

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CH. 6: AN SRO TALKS ABOUT FEMALE BODY ARMOR • 23
CHAPTER 7

MARION COMMUNITY 

SCHOOLS RECOGNIZED 

FOR BULLYING PREVENTION 

EFFORTS

By Becky Lewis

April 2017

It started with a small group of students calling 

themselves TAXII, for Teens Against Extreme 

Inappropriate Interactions. Five years later, it’s grown 

into a districtwide “kindness campaign” that has 

changed the culture and climate, decreased the 

number of reported bullying incidents by 83 percent 

and resulted in a 2017 National Exemplary Program 

Award from the School Safety Advocacy Council’s 

National Conference on Bullying.

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CH. 7: MARION COMMUNITY SCHOOLS RECOGNIZED FOR BULLYING PREVENTION EFFORTS • 25

In 2012, that group of students approached the administration, including Safety 

Director Justine Pond, with their concerns and “we started to look at what 

we were doing as a district and realized that we needed a message that was 

consistent from grade to grade and school to school. We spent a year writing 

a program and assembling a team with members from every school, and we’ve 

been building since then.”

The Bullying Prevention Program in the Marion Community Schools 

encompasses a number of components, ranging from cyberbullying training 

facilitated by the Indiana State Police to an annual Kindness Assembly where 

nominated students and faculty are recognized for their efforts and the entire 

district participates in presenting a paper “kindness chain,” with one link added 

throughout the year for each kind act carried out by a student. 

“It’s a very strong visual for our guests 

who come to hear about the good 

things that the students do,” Pond 

says. In recent years, the chain has 

wrapped completely around the 

gymnasium – not once but twice.

Those efforts have not only combined 

to reduce the incidence of bullying 

in the school system, they’ve also 

promoted a greater understanding 

of what bullying is – and what it 

isn’t. As Anita Brown, social service 

specialist at Justice Thurgood Marshall 

Intermediate School, explains: 

“Our focus has changed the actual 

definition of bullying. All of us have 

seen an increase in using the word in recent years, and a lot of times when 

we investigate, it’s not really bullying. Bullying is behavior that is unwanted, 

one-sided and repetitive. We’re teaching both students and parents that, 

unfortunately, there are mean people in the world, but that is different from 

bullying.”

And according to Pond, conveying an understanding of what is and isn’t 

bullying, especially to adults, plays a key role in the education process.

“We investigate all allegations. Even if we think it doesn’t really seem like 

bullying, we still go through the process and interview everyone involved,” she 

says. “And if it is bullying, we address the behavior and try to figure out how to 

stop it, all the while remembering that the person doing the bullying is still just a 

kid too.”

“Many times the process starts when a student comes to me and tells me 

something that is going on,” says Ed Velazquez, social service specialist at 

Marion High School. “Once we’re sure it is bullying, I bring the perpetrators in 

and read them the riot act. They get a warning and they’re told if it happens 
again, there will be discipline. Yesterday I had to do that, and the boy who was 

in trouble came back, kind of sheepishly, at the end of the day, and we had a 

good talk about why what he was doing was inappropriate. Often, that’s the end 

of it.”

And while the district continues to work on teaching both students and parents 

the definition of bullying and also deals with the incidents that actually are 

bullying, it also focuses on teaching them about social media and cyberbullying, 

according to Brown: “We want to get everyone using the same language, and 

we want parents to get used to checking things out with their children. This 

week alone, I’ve had to deal with three serious incidents involving social media 

use among children ages 10 to 12.”

“We’re working on rolling out cyberbullying education at all levels, even 

in preschools,” says Corry Hawkins, social service specialist at Riverview 

Elementary. “Students are gaining access to technology earlier and earlier, 

and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Students don’t know how to 

interact and be social, not only face to face but online too.”

The Indiana State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and 

Internet Crimes Against Children Youth Educator Trooper Cathie Bledsoe 

have also played a key role in helping to promote cyberbullying education. In 

2016, Bledsoe gave presentations tailored to grade level to the 3,700 students 

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CH. 7: MARION COMMUNITY SCHOOLS RECOGNIZED FOR BULLYING PREVENTION EFFORTS • 27

enrolled in the nine district schools, 

in addition to presenting to the Grant 

County School Safety Commission 

and at a community meeting. Her 

presentations focused on online safety, 

privacy protection, and sending and 

receiving inappropriate pictures, 

among other topics. Her work 

supplements that of the Marion Police 

Department, which places a roving 

school resource officer in the district 

schools. Alex Kenworthy, now deputy 

chief, filled that position for a number 

of years, and still serves on the 

Bullying Prevention Program steering 

committee.

“Everybody pretty much throws the word bullying around these days. Parents 

call and say their child’s being bullied, and usually, it doesn’t fit the definition,” 

Kenworthy says. “In the Marion Community Schools, they’ve done a wonderful 

job of explaining the concept and addressing the actual incidents that 

unfortunately do occur.”

In fact, Marion Community Schools have done such a good job that after the 

state adopted a new bullying prevention law, the district served on a committee 

to help create guidelines and resource materials for the state. 

“We want to put what we’ve done out there and make it available for other 

schools to adapt for their own use,” Pond says. 

For more information about how Marion Community Schools won the 

Exemplary Program Award, visit http://allen.marion.k12.in.us/index.

cfm?event=news&pageid=1243. For more information on the program overall, 

contact Justine Pond at (765) 662-2546 x144, email jpond@marion.k12.in.us. For 

more information on the Indiana State Police Internet Crimes Against Children 

Task Force and its Cyber Safety program, contact Trooper Cathie Bledsoe at 

ICACYouthEd@isp.in.gov.
CHAPTER 8

CRANFORD COMMUNITY 

EMBRACES ANTI-DRUG AND 

ALCOHOL ABUSE MESSAGE

By Becky Lewis

November 2016

For more than 35 years, the phrase “Just Say No” 

has been part of the American consciousness as the 

cornerstone of numerous anti-drug and alcohol abuse 

programs and curricula. But as the opioid epidemic 

continues to grow and concerns about adolescent and 

pre-adolescent substance abuse remain, communities 

have begun searching for other approaches. In 

Cranford, N.J., the police department’s school resource 

officers have taken the lead in what has become a 

communitywide effort based not on “Just Say No,” 

but rather on “Why do people keep saying ‘Yes?’ ”

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CH. 8: CRANFORD COMMUNITY EMBRACES ANTI-DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE MESSAGE • 29

Although Cranford’s Project A.L.E.R.T. (Adolescent Learning Experience 

Resistance Training) had its origins with a published curriculum, Det. Sgt. Matt 

Nazzaro and Det. Kelly Rieder, the department’s school resource officers, have 

refined and expanded the program, taking ownership of a community-wide 

effort that only starts with sixth-grade education classes that have replaced the 

existing D.A.R.E. program. 

Nazzaro explains that when James 

Wozniak took over as police chief in 

2014, he reviewed existing programs, 

including D.A.R.E.: “We wanted to 

retain the positive and proactive 

interaction between ‘the cops and 

the kids,’ ” Nazzaro says. “We had a 

strong relationship with the Cranford 

Board of Education and we worked 

closely with the Board in developing a 

creative approach that continued our 

presence in the classroom, working 

with health teachers to present our 

message.”

Starting with classes geared toward students in the sixth grade, Project A.L.E.R.T. 

sessions meet twice a week for five weeks to cover topics related to the use of 

tobacco, drugs and alcohol, focusing on how to deal with internal and external 

pressures coming from peers and the media (both mainstream and social). 

Students receive additional instruction in the eighth grade, and the Cranford 

Police Department and the Cranford High School Student Assistance Counselor 

developed an original course called High School 101 for incoming freshmen, in 

which the officers team up with high school counselors to reinforce the lessons 

learned in the lower grades. And the whole community of approximately 24,000 

residents has gotten involved through projects such as a Red Ribbon Week 

carnival against drug abuse, a townwide barbecue put on by the Cranford 

Municipal Alliance and other projects to keep reinforcing the message during 

the summer months. 

“All the stakeholders come together to try to complement our efforts. It’s not 

just something that happens in the classroom, it’s a philosophy that prevails 

throughout our township,” Nazzaro says. “One of my favorite parts of the 

project is a pre-meeting with all the sixth-grade parents to familiarize them 

with what we’ll be talking about. I show them slides of the different drugs and 

I tell them about an individual we arrested in town who was selling all kinds of 

marijuana and its derivatives to our youth. Then I tell them he was only 16 years 

old. I’ve had parents tell me afterward that they couldn’t get that story off their 

minds, and it helps them realize that although for them underage drinking may 

have been a rite of passage and they turned out fine, things are a lot different 

today.”

Those differences include a demanding routine of classwork, homework and 

afterschool activities, generating a pressure-filled schedule that Nazzaro says 

he couldn’t have coped with as a teen: “It’s not just peer pressure, it’s internal 

pressure. Kids are so overwhelmed and so tightly wound they say they need a 
way to decompress and relax. They’re growing up faster, they have to deal with 

social media, and there’s an overabundance of substances that weren’t available 

when I was growing up and when their parents were growing up.”

The classroom curriculum does not use a lecture format, but rather a variety 

of activities such as skits and role play that generate involvement between the 

students and the officers. The published materials target use by teachers, but 

the Cranford Police Department saw the value in using officers as instructors 

instead. Both officers work with health teachers, who reinforce the message 

the next day in class, and homework includes fostering an honest discussion 

between students and their parents by requiring the children to ask how their 

parents how they dealt with peer pressure and substance abuse. (The preprogram meeting includes tips for parents on how to handle the questions 

they’ll face during the discussion.) 

One of those parents came up to Nazzaro at a recent Police Athletic League 

football game to tell him how much his child enjoyed the program. When 

Nazzaro asked why, the parent told him it’s because of the way the curriculum 

relates to real life, such as asking the students to find examples in their daily use 

of Twitter, television, Pandora or other media of tobacco-, drug- and alcoholrelated advertising. 

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CH. 8: CRANFORD COMMUNITY EMBRACES ANTI-DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE MESSAGE • 31

“Deploying the curriculum in the right 

way ties it all together. We educate 

the students and we connect with 

the community. The students are 

engaging in a positive relationship 

with law enforcement, and we hope 

this will help combat the divide 

between law enforcement and the 

communities they serve, and allow 

them to see us a valuable resource 

in the community,” Nazzaro says. 

“Time will tell if we’re able to cause 

the paradigm to shift in our town so 

that our kids make informed decisions 

about risky behaviors. We’re proud of 

what we’ve started, and having strong 

support from the community and the 

township makes my life easier.”

“One of my top priorities when I took over as chief was to implement a school 

resource officer program. We needed to fill a void that existed between the 

youth of Cranford and our officers,” Wozniak says. “Sgt. Nazzaro and Det. 

Rieder have bridged that gap, and we have achieved a great amount of success 

with our SRO program to include a fantastic relationship with teachers and 

school administrators. This is something we are very proud of.”

For more information about how the Cranford Police Department has worked 

to engage the community in education and discussion about drug and alcohol 

abuse, contact Det. Sgt. Matthew Nazzaro at m-nazzaro@cranfordnj.org.
CHAPTER 9

“PLAN, PREPARE, ACT” 

WINS AWARD, ENCOURAGES 

PLANNING

By Becky Lewis

June 2016

An ordinary school day. Students hurrying through the 

halls, earning a “no running!” warning from a teacher. 

Study groups meeting in the library. Classroom lessons 

underway. 

And suddenly, the sound of gunfire.

The state of Illinois mandates that all schools hold drills 

every year: fire drills, tornado drills, active shooter 

drills. Although the odds are against any of these 

events striking any one school during a given school day, preparing, planning 

and practicing help ensure that teachers, students and staff know how to react 

32 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CH. 9: “PLAN, PREPARE, ACT” WINS AWARD, ENCOURAGES PLANNING • 33

if called on to do so. “Plan, Prepare, Act,” an 11-minute video produced by the 

Orland Park Police Department with donated assistance from local business 

Eyelight Studios, encourages viewers to think about evacuating safely, locating 

safe hiding places and planning how to fight back if absolutely necessary. 

Available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0NPcbAuJ84, 

the video received the People’s Choice Award in the 36th Annual Telly Awards 

competition held in 2015. 

In the introduction to the video, 

Orland Park Police Chief Timothy 

McCarthy says that although it’s hard 

to even think about the possibility of a 

school shooting, planning what to do 

before an incident occurs is critical.

“Active shooters, school shootings 

and of course school safety in general 

is a high priority here,” McCarthy says 

in an interview. “We wanted to create 

something for schools to use outside 

of the annual drill, where we go out 

to the schools and practice with them. 

We wanted to tell them about all the 

options available, then give them time 

to study them and think about them. If 

an incident ever does happen, it’s not likely the police will be there at the onset. 

In those first few minutes, administrators have to make life or death decisions. 

It’s important for them to receive information ahead of time and to have time to 

review it. We don’t want them to considering their options for the first time while 

a crisis takes place.”

With the message in mind and Commander Joe Mitchell overseeing the 

production process, Orland Park recruited volunteers from among officers’ 

family members to play the roles of administrators, teachers and students, 

and obtained cooperation from Orland Park Fire Protection and other local 

emergency services agencies. Although the department incurred some 

production costs, overall expenses remained low, and the video itself is made 

freely available to local schools in the suburb of 50,000-plus residents, located 

25 miles southwest of Chicago.

“We passed it out to every school in our community. We’ll pass it out to anyone 

who wants it, frankly. Our local schools are using it on a regular basis on institute 

days, where they play it as a refresher. We don’t want it to sit in a drawer at the 

school, instead we want it to be used on a routine basis,” McCarthy says.

Not keeping the video in a drawer and showing it to staff repeatedly also 

ensures that substitutes come in for their fair share of training and repetition: 

“When subs come in, we want them to know the policies too. Substitutes are 

used far more than most of us realize. When it’s flu season, teachers get the flu 

too, and on any given day, substitutes could make up a significant part of the 

staff working in a school.”
The need to train substitutes, plan in advance and practice plans is shared 

by schools throughout the nation, and McCarthy encourages departments 

and school systems across the country to use the “Plan, Prepare, Act” video: 

“Different departments respond differently, of course, but the video covers the 

basics of school safety, lockdown drills, rapid deployment and evacuation. 

These are almost universal principles being used across the country.” 

“Plan, Prepare, Act” is the second video produced by the Orland Park Police 

Department, following a video on community drug concerns and the heroin 

epidemic produced several years ago. Public Information Officer Margie Owens 

submitted it for the Telly Award without McCarthy’s knowledge, and he was 

“surprised and proud” over the win and the way the video has resonated in 

the community. 

“We’re very proud of “Plan, Prepare, Act” and the award, and we hope it’s 

something that people find useful for a long time,” he says.

For more information on the project, contact Chief Timothy McCarthy at 

tjmccarthy@orlandpark.org.

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CH. 9: “PLAN, PREPARE, ACT” WINS AWARD, ENCOURAGES PLANNING • 35
CHAPTER 10

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA 

LEADS DEVELOPMENT OF BOMB 

THREAT TRAINING VIDEO

By Becky Lewis

August 2016

Around the country, it seemed the headlines were 

the same: Bomb threats strike school systems and 

postsecondary institutions in California. In New York. 

In Massachusetts. In New Jersey. 

At the University of Central Florida, Department of 

Security and Emergency Management staff knew that 

the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 

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CH.10: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA LEADS DEVELOPMENT OF BOMB THREAT TRAINING VIDEO • 37

provided the “go to” site for information on handling bomb threats, so the 

university immediately turned there to look for video training on how to handle 

a bomb threat call. Surprisingly, the extensive DHS resources lacked a video 

component. So UCF partnered with the DHS Office of Bombing Prevention to 

make one for everyone’s use. 

And now, it’s become the standard not only for the university, but also for DHS, 

the International Association of Chiefs of Police and numerous other institutions 

of higher education around the country.

Jeff Morgan, the department’s 

director, says UCF worked with the 

Office for Bombing Prevention, part of 

the National Protection and Programs 

Directorate’s Office of Infrastructure 

Protection, to ensure that the script 

stayed on message and the resulting 

video would be useful to not only 

colleges and universities, but also to 

any type of organization ranging from 

a hospital to a “mom and pop” store, 

from an elementary school to a bank. 

The result, “What You Can Do When 

There Is a Bomb Threat,” can be 

viewed at https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=pg7yVTBciWg, as well on the 

DHS What To Do When There Is a Bomb Threat resource page (https://

www.dhs.gov/what-to-do-bomb-threat) and on the websites of a number of 

other universities and police departments across the country.

“In the past couple of years, there has been a rash of automated bomb threats 

to not only schools and universities, but also to airports, hospitals and large 

organizations,” says Morgan. “Universities are required to notify the campus 

community within minutes of receiving a potential threat. Because UCF is the 

second largest university in the country with more than 60,000 students, we’re 

just as vulnerable to these threats as any other organization.” 

That realization led to revamping the UCF policy on how to deal with a bomb 

threat, and Morgan says he understood that most people didn’t know how to 

handle a bomb threat phone call.

“Let’s face it, we now live in a visual world and it’s a preferred method of 

learning,” says UCF Police Chief Richard Beary, who was serving as IACP 

president at the time of the video’s production. “By creating the video, we’ve 

provided a new resource for the DHS tool kit. At the same time, IACP also 

realized the need and helped with promotion.

“The beauty of it is how well it applies to a vast realm of organizations that could 

receive bomb threats. Our main focus was to fill a void, and we’ve heard from 

other departments around the country how useful they find it as a resource,” 

he adds.
In four minutes, 12 seconds, “What You Can Do When There Is a Bomb Threat” 

uses a generic workplace scenario to walk viewers through the steps listed 

on the DHS Bomb Threat Checklist (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/

publications/dhs-bomb-threat-checklist-2014-508.pdf), and suggests keeping 

printed copies on hand for use should a bomb threat call come in. Tips include 

attracting a co-worker’s attention to initiate 911 contact, listening for clues in the 

caller’s voice and in background noise, and leaving the line open after the call 

ends. On the DHS website, it joins such resources as the checklist, a brochure 

that provides guidance on pre-threat preparation, evacuation and shelter-inplace considerations, and more. 

Once the university completed production of “What You Can Do When 

There Is a Bomb Threat,” in addition to promotion through DHS and IACP, 

the Department of Security and Emergency Management pushed it out to 

emergency managers from every university in the country via a listserv and to 

the UCF community via the university website. 

“We wanted to make something that could be used anywhere in the country. If 

you just look through the news headlines, bomb threats are happening all the 

time at universities and schools,” Morgan says. “The video promotes a message 

on how you should train so that if something happens, you can provide law 

enforcement with the information they need to do their job. And of course we 

want you to do it safely and minimize the threat as well. We hope others will 

post the video on their websites and utilize this as a standard training tool for 

their organization.” 

For more information on the project, contact Jeff Morgan at (407) 882-7111, 

email Jeff.Morgan@ucf.edu.

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CH.10: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA LEADS DEVELOPMENT OF BOMB THREAT TRAINING VIDEO • 39
CHAPTER 11

IDAHO TAKES SYSTEMATIC 

APPROACH TO SCHOOL 

SAFETY PLANNING

By Becky Lewis

September 2016

In Idaho, a llama shares top billing in the state’s new 

school safety PSA. Yes, a llama. Big. Brown and white. 

In a school hallway. 

But the state’s newly created Office of School Safety 

and Security has a lot more going for it than just a 

gimmick.

The llama stars along with State First Lady Lori Otter 

in a 33-second PSA for Idaho’s “See, Tell, Now” 

campaign, which encourages faculty, students and staff “If you See something, 

Tell someone, Now.” Brian Armes, manager of the new office, explains that 

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CH.11: IDAHO TAKES SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO SCHOOL SAFETY PLANNING • 41

the llama’s appearance isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem: llamas and alpacas 

are used as pack animals in the state’s mountains That campaign, with its llama 

mascot, was created by an ad agency with a goal of producing a take on the 

concept of “stranger danger” with which younger children could connect and 

not feel frightened. (View the PSA at https://schoolsafety.dbs.idaho.gov/see-tellnow/). 

Armes says the campaign is based 

on the U.S. Department of Homeland 

Security’s “See Something, Say 

Something” campaign, with an 

ultimate objective of involving the 

community in addition to school 

campuses. It’s all part of the purpose 

for which the 2016 Idaho Legislature 

created the Office of School Safety 

and Security; a purpose which is, 

according to the Office’s website, “to 

support Idaho public schools in the 

creation of safe learning environments 

in the midst of an evolving threat 

environment.” Although Idaho’s 

school safety center opened several 

years after many other states began 

their own concentrated efforts, Armes says a great deal of careful and directed 

planning went into the center’s creation, and the state won’t be starting out by 

playing catchup.

“People wonder ‘Why did Idaho wait?’ ” Armes says. “Fortunately, we haven’t 

had any headline-making tragedies, and it made sense to hold off and come up 

with a well thought-out plan.”

That plan included placing the Office in the Division of Building Safety, rather 

than the Department of Education or the Department of Justice. Armes and 

two of his four staff members have backgrounds in education, but as the 

state’s economy begins to recover and Idaho sees new growth in population 

and construction, a concurrent effort to update existing schools and build new 

ones gives the state an opportunity to incorporate Crime Prevention Through 

Environmental Design (CPTED) principles into their infrastructures. 

“Operations is an area where we have an opportunity to make a big change,” he 

says. “We’re here to serve the community and we can have a big impact through 

policies, practices and procedures that use and enforce safety principles.”

To review the effectiveness of that approach, the Office plans a three-year cycle 

of assessments, with one-third of the state’s schools under review every year: 

“Every effort should begin with an assessment, followed by long-term planning, 

and we believe a systematic approach will work best for Idaho.” 

The assessments are all part of a sustained planning approach begun in 

2013 after the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

That approach began with selection of 75 schools – large, small; elementary, 
secondary; urban, rural – for an initial assessment that helped inform the 

legislature in its decision to create the Office. Armes says the plan also includes 

a regional approach, because “in Idaho we have a saying that the water doesn’t 

get to the end of the row. It’s based on the irrigation we do here, but what it 

means is sometimes benefits don’t make it all the way from the state capital to 

the schools at the end of the line. If you shorten the row – if you use a regional 

approach – the water has a greater chance of reaching the area where it’s 

needed.”

And part of that regional approach includes leveraging regional resources such 

as local Crimestoppers organizations to expand the Office’s efforts, rather than 

setting up parallel efforts like hotlines and mobile apps. 

“We want to involve the community and use what’s already there to help 

encourage our educators and our students to look out for each other. If we get 

children thinking that way from a young age, they are likely to take that attitude 

into adulthood,” Armes says. “There’s a tendency to think that out West where 

communities are smaller we naturally do that, but with people moving around 

frequently, there’s less thought given to community responsibility than before. 

I think our approach makes a lot of sense for Idaho, and it’s a good way to get 

people ‘back in the saddle’ and caring for each other.”

For more information on the programs of the new Idaho Office for School Safety 

and Security, visit https://schoolsafety.dbs.idaho.gov/ or contact Brian Armes at 

(208) 332-1753, email Brian.Armes@dbs.idaho.gov. 

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CHAPTER 12

INDIANA COUNTY 

IMPLEMENTS “ONE COUNTY, 

ONE PROTOCOL”

By Becky Lewis

June 2017

When the Valparaiso Community Schools District 

asked the Porter County Sheriff’s Office to review 

its school safety plan, it seemed like a good time to 

review all plans from throughout the county’s seven 

school districts, with a goal of possibly condensing and 

unifying them. The sheriff’s office ended up with the 

overwhelming task of dealing with a room filled with 

well-written but probably unread paper plans, each 

one different from the next.

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CH.12: INDIANA COUNTY IMPLEMENTS “ONE COUNTY, ONE PROTOCOL” • 45

Then Sheriff David Reynolds went to a basketball game at Indiana University in 

Bloomington, and saw a poster that changed their whole approach. Now, more 

than a year later, the seven school districts are united under “One County, One 

Protocol.”

The poster listed, in simple terms, the steps to follow in the event of an active 

shooter situation, and inspired the idea to develop something similar for 

the schools in Porter County. The sheriff’s office developed a message that 

would ensure all schools followed the same procedures and used the same 

terminology, then created versions for each school that included their colors 

and mascots. 

But “One County, One Protocol” 

doesn’t end there. With funding 

from the school districts and the 

Lake County High Intensity Drug 

Trafficking Area (HIDTA), the sheriff’s 

office and the other law enforcement 

agencies in the county worked 

together to produce a 22-minute 

video that focuses on the plan in more 

detail (https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=QX9C20pqBAI), encouraged 

the school districts to sign up for a 

particular smartphone app that allows 

teachers and staff to connect directly 

with local law enforcement and began 

working on implementing training 

on the plan. The project has drawn 

attention from other counties in the state, some of which have adapted all or 

part of the program, and recently Chief Deputy Jeff Biggs and Dr. Julie Lauck, 

associate superintendent of the Valparaiso Community Schools, presented 

information on “One County, One Protocol” as a potential best practice at 

the Indiana School Safety Specialist Academy. (The academy is an annual recertification event for the state’s school resource officers and others who have 

completed the state’s basic school safety specialist training.) 

And it all started with the posters.

“I think the posters are very important tools in promoting ‘One County, One 

Protocol.; The schools have them posted in the lunchroom, in the hallways, all 

around the school,” Reynolds says, adding that the posters were inexpensive to 

produce. “Parents are always saying ‘What are you doing to keep my kids safe?’ 

I’m not saying this is a panacea, but it’s a constructive way of working together.”

Although other aspects of the project have entailed greater expenses than did 

the poster, teamwork and a variety of funding sources got schools on board 

with the smartphone app and led to the creation of the video. The video does 

use teachers, students and local law enforcement officers to act out scenarios 

that take place in the school buildings, rather than calling on acting talent and 

staged environments (which would have escalated the costs). And although 
the opening moments set the stage with some information directly related to 

Porter County, the majority of the video focuses on executing the simple steps 

outlined on the posters. With its availability on YouTube, it’s accessible by any 

law enforcement agency or school system in the country that wants to use it.

“Regardless of whether you’re in Utah or New York or Georgia, schools are 

facing the same issues,” Reynolds says. “We tried to use the video to show 

students, teachers and staff how to follow instructions on the PA when they’re 

given, and also to empower them to make decisions on their own when it 

becomes necessary to follow the principles of Run Hide Defend.” 

The video and the rest of the project emphasize that message so well that 

representatives from the state Department of Homeland Security came to a 

Porter County Safe Schools Commission meeting earlier this year to discuss the 

possibility of presenting parts of the project to the governor as a potential “One 

State, One Protocol” project.

“With 92 counties in Indiana, that could prove difficult, but there definitely is talk 

about getting everyone on board,” Reynolds says.

For more information on the Porter County “One County, One Protocol” project, 

contact Porter County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Sgt. Jamie Erow 

at pio@porterco-ps.org.

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CHAPTER 13

COOPERATION, PARTNERSHIPS 

LEAD TO CREATION OF 

YAKIMA VALLEY CENTER

By Becky Lewis

May 2017

It started with Friday morning coffee, not long after 

the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook 

Elementary. Some of them came from law enforcement, 

some from the school system. All of them were hearing 

the same question from parents and the community, 

“What are you going to do to protect our kids?” 

More than four years later, the Friday meetings 

continue, no longer an informal gathering over coffee 

but a regularly scheduled meeting of a cooperative 

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CH.13: COOPERATION, PARTNERSHIPS LEAD TO CREATION OF YAKIMA VALLEY CENTER • 49

effort that includes representatives from 23 Central Washington School Districts 

representing five counties; Educational Service District 105, which provides 

services to those school districts; multiple local law enforcement agencies, fire 

departments, emergency medical services and hospitals; and other community 

partners, such as insurance companies. It’s a project that has taken the lead in 

innovations in law enforcement and school staff training, lobbied for changes in 

the state’s mandatory emergency drills and been the driving force behind the 

creation of a School Safety Operations and Coordination Center (SSOCC) that 

uses enhanced technology to help provide safety and security to those school 

districts.

Although the SSOCC – which offers 

live access for law enforcement to 

school cameras during emergencies, 

immediate notifications to schools 

whenever there is law enforcement 

activity nearby, the ability to seal off 

parts of some schools, online access 

to school safety plans and more – has 

been termed “a game changer,” co-op 

members emphasize that partnerships 

and people make up the project’s 

foundation. 

“We built our program on the premise 

that technology in and of itself does 

not save people. It’s the training and 

the knowledge of how and when to 

apply that technology appropriately 

that saves people,” says Chris Weedin, ESD 105 School Safety Technology 

Coordinator. “I can’t say that often enough. What’s going to save people is 

people, and they need to know what they’re capable of doing in a crisis.”

“One of the things that has made us successful is flexibility and a focus on 

making progress,” says Yakima County Sheriff Brian Winter. “We’re not waiting 

for the federal government to fix the problem, we’re not waiting for the state, 

we’re not waiting for ‘somebody else.’ If someone comes to the group looking 

for help, either somebody sitting there has already dealt with the same issue, or 

we can point them to a resource that will help. Our partners are on board that 

‘it’s not somebody else’s job’ and that’s why we’re making progress.”

That progress has moved local schools from answering a post-Sandy Hook 

short survey of basic school safety questions to developing comprehensive, 

individualized safety plans that can be immediately accessed by law 

enforcement through the SSOCC. And through the co-op, Weedin explains, 

ESD 105 has developed leading practice guidelines schools can use as 

templates. When a district initially contracts with the ESD (although Washington’s 

nine regional ESDs are state agencies, they rely on individual school districts to 
fund part of their operating costs), staff perform an initial assessment of assets 

such as: 

• Cameras.

• Access control.

• Trauma kits.

• AEDs.

They also look at procedures for calling lockdowns and alerting local law 

enforcement.

“We do a top-to-bottom analysis that goes into the school’s Safety Assets 

Portfolio, where it’s reviewed annually. We usually start by preloading 

information from the school’s website, and the administration almost always tells 

us it’s inaccurate and asks where we got it. They’re floored when we tell them it 

came from their own sites,” Weedin says. “Once we have accurate information 

in place, we migrate it to the leading practices, show the school administration 

the gaps and make a plan for closing those gaps. “

Prior to the implementation of the SSOCC, Weedin says, many of those leading 

practice ideas were discussed in the co-op, but not necessarily implemented. 

Now there’s a repository for storing them and a mechanism for distributing them 

via Web, smartphones and other devices: “We focus on school staff as first 

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responders. We want to equip them to 

handle whatever crisis comes along, 

whether it’s a kid falling off a swing, 

an ammonia leak or an active shooter. 

We want to be sure they understand 

there’s a leading practice for dealing 

with all of those situations.”

Randy Town, long-time ESD 105 

coordinator of school safety and 

security, and a retired Yakima County 

reserve deputy sergeant, agrees that 

partnerships have played a key role in 

developing a co-op among systems as 

diverse as the 15,000-student complex 

that makes up the school district in 

Yakima itself to a half-dozen rural oneroom school districts with less than 100 students: “The majority of our services 

do go to the smaller districts, because the larger ones are more self-sufficient. 

Some of the rural schools can have a long wait for law enforcement to arrive, 

and they need to know what they can do to help themselves.”

Schools learning what to do to help themselves is the latest evolution in 

crisis response, says Winter, who notes that after Columbine in 1999, local 

law enforcement moved from taking the passive role of waiting for the SWAT 

team to reacting actively, and that after Sandy Hook, schools began to realize 

their staffs too needed to become more active rather than solely waiting for 

law enforcement: “With the co-op and the SSOCC, we try to define what the 

schools can do with the tools and the training they have. It might be using a one 

of the 100-plus trauma first aid kits we’ve installed in county schools or using 

skills they’ve learned to defend the classroom. Each school district has taken a 

different tack, but every school in the county has done something to improve 

safety and security. It doesn’t have to be done with firearms; it can be tools to 

break out windows and mats to put over the broken glass, it can be pepper 

spray or even a fire extinguisher. What matters is that you have a plan and 

you’ve practiced it.”

Local law enforcement has been planning and practicing as well, starting with 

the formation of a group of instructors from 19 local agencies that began 

teaching a standard active shooter response protocol in 2004-2005. Chief Greg 

Cobb of the Union Gap Police Department says his agency was one of the first 

in the country to put active shooter response kits in their patrol cars to include 

rifle armor specifically ordered for patrol officers. A countywide memorandum of 

understanding to start the training group followed shortly thereafter. 

“This area has always been very proactive when it comes to active shooter 

response,” Cobb says. “We’re very supportive of each other, and when I talk to 

chiefs from outside the county, they tell me they don’t see that in their areas. 

But with our history, it was no surprise when the call went out for that first co-op 

meeting right after Sandy Hook.”
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Cobb says not long after the group 

began meeting, members realized 

a need for changes in the state’s 

mandated emergency drills. At that 

time, Washington required six fire 

drills per year, and no drills related to 

active threat response.

“We did some research and found 

that the nation hadn’t lost a child in a 

school fire since the 1950s. Fire drills 

were originally mandated because 

children were dying in school fires, so 

drills and codes were implemented to 

make sure it never happened again. 

So here we were, 60 years later, 

ignoring active threats instead of 

addressing them with the same rigor,” Cobb says.

Co-op members joined in lobbying efforts to change that, and the state now 

requires three fire drills and three lockdown/hostile event drills per year, and 

“the hope is that our successors, 50 years from now, will be saying ‘we haven’t 

lost a child in a hostile event in many years, so why are we still doing this?’, just 

the way we look at fire drills now.”

And all of this – active shooter training, increased emphasis on Run Barricade 

Fight, drills, assessments – led directly to the creation of the SSOCC where 

everything is tied together and distributed through technology to the people 

who may someday need to implement it in a crisis situation. 

“It’s a big big deal when it comes to communication and making sure things 

happen in the order they’re supposed to happen. I think it’s a game-changer for 

us,” Cobb says. 

“If it helps save just one life, it’s worth it,” Winter says. “Yakima County is much 

better prepared than we were several years ago, and if the idea of pooling 

information and working together in a co-op like this spreads to other areas, so 

much the better.”

For more information on the Yakima Valley School Safety Cooperative and the 

School Safety Operations and Coordination Center, contact Chris Weedin at 

(509) 853-2047, email chris.weedin@esd105.org.
CHAPTER 14

FAST, FREE REVERSE 

CHECKOUT PLAN RECOGNIZED 

AS BEST PRACTICE

By Becky Lewis

May 2017

Allan Robertson, principal of Wedowee Middle School 

in Wedowee, Ala., recognized one thing in common 

among every active threat incident he saw on the news: 

parents. Frightened parents. Worried parents. Parents 

who wanted to see their children NOW.

So he came up with a fast, easy way to reduce that 

stress. And it’s free.

“In the event of any crisis where we need to evacuate, 

when the lockdown is over, we’ll take them all to the gym. Parents can come 

straight to the school, come into the gym and find their child,” Robertson says. 

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CH.14: FAST, FREE REVERSE CHECKOUT PLAN RECOGNIZED AS BEST PRACTICE • 55

“But that doesn’t mean someone might come in and take a child. Whoever is 

picking the child up must go to the homeroom teacher, who has a stock of neonbright cards that would be hard to duplicate on the spur of the moment. After 

confirming the person is authorized to pick up the child, the teacher writes both 

names on the card, and the adult must present the card at the door to leave.”

In addition to being easier for parents, 

Robertson says it’s also easier for 

school staff, because they don’t have 

to organize an evacuation to another 

location such as a nearby church or 

the courthouse. And law enforcement 

also benefits from not needing to 

secure two separate locations.

“I commend Principal Robertson for 

his thinking outside the box to help 

find a solution to protect our children. 

It’s a neat concept because it’s kind 

of going against what we’ve been 

taught before, but it works. It was 

quite successful when we ran a drill 

on it,” says Wedowee Police Chief Jay 

Stone. “It helps us with personnel because we only need to secure an additional 

location in the school, instead of a second site.”

Another aid to both law enforcement and school staff can be found on the 

outside of every window: the classroom number. Inside each classroom, under 

the light switch, the school has placed signs reading “911. Room XXX.” 

“If dispatch gets a call from a child who is panicking because the teacher is 

down, the operator can remind the child to look at the light switch and give the 

room number. That information goes to arriving officers, who immediately know 

the correct room to go to by looking at the windows. It makes it a lot easier to 

identify the site of a problem and to tell which rooms are clear,” Robertson says. 

And those arriving officers have a clear road into the school as well; dispatch 

also calls for an automatic closure of the main road to the school, turning it into 

a one-way avenue for law enforcement only. Parents need to find an alternate 

route into the school – and they do, he says, pointing out that in a rural area 

like Wedowee (population approximately 1,000), parents often begin to arrive 

before law enforcement has operations fully in place.

The simplicity of Wedowee’s plan has drawn attention from the Alabama 

Attorney General’s Office, which has promoted it as a best practice throughout 

the state. That recognition didn’t come without some extra effort on Robertson’s 

part, however. 

“I applied for the Alabama Safe Schools Award two years in a row, and when 

we didn’t receive recognition the second year, I called the Attorney General’s 

Office and told them they really needed to see this for themselves,” Robertson 

says. The office’s law enforcement coordinator, Chris Carden, made a site visit 

in April 2017, and said he was impressed with the plan’s simple, inexpensive 

effectiveness. The result was a letter recommending the Reverse Checkout Plan 
to the state superintendent of schools in addition to all police chiefs and sheriffs 

in the state. Since that letter went out, Robertson has heard from several schools 

in the Birmingham area, where he worked before moving to Wedowee.

“The community has been very appreciative and the parents really like it. We’ve 

had two trial runs and will continue to practice it, and once they realized how 

quickly and easily they can get their children back without having to go to 

another location, they were thrilled,” he says. “Whenever you see one of these 

incidents on television, you see that parents instinctively come to the school and 

then they’ve been directed to go somewhere else. But not here.”

Although the plan started with a small school (Wedowee has 215 students 

in grades 4-6), it can be modified to fit the needs of any size school, and is 

portable as well: Wedowee has several alternate locations for carrying out the 

plan in addition to the gym. And all for nothing more than purchasing sheets of 

colored card stock or pulling them from supplies.

“It costs essentially nothing, it’s easy to organize, it’s easy to practice and 

the parents appreciate it,” Robertson says. “I hope that any principal or law 

enforcement administrator who reads this realizes how easy this would be to 

implement at any school.”

For more information on Wedowee’s Reverse Checkout Procedure, contact 

Allan Robertson at arobertson@randolphboe.org, phone (256) 357-4636, or 

Chief Jay Stone at (256) 610-0123. 

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CHAPTER 15

AUTOMATED STUDENT 

MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 

BRINGS “PEACE OF MIND” 

TO KENTUCKY SCHOOL

By Becky Lewis

September 2016

It’s a nightmare that has caused numerous elementary 

school administrators and teachers to wake up in a 

cold sweat: A distraught woman approaches a few 

minutes after school ends, asking “Where’s my son?”

“Oh, he went with his father today. Did the two of you 

get your schedules crossed?”

“I took my son and left my husband... he can’t pick 

him up anymore! I told them in the office this morning, 

didn’t the word get to you yet?”

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But in Albany, Ky., that nightmare has been banished for good with the 

development of Albany Elementary’s Student Management Transportation 

Solution (SMT), a QR code-based system that ensures incidents like the one 

described above will never happen. 

Tim Armstrong, who has served as the 

school’s principal for 18 years, knew 

the potential problems in the school’s 

paper-based afterschool pick-up 

program, which ranged from a lag 

in updating pickup authorization to 

children racing through the parking lot 

in front of oncoming cars. For several 

years, he searched for a system to 

meet his needs and couldn’t find what 

he wanted anywhere, so he worked 

with a local company to create SMT at 

no charge to the school system. In its 

first full year of use during the 2015-

2016 school year, Albany Elementary 

averaged 147 student pickups daily, 

with no problems.

“Previously, after the buses left, the adults who were picking up children came 

to a specific door into the gymnasium, and we paired them up. We’re located in 

a beautiful rural area between two lakes, and there was a time when I knew all 

of our parents and guardians personally, but that’s changing,” Armstrong says. 

“And then one winter day, we had two children who ran ahead in the parking lot 

as they left the building, and both were nearly hit by drivers who weren’t paying 

enough attention. These are my kids and I feel responsible, and I decided then 

we had to come up with our own solution.” 

Using SMT, Armstrong staffs a Wi-Fi-equipped booth outside the building, 

where he uses a tablet computer to check in adults making a pickup. Each 

authorized adult – not each family – has a unique assigned QR code, which is 

associated with a photo of the authorized individual and the names and photos 

of children that the adult may pick up. If a mother makes the pickup on Monday, 

the father on Tuesday and a grandparent on Wednesday, that’s all recorded in 

the system. Updates occur in real time: if that father is called out of town on a 

specific Tuesday, and a grandparent is coming in his place, that reported change 

gets to Armstrong instantly. 

In the booth, Armstrong submits the names of children waiting for pickup into 

the system, and their names appear, in order, on a monitor in the gym. Staff 

members in the gym line the children up in pickup order and escort them to 

the door, where they put the children directly into the back seat of authorized, 

waiting vehicles. At that point, staff once again scan the QR code, and the 

school has documentation of the date and the time the child was picked up, 

who made the pickup and who escorted the child to the vehicle. And compared 

to the previous system, it takes place in a small fraction of the time. 
“We have some 2,200 people authorized to pick up more than 550 children, 

in various combinations of children and days. Custody constantly changes. 

Children move from home to living with a near-relative to foster care. We 

couldn’t carry around the amount of paperwork required to keep track of all 

that, but now, if we’ve been told about restrictions, we know it,” Armstrong 

says. “And our parents think this is the greatest thing ever. I had some the first 

year who tested it by trying to use someone else’s QR code, and they were very 

pleased when I caught them.” 

From his position in the booth, Armstrong can also call an immediate lockdown 

inside the school if he sees something suspicious in a vehicle, such as a 

weapon, and he can use a two-way radio to make immediate contact with 911 

and the state police. Albany Elementary also uses SMT to generate visitors’ 

passes during the school day, and monitors show the names of all visitors in 

the building at a given time, along with the reason for their visit. When a visitor 

leaves, SMT creates a time-stamped record of the checkout.

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The school also uses the system to 

track the comings and goings of 

roving teachers for classes such as 

art and physical education, and can 

generate a watch list of individuals 

who are considered potential 

troublemakers. And in the event of 

an electrical failure, teachers do have 

printed information for each student, 

which is regenerated every time 

information is updated in the system. 

Plans call for ongoing improvements 

to include incorporating bus 

information into the system. 

“We created this to solve the problem 

we had here at Albany Elementary, but other schools are interested as well,” 

Armstrong says. The Walker Early Learning Center in nearby Wayne County 

has begun using the system for its young pupils, and Armstrong has given 

presentations on SMT throughout the state, including at the summer 2016 

Kentucky Association of School Administrators conference. 

“It solves so many problems that principals face nowadays, and principals and 

teachers have enough stress in their lives already. It was an undertaking to get 

it in place, but now we only have to do updates and add each year’s incoming 

class,” Armstrong says. “I could have retired two years ago, but this gives me 

the peace of mind I need to stay on.”

For more information on Albany Elementary’s Student Management 

Transportation Solution, contact Tim Armstrong at 

tim.armstrong@windstream.net or call (606) 688-9511.
CHAPTER 16

MISSOURI SCHOOL BUS 

DRIVER TRAINING EMPHASIZES 

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, 

COMMUNICATION SKILLS

By Becky Lewis

June 2016

First stop. “Hey Mr. B, hot one today!” “Sure is, finally 

warm enough for those shorts you boys wore all 

winter!”

Second stop. There they are, more yelling, giggling 

youngsters in shorts and flip-flops. Third stop. And 

here’s more of the same, marked by the high spirits that 

indicate the school year is almost over.

Fourth stop....wait a sec. A hoodie? Sweats? He wore 

shorts when it was below freezing. And what’s up with the second backpack?....

What did they say in that training we had last fall, JDLR...somebody or 

62 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CH.16: MISSOURI SCHOOL BUS DRIVER TRAINING EMPHASIZES SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, COMMUNICATION SKILLS • 63

something that Just Doesn’t Look Right, that’s it...I’m going to roll right on by, 

and I’m going to call in. 

According to the American School Bus Council, some 480,000 school buses 

transport 26 million children to school every day, yet few school systems train 

their drivers on what to do if an intruder enters their bus, says Gary Moore, 

safety coordinator at the Missouri Center for Education Safety. In the aftermath 

of the December 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary and a January 

2013 incident in rural Alabama where a bus driver was killed and a child taken 

hostage, Moore was tasked with developing a safety training program for 

school bus drivers; he has since presented it more than 150 times in the past 

three years in 12 states and Canada. Initially offered free of charge to schools 

in Missouri under a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant, the Center 

continues to offer the training throughout the state at a low fee. And although 

jurisdictions in some other states have been willing to pay the fee to have Moore 

make the presentation, he also willingly shares his slides and talking points at no 

charge, allowing other agencies to create their own training programs.

Moore says he didn’t “invent 

anything new;” rather, he 

applied knowledge gained 

during his 34 years in law 

enforcement (29 as a member 

of the Missouri Highway Patrol) 

to school bus safety. He worked 

with the sheriff’s department in 

Dale County, Ala., where the 

hostage situation took place 

while developing the training, 

which covers the basic rules of 

safety, the importance of good 

communication and dealing 

with a physical altercation.

“I hear from the drivers that 

‘JDLR’ sticks in their heads,” 

Moore says. “Anything that strikes you as out of your range of normal becomes 

a JDLR. It could be somebody wearing inappropriate clothing or carrying a 

strange object. When you see it, you need to act on it and report it.” 

In addition to emphasizing JDLR awareness, Moore focuses on the importance 

of good communication: “If I only had time to talk about one topic, it would be 

communication. Good skills defuse problems, poor skills only escalate them.” 

If a driver is confronted by an angry parent or student (a more likely scenario 

than facing an active threat), it is important to listen actively and look engaged 

while not interrupting, then paraphrase some of the individual’s statements in a 

response, Moore says, noting that the vast majority of physical altercations start 

with a verbal confrontation. In the event an altercation does become physical, he 

says, it’s important to be able to get out of your seat, and don’t hesitate to use 

anything at your disposal as a weapon: a fire extinguisher, wasp spray, the bus 

itself. 
In addition to covering those topics in more depth, the Missouri training also 

presents the following Basic Rules of School Bus Safety:

• Never let any unauthorized person on the bus, unless there is a need to assist 

a student on or off the bus.

• Never allow a stranger to get onto the bus.

• Conduct all communication at the driver’s window; if necessary for safety, 

advise the individual that the conversation needs to be moved to the school 

or bus transportation office.

And just like with any other training, the best way to be sure all of this kicks 

in in the event of an emergency is to practice, practice, practice. Moore says 

school districts should run appropriate drills more than once a year, and that 

local law enforcement needs to be involved in training events: “Every local law 

enforcement agency has its own way of doing things. Training needs to focus on 

including their procedures.”

One drill that drivers can implement on their own, though, is conducting a 

personal inspection to make sure the brakes and the emergency exit work 

properly prior every single time they start their bus. 

“I don’t care if they’ve only been parked somewhere for an hour, they need to 

check those two things, which can be tampered with so easily. I try to emphasize 

that during the training, and I hear feedback from safety directors that they’ve 

64 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
seen their drivers doing this,” Moore 

says. “When I spoke at the Missouri 

State Emergency Management 

Conference last year, a member of the 

audience stood up and said ‘after you 

provided training in our area, it had a 

profound effect on how the drivers do 

their business. What you’re doing is 

working.’ ”

In addition to emphasizing the need 

for training, Moore also emphasizes 

the need for school districts to have 

formal written policies regarding 

intrusion onto buses. Missouri has 

enacted a statute backing up such 

written policies, as did Alabama in the 

wake of the 2013 hostage situation. 

“For whatever the reason may be, safety and training for our school buses have 

been ignored too long. I never gave it much thought as a trooper, but providing 

this training has raised my awareness,” Moore says. “Sometimes drivers think 

‘I’m just a bus driver,’ but they have the lives of our children in their hands.” 

For more information on school bus driver training offered by the Missouri 

Center for Education Safety, including free information on developing training 

programs, contact Gary Moore at (573) 638-7501, ext. 415, or email moore@

moces.org.

CH.16: MISSOURI SCHOOL BUS DRIVER TRAINING EMPHASIZES SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, COMMUNICATION SKILLS • 65
CHAPTER 17

FREE MOBILE PHONE SAFETY 

APPLICATION TRACKS 

LOCATION, SENDS ALARMS 

AND RECORDS DATA

By Becky Lewis

September 2016

Sometimes, when confronted by an attacker, even the 

time it takes to make three jabs of the finger – nineone-one – is too long. 

With PhoneFlare, a new free security app, it takes only 

a single ripping gesture on the headphone cord to 

raise an alarm for help.

PhoneFlare, launched by a nonprofit group in August 

2016, can be downloaded from both Apple and 

Google Play at no charge. Targeting primarily college students, but available to 

anyone, the app activates an alarm when the user either misses a designated 

66 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CH.17: FREE MOBILE PHONE SAFETY APPLICATION TRACKS LOCATION, SENDS ALARMS AND RECORDS DATA • 67

check-in time or makes a manual call for help by pulling headphones or another 

accessory out of a phone’s audio jack or charging port. In either instance, the 

phone automatically texts designated friends and family and sends them the 

GPS coordinates of the user’s location. For students at participating colleges and 

universities, the app also sends a message to the school’s security dispatch. 

To help cut down on false alarms, PhoneFlare sends reminders at five-minute 

intervals as check-in time approaches, giving the user the opportunity to reset 

the designated check-in time. Once the deadline has passed, PhoneFlare begins 

sending emergency messages, but the user still has a chance to call it a false 

alarm and stop the messages. However, as an additional safeguard against a 

user’s being coerced by an attacker to 

turn off the app, the disarm function 

includes a request to choose a 

color; an incorrect color choice gives 

the appearance that the alarm has 

been disabled, while in actuality it 

continues to broadcast the user’s GPS 

coordinates.

Funded entirely by grants and 

donations, PhoneFlare is the brainchild 

of app developer and filmmaker 

Christopher Cinq-Mars Jarvis. As a 

student at New York University, he 

became aware of the many issues 

surrounding campus sexual assault 

and the need for additional resources 

to help his female friends.

According to Kristina Clark, spokesperson for PhoneFlare, the original concept 

dealt with creating a resource that would help gather evidence; hence, 

PhoneFlare’s option to record audio to the phone and to catalog the UDIDs of 

nearby devices. Should a user want to retrieve the UDID log, PhoneFlare staff 

will provide assistance with retrieving the data and emailing it to a personal 

account. 

“After they developed a way to gather potential evidence, the developers came 

up with the idea of pulling an accessory out of its connection to trigger an alarm 

as an easy way to call for help,” Clark says. Some of the funds raised to cover 

PhoneFlare’s operating expenses have gone toward the purchase of so-called 

“dust plugs,” which are non-functional plugs that can be inserted into a port, 

then pulled out to raise an alarm. PhoneFlare plans to hand these plugs out free 

of charge on campuses and also at women’s shelters. 

“We are partnering with colleges to make sure this easily accessible resource is 

communicated to their faculty and students, and we have high schools pushing 

it out to their students as well,” Clark says, adding that PhoneFlare has also 

received interest from hospitals and from retirement communities. Although 

there is no automatic alarm to a security dispatch outside of campus settings, 

anyone can use the option to have the app send text messages to designated 

friends and family, along with the user’s GPS coordinates. (A disposable link 
opens Google Maps and updates the individual’s position every 10 seconds.) 

For those institutions of higher learning listed in a crowdsourced database – 

more than 700 signed up in the first month – the automated call to security/law 

enforcement dispatch relays the students’ verified school email as well as the 

GPS coordinates. 

“We hope this app will continue to grow and evolve as an important resource for 

sexual assault prevention,” Clark says.

For more information, visit http://www.phoneflare.com/ or contact Kristina Clark 

at (931) 308-2977, email press@phoneflare.com.

68 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CH.17: FREE MOBILE PHONE SAFETY APPLICATION TRACKS LOCATION, SENDS ALARMS AND RECORDS DATA • 69
CHAPTER 18

MICHIGAN SCHOOL 

INTRODUCES NALOXONE

KITS, TRAINING

By Becky Lewis

June 2017

Not that many years ago, portable AEDs were the tools 

of emergency medical personnel, used judiciously 

under physician supervision. Today, they hang on the 

walls of office buildings, airports, shopping malls, 

houses of worship, schools and other locations.

Now there’s another lifesaving tool slowly making its 

way from the EMS toolkit into more mainstream areas: 

naloxone. In Gaylord, Mich., administrators and staff at 

Gaylord High School and Gaylord Middle School will 

receive training this summer to ensure they know how, and when, 

to use the naloxone kits available in the school offices come fall.

70 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5
CH.18: MICHIGAN SCHOOL INTRODUCES NALOXONE KITS, TRAINING • 71

“Our take is, we hope we never have to administer it, but if it can save a life, 

the downside of using it doesn’t come close to the downside of not using 

it,” says Brian Pearson, superintendent of Gaylord Community Schools. The 

free naloxone kits, supplied to the school through a partnership between a 

pharmaceutical company and a national foundation, were brought to the school 

district’s attention by Up North Prevention, a community initiative to advance 

substance abuse prevention efforts in northern lower Michigan. Up North’s 

Linda Gall, a certified prevention specialist, learned about the program at a 

conference and brought it to the school for consideration. The district school 

safety committee made the decision earlier in 2017 to implement the project for 

the 2017-201 school year. 

Pearson explains that committee 

includes local law enforcement, 

EMS, the district attorney, various 

community organizations and parents, 

and it meets regularly to discuss 

current issues and how the members 

can work together to continue to 

make Gaylord a safe place to learn: 

“Our goal is to foster a safe and 

collaborative culture. You need to 

ensure safety first for kids to learn. You 

can have the best teachers in world, 

and if your students don’t feel safe, 

they won’t learn well.” 

The committee worked with the board 

of education to develop a clear policy 

on how and when to use the naloxone, and that protocol starts with calling 911 

before administering the drug. All teachers will receive basic training from the 

state police and local EMS on how to recognize the signs and symptoms of an 

overdose, and office staff will receive more detailed training on using the kits. 

Corey Hebner, the community state trooper for the Gaylord area, has conducted 

numerous train-the-trainer sessions for his fellow law enforcement officers, and 

he will provide oversight to the training at Gaylord. He says its basic focus is on 

awareness of the signs and symptoms of an overdose, which can include heavy 

perspiration, a grayish hue to skin, shallow breathing, skittish behavior and/or 

passing out. 

In northern lower Michigan, as in much of the rest of the country, first responders 

are being faced with heroin mixed with fentanyl or carfentanil, sometimes 

requiring multiple doses of naloxone to reverse the overdose. Hebner 

emphasizes the need to call 911 immediately and to assume that one kit may 

not be enough to help. 

“The beautiful thing about naloxone is if it is something else, the drug has no 

effect and causes no adverse reaction,” Hebner says. Training will also provide 

staff with information on problem behaviors to watch for that might indicate a 

need for an intervention that could potentially prevent an overdose, Pearson 

says.
“Brian is very proactive instead of reactive. He’s looking at the whole picture 

and we need to see more of that,” Gall says. “If other schools also take that 

approach, it becomes one more layer of prevention for the whole community.”

Up North Prevention works with various aspects of drug prevention in the 

community and in the schools in 14 counties, and has assisted with training at 

55 local law enforcement agencies in the past two years, resulting in at least 

39 lives saved due to naloxone use. Getting the program started in Gaylord, 

which is the largest school district in the area (approximately 3,200 students in 

grades K-12), may encourage other schools in the area to apply for the kits as 

well, Pearson says. 

In a small town like Gaylord (pop. less than 4,000), school events like football 

games and plays draw in hundreds of spectators, and the buildings themselves 

are also heavily used for local craft fairs, worship services and the like. While 

Pearson likened the naloxone kits to epi-pens and Hebner drew the parallel with 

AEDs, they join Gall in agreeing that naloxone is a way of rendering aid in a 

medical emergency whose time has come.

“Even if there’s only a 1 in 100 chance that we might ever use this to save a life, 

it would be ridiculous not to do this,” Pearson says.

For more information on how Gaylord Community Schools will administer its 

naloxone program, contact Brian Pearson at pearsonb@gaylord.k12.mi.us. For 

more information on Up North Prevention and its programs, contact Linda Gall 

or Laurie Ames at (989) 732-6761.

72 • SHARING IDEAS & RESOURCES TO KEEP OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS SAFE! VOLUME 5

VOLUME 1: 

https://justnet.org/pdf/00-Sharing

Resources_508%20updated%20

with%20volume%201%200619.pdf

VOLUME 2: 

https://justnet.org/pdf/00-Sharing%20Ideas_

Vol2-JUSTNET%20508%200715.pdf

VOLUME 3: 

https://justnet.org/pdf/Sharing-Ideas-and-Resources

Vol3_web%2006112015.pdf

VOLUME 4: 

https://justnet.org/pdf/00-Sharing%20Resources_

Vol4_FINAL_508_06282016.pdf