First-ever conference prepares Department of Education staff for safety crisis

What would you do if an armed man with malicious intent walked onto your school campus?

That question and more were top of mind this week as hundreds of public school employees attended the state Department of Education’s first School Safety Conference at the Hawai‘i Convention Center.

Wednesday was the final day of the three-day conference featuring national experts that aimed to guide department leaders and staff members in preventing, identifying and responding to various threats to school safety.

On Wednesday there were training sessions with discussions on how to identify and stop a threat before it materializes into a full-blown crisis, improve decision making under stress, and deal with athletic event emergencies.

Monday and Tuesday sessions included verbal de- escalation, social media threats, behavior threat assessment and recounting lessons from past school shootings.

This week is fall break for Hawaii’s public schools, and that allowed more than 700 front-office workers, teachers, principals, custodians, cafeteria workers and school safety officers to voluntarily attend the safety conference with pay.

“We’re going to focus on being aware of what’s going on around you — recognizing what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s going right, what’s going wrong and then making decisions on how to react,” Sean Burke told his training session Wednesday morning.

Burke, a former Boston- area police officer with dec­ades of experience working in schools, said people are often in denial about the threats around them. As an example, he played a video of police debriefing a security guard following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

The guard described how he let a former student walk onto campus right past him toting a rifle bag even though he was aware of his troubled history at the school. The gunman killed 17 and injured 17 others.

“He had plenty of opportunity to intercede but he didn’t,” Burke said.

This week’s conference was arranged by Deputy Superintendent Heidi Armstrong after she attended a national safety conference in July.

“I give a lot of kudos to the Hawaii Department of Education for being proactive,” said Curtis Lovorello, executive director and CEO of the School Safety Advocacy Council based in Florida. “They’re not doing it in response to a tragedy. They’re doing it saying let’s prevent that from ever occurring, and that’s commendable.”

Is a three-day conference enough?

It’s a good start, he said, but now the onus is on the department to make safety a priority.

“Kids can’t learn unless they feel safe,” Lovorello said. “So not only do you have to create that perception of safety but it has to be a reality.”

Lovorello said he would expect the department to review its crisis plans and conduct consistent training across all schools, as well as continuously monitor changes in procedures because there’s been a new focus after the Parkland shooting in behavioral threat assessment and working with law enforcement to “connect the dots.”

“We don’t stop a lot of these school shootings because we’re well armed with AR-15s out in front of the schools,” he said. “We stop them because we do what’s smart and prudent. And what’s smart and prudent is getting to know your kids, communicating with your kids. The Secret Service told us years ago 70% of kids that are school shooters communicate that fact before they ever do it. And that’s where our opportunity to prevent it lies.”

Armstrong said that in arranging this week’s conference, she wanted to keep the safety conversation alive beyond the periodic drills and annual training at the beginning of the school year.

“I think this conference is going to raise a lot of questions,” she said.

More schools will examine their safety plans, she said, and it will lead to plenty of requests for additional training.

“That was the purpose of the conference: We wanted to create the vigilance, create the awareness and we want schools to be asking the questions and feeling concerned in areas where they may not be as proactive as necessary and get the training and support moving forward,” Armstrong said.

Roosevelt High School Principal Sean Wong was one of four staff members at the conference representing his Honolulu school.

“You see what’s happening on the mainland,” Wong said. “Sadly, it might be only a matter of time, so we just got to be ready and prepared.”

Wong said his staff will have to review Roosevelt’s safety plans to see what revisions might have to be made.

“We’ve been lucky so far,” he said. “We’re hoping we can stay that way.”