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Inside an underground meeting room attached to the U.S. Capitol, past guards and metal detectors, lawmakers and officials from leading security companies discussed a burgeoning threat of mass school shootings and the dire need to "harden" campuses before someone else gets killed.

"If you think this cannot happen to you, I'm here to tell you I used to think the same exact thing," said Noel Glacer, a Florida-based security professional. The message - belied by the statistical rarity of school shootings - was part cautionary tale, part call to action.

Glacer is no dispassionate observer. In February, his son, Jake, was in a psychology class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman opened fire, killing 17. Glacer urged people in the room to donate to SOS Parkland, a nonprofit that's raising money to equip the city's schools with additional security.

"It was horrible," he said, recalling the Valentine's Day shooting. "It can happen to you. It can."

Glacer spoke at a roundtable in Washington in late June, part of the annual conference of the Security Industry Association, a trade group. Attendees included Trump administration officials, legislators from both parties, security-company executives, and industry lobbyists.

Security officials in the room hawked a range of products that could have been ripped from a James Bond movie: surveillance cameras with facial recognition capability, automated door locks, gunshot detection sensors, and software that scans social media platforms in search of the next shooter. If schools across the country put a larger emphasis on securing their buildings, they said, educators could prevent shootings or, at the very least, mitigate the bloodshed.

Each major school shooting - Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland - has added fuel to a multibillion-dollar industry encompassing everything from sophisticated surveillance technology to high-priced consultants to explain it all to anxious educators.

The recent tragedies are pumping new energy - not to mention funds - into strategies to keep children safe, including millions of dollars in federal money from the STOP School Violence Act.

As each tragedy stokes fresh outrage from parents, education leaders say they're inundated with sales pitches from security companies, each with the same basic message: You could be next.

Such a climate is "ripe for exploitation," argues Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, which consults districts on school safety planning. The result, according to many critics, is that the security industry has dominated the policy response to school shootings, drowning out subtler conversations about issues ranging from mental health to gun control in favor of a rush to adopt costly, and largely unproven, methods to harden schools.

"It's not that they're villains and they don't care and they don't want safe schools - I'm not trying to send that message," said Trump, who has no relation to the president. "But they're certainly opportunistic. At the end of the day, they're looking for new revenue streams."

The Columbine 'Wake-up Call'

It began with Columbine.

Before that, Guy Grace said, security efforts in his Colorado school district centered on kids with spray paint cans, not guns. For Grace, director of security and emergency preparedness at Littleton Public Schools, the shift was instantaneous.

On the morning of April 20, 1999, he was lifting weights at the gym when his pager went of f. Two students had walked into Columbine High School in a neighboring school district and killed 15 people, including themselves. After that, his job was never the same.

"It was a complete change, just a wake-up call for us all," he said. "It certainly has shaped a lot of what we do across the country in regards to school safety."

The market analysis underscores what any salesman knows: Anxiety can be good for business.

"For anyone to say, 'It's not going to happen here,' all they're doing is playing the law of large numbers and assuming that they're going to get lucky," said Harry Rhulen, co-founder of Firestorm Solutions, a crisis-and-risk-management firm that contracts with school districts.

To pitch his company's violence-prevention program, Rhulen laid out a chilling scenario: Every school in America, he said, has students, teachers, or staff members who are "sitting on the fence." Maybe they're dealing with mental health issues. Maybe they're experiencing spousal abuse or are dependent on drugs or alcohol. "Something may push them off the fence."

The upshot: One of them could become the next shooter, he said, "and there's just no way to know which school is next."

But is Rhulen framing the danger fairly?

David Ropeik, a consultant on the psychology of risk perception, has written that the odds that a K-12 student will be shot and killed at a public school are roughly 1 in 614 million. According to the most recent federal education statistics , between 1992 and 2015, fewer than 3 percent of murders in which the victims were children and fewer than 1 percent of youth suicides occurred at schools. The data showed that reported incidents of violent crimes in schools has declined over the same time period.
Marketing Tragedy
Recognizing the heightened concern, officials at the security industry conference seized the moment. Inside the Independence Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Washington, salesmen touted some of their latest wares: door locks that open with a smartphone app, motion detectors that notify staff before a visitor reaches the building, and cameras that track guests as they walk around campus.

There's a larger force motivating these new offerings. The school security industry will experience slower growth in the coming years, Dearing of IHS Markit predicts. Since a majority of schools now have surveillance equipment, fewer districts are entering the market for the first time. In response, he said, companies are marketing the next generation of school safety products, like scanners that track license plates in the parking lot and high-security classroom doors.

Salespeople argue, and they hope schools agree, that as older products become obsolete, schools install the newest ones to stay safe. In order to persuade educators, security companies are making in-person sales pitches and building pop-up displays at education conferences. Some companies hold their own events to promote the importance of heavily outfitted campuses.

For example, Axis Communications, a company that sells surveillance cameras and other hardware, hosts school-safety symposiums several times a year in cities across the country. Scott Dunn, the company's senior director of business development solutions and services, said the symposiums aren't designed as marketing pitches but rather serve as opportunities to inform educators about the need for security plans and technology to keep kids safe.

But interactions with security companies have left a bad taste in the mouths of some district leaders.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Connecticut awarded the Newtown district $50 million to build a new, state-of-the-art campus . Now-retired superintendent Joseph Erardi quipped that after the tragedy, he made " dozens of immediate new best friends " from the ranks of security companies looking to get their products inside the school.

"In some cases, they were sincere," said Erardi, who retired in 2017 and now consults districts on school safety planning. "In other cases, it was all about branding and marketing Newtown."

For security companies, Grace's reality became a sales pitch.

"They start pounding all the school districts across the country and then they say, 'Don't be like Arapahoe High School,'" Grace said. "You sit there and go, 'Who is this idiot? He's trying to capitalize on a tragedy that we just had in our school district.' I just despise that with a passion."

'How Many More Kids Have to Die?'

As industry leaders sipped cocktails at the security-conference reception, Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, acknowledged he owed a recent legislative success to people in the room. Just weeks before the February shooting in Parkland, Rutherford had introduced the STOP School Violence Act, a law that directs hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade toward school security and will thus be a boon for security companies. (Every year, districts spend far more than that on such companies' products and services.)

"The STOP School Violence Act could not have gotten across the finish line as quickly as it did without the support of this group, as well as the school safety caucus and the advocacy from the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools," Rutherford said.

Much of the conference's discussions around campus security were led by the Secure Schools Alliance and the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, two advocacy groups that urge schools to take more measures to prevent shootings and other threats. Secure Schools is funded by security companies, and the Partner Alliance is a joint venture of the Security Industry Association and the National Systems Contractors Association, both trade groups. The Partner Alliance and Secure Schools maintain advisory boards staffed largely by officials from security companies; for example, the public affairs director of Allegion, a security company that focuses on door locks and other entry technology, serves on the boards of both groups.

Robert Boyd, executive director of the Secure Schools Alliance, says his group is funded solely by security companies because "they get it." (He added that the group plans to add officials who represent school police and fire marshals to their board.)

He said leading companies like Allegion aren't investing in school security efforts to sell more locks. Instead, the company recognizes a dire need.

"They look at it and they say, 'You know, we understand what happened in Sandy Hook was a facilities failure,'" Boyd said. "Folks in the security industry, we understand how to keep intruders out of a building."

Beyond the STOP Act, security companies and partner advocacy groups have also worked to ensure that conversations around hardened campuses continue in Washington. In 2016, Rep. Susan Brooks, Republican of Indiana, and Rep. Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, teamed up to form the Congressional School Safety Caucus. Brooks acknowledged that the caucus was formed after executives at security companies with offices in her district, including Allegion, urged the move.

In order to advance federal policies like the STOP legislation, Boyd said, advocates with his group "hit the pavement" on Capitol Hill. "You go office to office, staff to staff, committee to committee."

Trump, the safety consultant, said he is concerned about the influence that security companies, and the advocacy partners they fund, wield over lawmakers.

"While physical security has a piece in the puzzle, the concerning part is when big business in the security industry is trying to single-handedly have laws changed and rewrite codes, which at no coincidence benefit their business interests," he said.

Boyd pushed back on this argument. He maintains that school security should be decided at the district level but that the state guidelines his association works on help ensure that schools aren't "throwing money at the problem."

He said he's simply frustrated with the level of security deemed acceptable at schools. In the interests of student safety, he's of the opinion that "school security needs to be a little bit more inconvenient," like it is in other government buildings such as federal courthouses.

"When you go to that courthouse, if they tell you, 'Drop your pants,' you're going to drop your pants or you're not getting into the building," he said. "They're going to inspect you thoroughly because we've had our share of courthouse shootings, and they stopped them. At what point does the collective outrage say, 'Enough'? How many more kids have to die?"
The State of Research
Indeed, Boyd and others in the security industry say their products save lives. "No shooter has ever breached a locked classroom door," he said, pointing to the example of the shooting at Sandy Hook.

In fact, the school's front door was locked, but that didn't stop the gunman. He shot through a window near the front entrance to get in. In the part of the building where the shooting unfolded, classroom doors only locked with a key - from the outside. More could have been done to protect students, he said.

"If you had a ballistic-graded entrance and you had lockable classroom doors, that death toll comes way down - if he even gets in," he said.

Superintendents and state schools chiefs acknowledged in interviews that physical security is crucial to maintaining safe schools.

"I thought it was concerning there was such a lack of evidence about forms of technology that seem to be widely used," Schwartz said.

Security as 'a Way of Life'

As school leaders across the country explore available security options, Dale Marsden, superintendent in San Bernardino, California, said the benefits of hardened schools are clear. But, he added, security equipment has its limits.

"If a shooter is intent on coming into a campus and you have a visitor control system, it sounds harsh, but someone can take out the visitor control system," said Marsden, an Air Force veteran who specialized in security. "Can some of those things slow down or prevent? Yes. Can you have absolute safety? No."

Although Marsden said cost is a major roadblock for districts considering new security initiatives, Eckersley of Allegion said educators get too "wrapped up about the money." He pointed to the Partner Alliance's "tiered" guidelines that encourage districts to start with basic infrastructure and work their way up to the Cadillac of school safety plans. Though the recommendations don't push specific brands, districts that opt to implement the guidelines would be in for a major monetary investment.

Once schools reach that top level - with electronic gates, technology that scans license plates, bullet-resistant glass, and other equipment - a Partner Alliance PowerPoint slide said that "security is no longer a project - it is a way of life."

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Inside the $3 Billion School Security Industry: Companies Market Sophisticated Technology to 'Harden' Campuses, but Will It Make Us Safe?

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Inside an underground meeting room attached to the U.S. Capitol, past guards and metal detectors, lawmakers and officials from leading security companies discussed a burgeoning threat of mass school shootings and the dire need to "harden" campuses before someone else gets killed. "If you think this cannot happen to you, I'm here to tell you [...]

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Nearly 20 years separate the horrible tragedies at Columbine High School in Colorado and Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In that time, too little has been done to make our schools safer. That's why our grieving nation is again searching for a solution.

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A founding principle of National PTA's mission is to promote the safety and well-being of all children and youth.

All students and educators have a right to attend schools that are safe and conducive to learning and achievement, yet schools are experiencing increasingly frequent incidents that are having a devastating, long-term impact on students, parents, educators, and the community.

School safety is a multi-faceted issue with no one clear solution for each community.

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Students deserve a safe environment in which to live, learn and grow. Unfortunately, the threat of violence is a presence in many communities and has grown in a number of schools across the country. Learn what you can do to talk to your children about school safety.

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Federal Commission on School Safety | U.S. Department of Education

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In March 2018, President Donald J. Trump appointed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to lead the Federal Commission on School Safety. The Commission has been charged with quickly providing meaningful and actionable recommendations to keep students safe at school.

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Resources to keep your schools safe, especially during a crisis. Read more "

Resources to turn your school into a bullyfree zone. Read more "

Resources for students, educators, and families to conduct meaningful conversations toward healing in the wake Charlottesville. Read more "

Securing safe, healthy and peaceful learning environments for students.

Mass Shooting and other Traumatic Events: How to Talk to Students

All too often gun violence and mass shootings top the headlines in America, causing anxiety and confusion among young people. To help students who are continually hearing about senseless gun violence in or near schools and are scared about their safety, we offer advice from the National Association of School Psychologists for talking to them about violence and other national tragedies.

America's Safe Schools Week

Explore these educator resources to help students and parents learn about and advocate for school safety, bullying prevention, reducing violence, improving discipline, and increasing student attendance.

Resources for reducing school violence and promoting school safety.

A step-by-step outline of what to do before, during, and after any school or community crisis like a school shooting or natural disaster. NEA offers best practices that address the full spectrum of crisis response from how to prevent and prepare for a crisis to how to respond and recover in the minutes, days and weeks following the event.

In the wake of the recent events in Charlottesville, please find resources for students, educators, and families to address and engage in the national dialogue about racism, hate, and bias. Together we must foster safe spaces to discuss our individual and collective realties to move towards justice in education.

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Resources to keep your schools safe, especially during a crisis. Read more " Resources to turn your school into a bullyfree zone. Read more " Resources for students, educators, and families to conduct meaningful conversations toward healing in the wake Charlottesville. Read more " Securing safe, healthy and peaceful learning environments for students.

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We've assembled this collection of recent articles on school safety in America to spark conversation and problem solving in your school community. Here, you can learn about current events in school safety and explore a wide range of opinions and ideas to share within your school community. As always, we encourage school communities to form their own opinions and customized approach to school safety. These articles may or may not express the views, opinions, or recommendations of Safe and Sound.

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We've assembled this collection of recent articles on school safety in America to spark conversation and problem solving in your school community. Here, you can learn about current events in school safety and explore a wide range of opinions and ideas to share within your school community.

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News and Features from the National Education Association

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Montgomery County Public Schools/Bill Mills: www.mcps.org

Keeping Our Schools Safe

The primary responsibility of every school district is to ensure a safe and secure environment for students, staff and visitors. Listed below are articles and resources on school safety and crisis management, including emergency preparedness and disaster management.
Webinars and Videos
American School Board Journal
Research and Reports
Resources for School Attorneys
State School Board Associations and Other Resources
Webinar: Dec. 21, 2012: Planning For and Managing the School Crisis You Hope Never Comes
Sponsored by the National School Boards Association's Office of General Counsel and the Council of School Attorneys.

Video: Dec. 19, 2012: School Safety following Sandy Hook
Missouri School Boards' Association interviews Paul Fennewald of the Missouri Center for Education Safety on School Safety following Sandy Hook

Trending in School Security, Keeping up to Keep Students Safe
ASBJ decided to examine the latest trends in school safety and chat with security experts-and put together a list of cutting-edge issues worthy of your attention. This isn't the last word in school safety, but this list should provide fodder for your school board's next conversation on protecting students and staff.
August 2017

Bomb Scare
Hoax or real danger? School leadaers grapple with reaction to bomb threats.
August 2016

Electronic School: Security Goes High-Tech
Technology offers solutions to security dilemmas, building safety, data security and Policy and Practice: Georgia School Boards Association has offered its districts a group cyber insurance plan since 2013 at a cost of about $1 per student... read more.
August 2016

Police Presence
As arrests and suspensions rise, the role of the School Resource Officer (SRO) is under scrutiny.
February 2016

Security Checkpoint
Three years afater Sandy Hook, the horrific tragedy spurred schools to intensify security efforts.
October 2015
School Law Primer - School Safety: Legal Pointers for Public Schools: 2016
School Security After Sandy Hook
Addressing school safety doesn't mean simply responding to the latest horrific shooting. Districts have to put school shootings in perspective and understand where the threats are more likely to come from. Schools should take an "all-hazards" approach that considers the best responses to a variety of emergencies.
December 2013

School Safety Plans
Working together, schools and community partners can focus their emergency planning using time-tested national guidance, including efforts to build a positive school climate to establish relationships of trust and respect among students and staff in order to encourage them to share information about threatening behavior before an incident occurs.
August 2013
Connecticut Association of Boards of Education: Dealing with Tragedy
Preparing a crisis communication plan before a crisis hits(2015)

April 2018 Release: 2015-2016 Civil Rights Data Collection, School Climate and Safety, U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, biennial report. New in the 2015-16 CRDC report is comprehensive data regarding incidents of criminal offenses in our nation's public schools.
Texas Association of School Boards Hurricane Harvey Resources
March 2018 Release: 2017 Indicators of School Crime and Safety, Indicator 20: Safety and Security Measures Taken by Public Schools; Key Findings Source: 2018 report, IES, National Center for Education Statistics. Full report here. A joint effort by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
U.S. Department of Education: Practical Information on Crisis Planning U.S. Department of Education Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools Technical Assistance Center: Post-Disaster Reunification U.S. Department of Education Activates Emergency Response Contact Center U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Federal Emergency and Disaster Policies U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Post-Disaster Child Care Needs & Resources Matrix U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Children and Youth Task Force in Disasters U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Plan Ahead for Disasters
School Shootings and Student Mental Health - What Lies Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg
Recommendations created by William Dikel, M.D., Independent Consulting Psychiatrist, NSBA's Council of School Attorneys.

Student Perceptions of School Safety
Studies show that students who do not feel safe at school stay home. And when students aren't in school, they don't perform academically. The Center for Public Education's Data First project discusses student perceptions and how school officials can help keep them safe.
U.S. Department of Justice: Q&A on what documentation schools can collect from students U.S. Departments of Justice and Education: Information on the Rights of All Children to Enroll in School: Questions and Answers for States, School Districts and Parents U.S. Department of Education: Identifying and Supporting Students Experiencing Homelessness from Pre-School to Post-Secondary Ages Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program Nonregulatory Guidance (2016)
Available for Council of School Attorneys members:

When Seconds Count: A School District's Response to Natural Disasters and Emergencies (2015 seminar paper)

School Safety and Emergency Preparedness (2013 seminar paper)

New York State School Boards Association: "Tending to Our Youth"
T he report recommends specific actions that school districts can take to increase school safety, including ways to identify possible warning signs of students at-risk and provide support to students who do not feel that they belong in the school community. (March 2013)

Missouri Center for Education Safety
U.S. Department of Education: Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools Technical Assistance Center

Federal Resources

Resources on Homeless Students

When students and families are displaced during the emergency, federal law and guidance on homeless students may apply. Following are resources on homeless students from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education.

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School Safety, Security, and Emergency Preparedness

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Montgomery County Public Schools/Bill Mills: www.mcps.org The primary responsibility of every school district is to ensure a safe and secure environment for students, staff and visitors. Listed below are articles and resources on school safety and crisis management, including emergency preparedness and disaster management.

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Parkland Student Activists Talk Gun Control

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Students on why they walked out over gun control and school safety issues