School Safety

All right, hey everyone! Thanks for tuning in to this week's show. We've got a very special guest by the name of Dr. Kenneth Trump. But before I actually let him introduce himself, I do have to make a little note: today's episode is sponsored by Big O Tires in Montrose, Colorado, where Greg is at right now. Because to get new tires for his FJ – for those of you unfamiliar with where Greg lives high up in the Rocky Mountains – he has to go through a pass, ask a guy several questions, or someone asks him several questions, and he gets on a floating raft across a river. It's like a Monty Python episode. It really, really is. So, Greg is mobile today, but we have good connection, everything, so we're good. But I know we got a little bit of an intro to our special guest today. First of all, Dr. Ken Trump, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're excited to talk to you today.

Yeah, great being with you guys. I follow your work, and it seems like we have a lot of thoughts in common. I appreciate the invitation.

Yeah, we do. For those of us, too, we had a great call a couple weeks ago with some of our folks, our team, and talked to you because same thing, we've been following you on LinkedIn especially and reading a lot of your work. So, if you could, for our listeners, just to start out, give a little bit about your background in school safety and then kind of what you're doing right now, because it's important. I want people to know that you've been in this for a while, right? You're not a suddenly new subject matter expert on school shootings. So, if you could, give us a little bit of your background and what you're working on now.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Usually, when I start presentations at conferences nationally, I say, "I'm going to start by answering the background question that everybody really wants to know." With 40 years of experience in school safety, a doctoral degree, decades of experience working with school shootings, I'll answer the number one question on people's minds: "No relation!" That's the first— hey, it's important to get that up front, the elephant in the room. Really, it's a great icebreaker. It's not a political statement, and everybody usually laughs because they're going, "Yeah, that's really what we really wanted to know. Okay, now let's get into the material."

So yeah, actually, I literally started in junior high school. I started in Cleveland schools. They had, at the time, late 1970s, court-ordered cross-town busing due to a racial desegregation order, inequities in court over academics. Cross-town busing, and part of that created a Division of Safety and Security. So, I was a Cleveland school student, sitting in— and for those of us who are mature enough, not "old," mature enough to remember high school typing class or junior high typing class – anybody? Actually, I guess it's keyboarding now, I'm not even sure what it is, I don't think they even do that now. So, a guy walks in the room with a two-way radio, goes back to the teacher, and I get called back, and I'm going, "Wait a minute, what did I do?" She says, "Mr. Connor wants you to type his duty report. She says you're the fastest typer and do the best job." So, I'm like, "Who is this guy? What's this about?"

Well, that led to free pizza there, because he owned a pizza shop on the side. And I went and did his reports. I went on to high school, used to hang out in the security office there, do their investigation and duty reports. More pizza, a little pay under the table at that time, a few bucks for a high school kid. And the rest turned out to be history. The day I graduated, the deputy principal said, "You're not going anywhere. Hang over here while you're going to work on your bachelor's degree at Cleveland State." I got a Bachelor's in Social Service, Criminal Justice concentration. I went on, while I was still working in Cleveland District, to get a Master's in Public Administration.

And while I was in the schools, I developed a specialty with gangs. We had rival youth gangs. One of the unintended consequences of mixing kids from rival neighborhoods with the cross-town busing wasn't academics; it was they mixed rival gangs. So, we'd have gang riots in schools. I developed a specialty doing that. Really got into working with the gangs, ended up creating a five-person team with 127 schools, 73,000 kids, strictly working on gangs for the school district. Anywhere from talking to second graders on why they shouldn't join gangs and dealing with parents, to mediating disputes that were leading up to a drive-by shooting, threats, dismissal, to actually the street enforcement investigations and cooperation with Cleveland Police.

So, I caught a lot of attention for that, got a little side business doing training. I worked in a suburban school district for three years as a Director of Security for the school district there, Assistant Director of a federally funded anti-gang task force. And then I just went out on my own. I got a little fed up with the corruption in school politics at the point in time and decided to maintain my integrity and my freedom of life and not mix in some of the politics of some of the dynamics that were going on. I took a part-time gig into a full-time business. And until now, 40 years, a doctoral degree later, here we are doing school security. It's a lot more complex than what it's been. So, I had a great opportunity to work from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska with one school, 125 kids, to Miami-Dade, Chicago Public, some of the largest districts. And I enjoy doing security assessments, emergency planning, training. And then, as we'll talk about, I'm sure, a little bit more, expert witness work, civil litigation. I've worked on the mass shootings, on the lawsuits, rape, other sexual assaults, gang violence, and that type of stuff. So, a really weird background, weird mix, but that's where I was meant to be.

Brian, I just want to add one thing. Cleveland's only a couple hours directly south of Detroit, and I spent a lot of my formative years, first of all, in the mid-60s with busing in Detroit, so I understand that reference. And then the second part is Cleveland hosted the APIT (Police Institute for Tactical Training). So, I bet during some of those years that we probably passed each other, probably going back and forth. That's amazing.

In the same room! We used to do a lot of law enforcement conferences. Actually, one of the Cleveland PD guys and I formed the Ohio chapter of the Midwest Gang Investigators Association, dealt with McLennan and all the — yeah, just that whole network. Got involved with the suburbs with some federal grants, so I got on the speaking circuit with those different federal conferences. So, interesting mixes of public safety, law enforcement, and education, which is not necessarily an easy blend.

No, but essential in this work.

Yeah, I would say I appreciate you sharing that experience, and to add my opinion to that, it's probably why you have the perspective that you do. Not just a long history of being in the schools, but dealing with things like that, with different gang issues and just the normal crime that schools, especially larger school systems in larger major metropolitan areas, have to deal with. And so the reason why I wanted, for our listeners, why I wanted you to cover all that stuff too, is because now, because of this epidemic of school shootings that continues to occur, we've got all these experts coming out. We've got people trying to sell different technologies, and it's all very well-intentioned for the most part, for most people involved in it. There's a lot of people just trying to make a buck, which I get. But having a good foundational understanding of what schools really face is important, because that's what people forget in all this. It's like we're going after these low-frequency but highly impactful events, but there are all of these other problems too that most teachers typically have to deal with, and what all schools have to deal with, that kind of all fit into this process. You can't leave that on the table, meaning we can't focus on just one thing without having some sort of comprehensive plan of how we're dealing with everything. And a lot of folks just don't have that background knowledge; they're not aware of what teachers are facing on a daily basis really, most of the time, and how that impacts their ability to keep kids safe.

It's such a unique environment. You've got to understand school climate, school culture, school-community relations, and most of all, school politics or "politricks," as I call it – my first book's "Politricks of School Safety." Because you know, you can get the most decorated person with a background in the military and law enforcement – you know, captains, chiefs, deputy chiefs – come into a job as Director of School Security and figure, "You know what? I dealt with a lot of this at the local or county level, or wherever they worked. I dealt with bureaucracy and politics." And they come into a school district like, "Okay, this is a whole different world." It's an organizational structure, not paramilitary, highly structured, "Chief says do this, you do it." No, we do collaboration here, we're going to form teams, we're going to have consensus or not. And you know, I always used to joke, the process sometimes becomes more important than product over the long end. So, it's a whole – you have to be able to manage that. And working with schools, I always say there are three parts to a consultant: One is security and emergency planning; that's really the easiest part. We know what the best practices are, we know what needs to be done. The second part is communications. It's highly ambiguous, uncertain at times, a lot of anxiety. The worst that I've seen, the highest level I've seen with parents about school safety in 40 years. And there's a huge communication component to it. So, that's the second piece. And the third part is political. It's a political issue, image maintenance, denial in many cases over the years of problems. We didn't have gangs in Cleveland schools; I had a superintendent who said, "We had organized student group misconduct." So, I'm going, "Okay, that's pretty good." And when I went – yeah, so when I went to the suburbs, I thought, I said, "Okay, we don't have drug dealers here; we have pharmaceutical distribution specialists in the suburban educational setting." Now, that's the BS. Let's get down to dealing with the problem, but that's the environment you have to work in, right? It's two-thirds of this dynamic is dealing with the communications and the political context, and to be able to do what you need to get done on the security and emergency planning and the best practices. So...

So, on that, what are the biggest problems that you see when it comes to school safety? I know that obviously everyone's talking about school shootings, and we just had another one recently. But you know, what are the big problems? What are the things that bother you about this, because it's an industry now, right? I mean, there's a whole — there are lobbyists, there are big companies doing stuff, there are school administrators who kind of weren't used to dealing with this kind of stuff a while ago, and then are just going, "Okay, well, you guys must be the experts, you tell us." So, I just want to get your perspective on what you think the biggest problems are.

Yeah, it's a long list, so I'll try to, as we were talking about, narrow it down to the top three. That could take an hour or two on its own! The biggest, most current problem is the whole issue of the security vendor, hardware, product, technology marketing is on steroids. It's fueled by private equity in many cases, and it's driven in some cases by lobbyists. These firms are hiring, they're going to state legislatures, lobbying on behalf of their product, trying to get funding shaken loose for what they sell. No coincidence, two governors actually vetoed line items for one particular bill because it was so narrowly written it only fit the description of the one vendor whose lobbyists were doing the lobbying. So, that has taken over in the last, I'd say, three to five years. It's had a dramatic impact. School administrators are saying, "I can't cut through the noise," – same phrase that we hear over and over again, which I know you guys can relate to – "cannot cut through the noise." They're bombarded with vendors.

There are four groups of people that I say, generally speaking, broadly speaking, giving advice: Number one, there are activists, some who may take a gun control versus gun rights type social or political agenda. That's one group, and school safety is being used as a peg for that. The second part are advocates. We have a number of parents who've lost kids, former school administrators, people who have a particular single incident experience. And I respect that and respect their advocacy, and many will tell you that they're doing what they do, and giving speeches and tours is part of their grieving process. But the question becomes, where does grieving and advocacy stop, and where does policy and funding begin? And that line's getting really blurred, and not necessarily for the best interest, because money plays some role, directly or indirectly, with that.

The third area is experts. And experts, if you're looking at a court perspective, it's "qualified in court," and it's "education, training, and experience" constitute experts. And that could be many people from many different perspectives. And then the fourth part is sort of opportunists, that's the last bucket. People who see, you know, are trying to put the round peg into the square hole or vice versa, however you want to call it. And it just doesn't fit, but they're trying to jump in, see some opportunities, or what they believe to be opportunities. So, you've got all of this noise going on, and principals and superintendents are telling us, "We can't figure – we can't cut through the noise." And that's the impact. Either they're acting and making decisions, going down the wrong route for things, or what I'm increasingly seeing is they're freezing and saying, "I'm just, I'm done, I can't do anything." So, that's the number one problem, the most recent trend.

The second part of that is related to our conversations, is if you look at the civil litigation, the expert witness work – and I was talking with a reporter about this earlier – I said, "Well, when you talk about that, people think automatically, 'Well, you're helping people are worried about getting sued.'" Well, nobody wants to get sued. But if somebody's sued, it means somebody's been hurt or killed. And if somebody's hurt or killed, we're talking about kids, or maybe teachers and staff members. So, what do we learn from that? And having worked on some of the highest-profile mass shootings in schools, and single incident wrongful deaths, rape, other sexual assaults, while the facts and merits vary, the common thread is that the allegations of failures are failures of human factors: people, policies, procedures, training, communications, systems gaps. They're not failures of hardware, products, and technology.

So, we're spending all this effort with target hardening. There's a political piece to that. Target hardening is being used by elected officials now to counter calls for gun control. There's a huge agenda here in framing these issues. So, people come out after a school shooting politically and say, "Oh, we need gun control." The counter to that is, "No, we need target hardening." So, there's a ploy here, there's money involved with all these dynamics going on. But the key is, it goes back to people. And if we're skewing our funding and our lobbyists and our legislated mandates to target hardening, and we're doing less and less on the human factors, on the people end, then we wonder why we're still having the problems.

Yeah, and that leads to so many different issues. And you know, we always refer to it as like, sort of this diffusion of responsibility. It's like, "Okay, well, we've got this thing that we've got now. We've got these panic buttons, or we've got this, you know, up-armored whatever, we've got bulletproof this." And it's like, okay, but that one, that's not going to prevent and stop anything. It may at – it's that what we call "after-bang" thinking, right? It's when – so what you're doing is you're saying, "This is if this happens, or we're assuming this is going to happen, here's how we're going to better manage a problem that we think is going to happen." It's like, "Well, you don't have to let it happen." I mean, this is the biggest thing. And what I see too is like, yeah, like you said, you nailed it with different administrators, like, "Okay, I don't know. All these people are pounding on my door, they're showing up saying this, they have impressive résumés." Or at least I think they do. I mean, that's always the thing. I always tell people too, because I can, you know, being prior military myself, it's like, "Hey, just because you have some Tier One guy coming in here to train you, and yeah, they're amazing at what they do, and they had an incredible career, but that doesn't apply here, in the least bit." And so, but we sort of attribute these sorts of skills or knowledge to people that don't really have it. And you know, here you're saying, even with the data, it shows that these are human-centric or human problems, and those things can be fixed. Meaning, I don't have to build a better mousetrap. I don't have to have a technological response. We can use the resources that we have and the people that we have. I mean, because I was talking recently to someone who's in safety in school as well, I was like, "Well, you have a population here that works here that I'm pretty sure they didn't become a teacher or an educator or involved in education because they wanted to make a ton of money, or they wanted to do something." They're here because they care, their heart's in the right place. So, why wouldn't you want to capitalize on that and use those folks who are already caring about what they do, and the students that they have, to build this sort of network? So, I know, Greg, you probably had something to add too, and Ken...

Quickly, from my side, here's the thing: Both of us have spoken to Congress, both of us have spoken to Congressional subcommittees. I can go all the way up to Department of Defense leaders and everything. And when you come in as a subject matter expert, they want to know what the problems are and how to address them as solutions. And the problem is that sometimes lobbyists have much more power over us. I talked to Brian yesterday with a client. If you take a look at hockey gear over the years, when I started playing hockey, there were no helmets; you were lucky if you had a mouthpiece. When we look at cop vests, weren't issued, nobody wore them until much later. And then Kevlar came out and did the test, and people started wearing them. And then they were worn under your uniform shirt; now they're worn outside like a body bunker. Then we take a look at football helmets; they've never been a better generation of football helmets. And you know what? It didn't solve any of the issues. Now, it may have made less severe traumatic brain injuries, but cops are still getting shot in the head whether they're wearing a vest or not. And I'm looking at that like the paintbrush and the old Tom Sawyer, "Hey, look, we're whitewashing the fence, we're doing something." But at the end of the day, and you said it last time we talked, Ken, you said, "We've got to shake up this industry because people are no longer listening. They think they're pointing at the problem, they think that they've proposed a solution." And in reality, all we're doing is marking time until the next shooting. So, I throw that out there as a deterrent in the punch bowl, so to speak.

Well, it is. And you know, if you're hitting the panic button, and that's your answer to everything – well, if you're panicking, you're too late. Yeah, you hit the panic button when you're panicking. And you know, again, "follow the money," the golden rule. Yes, sir, who's behind the drive for the panic buttons? More to be seen, but you can rest assured there's an industry, a cottage industry, and profit there as well. And then what happens is you have people who are well-intentioned and grieving, and they're advocating. "The state mandates that every school, as a parent..." Well, you know, politically, nobody's got – everybody wants to listen to this person that's lost their kid's life. And I agree, but is that the best use of limited resources to mandate? If schools want to buy it and they've got the funds, go for it. But what are we forcing people to do?

And the same with emergency plans. I really think we're over-legislating school safety now to the point where you're putting principals and superintendents more in an office where they're checking the box and going through routines and saying that they're in compliance and filling out 85-page templates. I mean, you guys will appreciate this more than perhaps most people will. You know, some of these emergency plans we're reviewing are 85 to 125 pages now. Nobody from the custodian to the superintendent knows what's in there. And there's one superintendent who had a shooting in his school, now a retired superintendent, who said it best: "When the bullets start flying, no, we're not grabbing the crisis plan." He says, "If we looked at it, talked through it, went through it as teams, processed this, got some, as we would say, shared mental models on this stuff beforehand," he said, "that part helps." He goes, "But when the stuff hits the fan, that's – we're not going to the plan." And the problem is, we're going through the motions of doing something, just like you say, Greg, it's doing – going through the motions of painting that fence. "I've got a plan, and it's state-approved, and I sent it to them, and it's 85 pages." Yeah, and yeah, "it's a good one." You know, it used to be before the digital world, it's a red binder. It's not only a binder, it's a red binder up on the shelf. "And we have one, and it's pretty." Yeah, and then you start opening it up as we actually look at what's in there, and even when you have it, we're going, "Why did you put that in there? That doesn't make sense, or it's contradictory." And who does it turn out to be good for? It's good for attorneys when they're suing you because they're going to say, "Well, you know, on page 74, Doctor so-and-so, superintendent, it says that you shall do this."

And now we've got one other thing. We've got – there's an effort largely driven by consultants and security vendors that are trying to create an industry standard. ASIS International (American Society for Industrial Security International) now has created a school security committee, and it's a standard. And they're going to put this out; it's over 100 pages, and by one word count, it had more than 200 "shalls." Well, anybody that's done litigation work knows the differences between "should" and "shall" put you in some real tight – I'm not giving legal advice, but it puts you in a real tight spot in a position. So, who's for people from outside the industry forcing things in under the industry without the industry's input? And what I respect, you know, in our conversations, is there are transferable skills and ideas and behavior stuff that you guys are the experts. That's totally – and Dr. Joan Johnson, we talked with at length just on her research. I mean, there's stuff out there that's transferable, that's new, that's shifting it up a little bit. And it's not coming in a shiny object for $1 million that you can put at your front entranceway that still doesn't catch the weapons that you claim it does.

Yeah, that's the "think-twice" thing, that attitude. And you know, we all share that. And Joan is a wonderful researcher for that, with decades of experience conducting studies and research. And you know, in this field, it's the least amount of study and research because there's such a small control group to measure, and every incident is so varied and different. And then you talk about the psychographics and the dynamics and all these other things. Yet, I've never seen a proliferation of more so-called subject matter experts. And I think we need to say "so-called," because the idea is, you know, I stay in my lane. I'm the best in the world at one skill, and I can back that up with all my bona fides. But I don't comment on CNN on fishing, you know what I'm saying? I don't go out there and purport myself to be an expert in other places. And you truly are the standard for what an expert needs to be in this field, and you're still competing for time with people that have no bona fides whatsoever. How did that make you feel?

Well, I appreciate that. And it's, you know, there's room for different voices, and I'm certainly not the only one out here. But it's got to be there. It's unbelievable, the explosion of what I always say – and I've seen this all the way back. One of the advantages of being mature, not "getting old," is over four decades, and starting young in this. I've been here before Columbine, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Paducah, Kentucky, Pearl, Mississippi – ones that people don't even know about now. We have people that are in schools that weren't even born, that are working in schools, weren't even born at Columbine, that are starting into the teaching and stuff, or weren't even – I should say weren't born, weren't graduated from high school at the time, right? And they're entering the field. So, a lot of people really didn't live through these experiences. Like 9/11, right? If you – I went to the 9/11 Memorial Museum with my daughter, who's a college junior. And two different experiences we're going through. It had the same emotional impact on us. We spent hours there, we were emotionally drained. And we sat out over at the pub down the street for lunch and I said, "Man, I can remember exactly where I was sitting." And I literally described it: "Here I was in my office here with," I named the two anchors who were on cable when it was happening, exactly moment by moment. And she looked up and she says, "I'm emotionally drained," she says, "and to think I wasn't even born." This is amazing, you know? And it's – I said, "This made me think of the school arena." Right? There are people who didn't live through Columbine in the same, at least professionally, in these positions. And it's like starting – trying to reinvent the wheel, put the round peg in the square hole. And it's just, focus on the fundamentals. The things that we go into schools and ask on a consulting and are a couple of things: Number one, are you focusing on the fundamentals? Because you're looking for a PhD solution, and you haven't passed kindergarten doing the basic things. You're talking about the AI weapons detection system, but your staff member has got a propped-open door in the back and does that every day, and has a sign on the door. There was one school we were in – a high school – after a second visit several years later. Great administration, great district leadership, but human behavior, right? They put a buzzer camera intercom on the custodial dock. And then the assistant superintendent, "Here, I want to show you where we beefed this up based on your last recommendations." We walk back, there's a sign by the door, it says, "No one should never, ever, not just never, never ever prop open this door." There's a door propped open with some towels that have been laundered in a cart next to it, propped open. And I said, "You know, it's still human behavior, opening up side doors." You put an AI weapons detection system, spend millions of dollars on these questionable AI systems on what they catch and what they don't catch, and how they're marketed. And here's low-hanging fruit: you run them between 7:00 AM and 3:00 PM, and then schools are open until 10:00 at night for athletic events, performing arts, community use of the school. It's like, low-hanging fruit, guys, you can come in here at 5:00 or 6:00 and stash something if you wanted to come through clean tomorrow. It's security theater, it's smoke and mirrors, it's an emotional security blanket, and it's done to pander to school, to solve political and community relations problems, to appease parents, to give them shiny object syndrome, to say that we've done something. And you spend more, then, but as we've talked about, you create unintended consequences, right? How are you going to implement this? Fidelity of implementation is a joke. You're pulling staff members from other areas of the building, and they're not monitoring hallways, classrooms, stairwells where you've got bullying, sexual assault, harassment, fights going on. It's critical thinking. I tell people when we go and start a presentation, the first slide I have is – unlike many other speakers that are kind of pay-to-play to get on these conference agendas – I said, "I only have one thing to sell you that I'm selling you: the concept of critical thinking." Right?

Yep, and you've got to make critical thinking. And this goes to – you're bringing up some excellent points. And I think one of the problems is, a lot of people don't understand this problem, they don't understand school shooters, they don't understand some of the stuff that happens. So, it's like we're coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist or won't help. And I don't think that that problem has been clearly defined on how to do this. And you brought up, even to the point of when it comes to these emergency manuals or different training manuals or threat management things that we're going to do, or you know, we want to develop a case on someone. Okay, you have to document certain things. Even the people that put that out, the "experts," so to speak, the researchers who've done all the work on this stuff, putting it together, they even state in this stuff like, "Look, this is not a checklist to find a school shooter. There's no such thing as a profile of a school shooter." They even state it right up front in their writing, they're going like, "Here's some things you need to take into consideration." And it becomes, again, now it becomes like, "This is a paperweight." Like, I open this, I read through it, 80 pages, and I'm like, "What am I supposed to do with this? I've got to write a report about something. I'm not an investigator, I don't have law enforcement background. I'm a school administrator, and I've got three other jobs that I do for the school because I'm a coach and I do this." And that's what, but which makes it more difficult. But anywhere I've gone, you know, we kind of forget that there's a whole community behind that school. Whether some parents are going to be more involved than others, whether some teachers are going to be more involved, less. It's like, you go back to like, "Why aren't we engaging these folks and then them telling us, 'Here's what we need?'" Because even the Department of Defense has sort of done a different course with how they procure stuff and how they get new technologies. Where before, it was everyone just, especially during the Global War on Terror, and like there was unlimited funding, people just coming up with stuff with these solutions and then going, "Oh, that's cool, let's buy that, let's buy that." Now they're like, "Hey, wait a minute, we've got all this stuff. Let's just define what our requirements are, what our needs are." There are going to be companies that can solve the problem, right? They're going to come in and go, "We want that DOD money, we'll figure it out." So, and I don't think it's starting with that. It's not coming from the school, it's not coming from what that community needs. Because, you know, some small school in the middle of nowhere, Georgia, their needs are going to be very different than a Chicago public school, which has a host of other problems. I mean, so now it comes in with the legislation, and that there's no one-size-fits-all. It has to come from in there. And then that's kind of one of the big things that I see occurring. And then now it goes to those parents and administrators going like, "Well, I don't know," or, "I've got a buddy who was in the military, and he works for this company, and they've got this cool thing, and it's pretty badass."

So, Ken, let me throw a Part B in there before you answer, so it'll be two sides of the same coin. So, you have an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) to help defibrillate when a person is down. How many for a school? And should they be on each floor of the school, and how many per student? Well, they come out, and CNN or some other talking head had said about the Georgia shooting, "Well, they only had one School Resource Officer, every school should have three." Okay, well, where does that funding come from? And where does the training? What is the standard? And are they armed? What happens is these pundits suggest things, and they've done zero research whatsoever. You've been in the field for four decades, so I would hope that some of them are coming to you and going, "Hey, you know," – because I hate the term "best practices," I think we all do – "but the idea is that they at least come to you and go, 'What's a good plan? What's a fidelity-filled plan for the future?'"

Yeah, and that's it. I mean, part of the dynamics is, well, there are so many pieces to this. "Best practices" is an education phrase, and really, "what works." And the problem it is, is now they're trying to take this – create this industry standard – and then take it through so they can have a standard. And then take it to what it is, so that the lobbyists can take it to the state legislator and then say, "See, there's this quote-unquote National or International standard, and you need to codify this into law and mandate it." So now they're, you know, it's basically shoving it down schools' throats. And it's driven by hardware, product, and technology, and security consultants. And no matter what they say, there are some good people on that committee, I'm sure, that were well-intentioned. I already know of a few that were on there. But the underlying push here, there's a bigger agenda, right? It's a bigger – why now, and why not 10 years ago? Well, why now is because there's private equity, there's money, or there's a perception that there's money. Well, here's a little inside secret for anybody who's listening – don't tell anybody, it's just going to be the three of us and everybody who's watching – guess what? The COVID pandemic funds, money that the schools have been using to buy the shiny objects, is done next year. It runs out in the next fiscal year. So that little bucket of money that people have been dipping in and saying, "Hey, it's not coming from our operating budget, but I've got $17 million over here. I can spend $3 million, buy some weapons detection system and some panic buttons, calm the parents, and hey, you know what? Kick it down the road and hopefully it gets quiet." That's going out. And then the one-time shot in the arm state grant... You look at the Georgia school shooting: one report said that the system for the panic buttons cost a million dollars for the school district where the incident occurred. According to the story, $800,000 of that was provided by a state grant, and $200,000 was from the sheriff's drunk and driving ticket fund. So, the school didn't pay a dime on that. Well, what's going to happen for maintenance, repair, replacement, upgrade? We see this with everything, whether it's cameras, whether it's this type. When that one-time shot-in-the-arm funding's gone, is that coming out of operating budgets? In school districts that are cutting funds, it's not going to be there. So, you're going to see – you know, I have this vision that was to deal with like weapons, that AI weapons detection, the screening at the front doors. The hardware is leased, the software is subscribed. So, what are you going to do when you can't afford both? I'm looking at a repo truck coming in, hauling the hardware out, right? Because you can't pay your subscription, and you haven't done it. So then, what do you tell parents? You've given them a false sense of security. Now you have to explain why you're undoing or not doing what you told them in the first place, which was a bill of emotional security blanket, security theater.

And it comes down, as we know and agree on, it comes down to behaviors. Whatever it is, it comes down to behaviors. Whether that's "left of bang," "during bang," or "after bang," you're dealing with behaviors. It's not a perfect science, but there's certainly information out there where we know a lot of science behind it that's not being tapped into. And we know that in the schools, the number one way you find out about weapons plots and kids that are going to cause harm to themselves and others is from when a kid comes forward, tells an adult that they trust. It's relationships, recognizing abnormalities in behaviors. And what I say, not only "to see something, say something," I have a third one: and "train people to do something." Because if you're seeing it and saying it, and nobody knows what to do, your first two aren't doing you that much good because you've got to know what to do.

Brian famously brings that up every class that we have: "If you see something, say something, but what am I looking for and who do I tell?" And that's the problem. We don't put any emphasis whatsoever on the human behavior, that predictive analysis, the things like that we recently wrote about, the "parking lot look." Those are as good as these multi-million dollar programs, or better. And nobody's taking a look at them. So, you know, that's our fight every day.

Yeah, and we're in the same – we're fighting the same fight, a different battlefield. Although, I think the two can come together, is that, you know, the best – the phrase I use, as you know, when you do media, you've got to talk in a soundbite because you only get 20 seconds, right? What I get across is really the best security and safety for kids is less visible and invisible but more impactful. Right? If you're focusing on behavior, I can't dangle a relationship or a training or a behavior out in front of parents at a PTA meeting or in front of a news camera at a press conference and say, "See, we've got something new, we dealt with it." But you can do that with a weapons detection, more cameras, a fortified front entranceway. But it's what's beyond that fortified entranceway – the people behind it that'll make it or break it. I mean, your bus driver, who's the first and last person to see a kid during a school day, who's going to tell if something's off? Your teachers, your secretaries in the office that are dealing with irate parents and people coming in and problems, strangers coming up to try to get to the building. Your custodial facilities personnel, who knows the building better than the principal? Your facilities personnel, your custodian knows it.

And then all, as we know, and we've talked – I talked with Joan, you know, a little bit even longer about the research. Just, you know, get a little wonky once you start getting into the academic world. So, we like to talk more about it and learn about it. You know, I had to laugh, she said, "You know, one foot in academia, one foot in practice." We were talking about just the people like Dr. Gary Klein, who we look to for a lot of things. But if you can't put it in practice, what good is it? Right? What good is that? That's why I got an Ed.D. (applied doctorate), because I want something to – you know, I looked at school administrator strategic school safety leadership and communicating safety in highly ambiguous at certain times. So, a long, long, long thing, but how do you deal with it? How do you lead on it? And then how do you communicate about it? And it still comes down to people.

I mean, you hit on an interesting point, you talk about defining it. Five years finishing through in a doctoral program dissertation, there is no standard definition of what a safe school is. There are many commonalities on the agreements on the things that make up a safe school, the components. But you can't just blurt out a line and say, "This is what a safe school is." And as a matter of fact, we've gone through that on, "What's a mass shooting? What's a school shooting?" There are even debates on that. If it was during the football game on Friday night, does that count? You're getting into all these areas. And you know, you're tying it back to – and what I think it is, is what can these administrators and community members and parents do? Because I believe in starting at the local level. I'm never going to change national policy, but I can affect my neighborhood, I can affect my school district that my kids go to. And that's the biggest thing. What I talk to different school administrators about is that typically what happens is, you know, there's a school shooting or something, everyone reaches out. A lot of people will reach out and say, "Is there something I can do?" or, "I'm concerned about this." So, people are there. We've worked with folks who are trying to stand up, like, a parent-led, almost like a neighborhood kind of watch for the school where they all volunteer their time. But then you get into just the pure bureaucracy of it, about what you can and can't do at school. And now we've got to do background checks on people because now we're opening it up to people outside who haven't been vetted. So, there are a lot of these different barriers that come in the way. And so, what can those schools do to say, "You know what? This is how we're going to do things," or, "We want to do it this way," because I think their voice is more powerful in a sense because they know their community better. So, it's like, "What are they supposed to do? I'm a dad, I'm a teacher, I'm whatever. What can I do right there in my district?"

Well, we talk about that expertise that you develop by being there every day. And you know, that whole idea, I try to get across to educators as much as I do what I do: you're the expert at your school. You know that pattern recognition and abnormalities – right up your alley here. What, you know, starts at, right? A kid getting on a bus, something's off, this is not the same kid I see every day in terms of behavior. Arrival and dismissal, being out, greeting kids, observing, calling kids by name, engaging with them in the hallway – the "people" piece of it is extremely important. The challenge is, the only thing school administrators have less of than money is time. Getting on the agenda. And I know that, talking with Joan about this in her years of work and your years of work, is you have great programs, you have great training, you have research-based stuff. You know it'll work, you know it'll help people meet their mission, and you still can't get on the agenda.

I had a superintendent call me after the Uvalde shooting here in the Midwest. And of course, after the Uvalde shooting, I had eight requests across three states in three weeks to do training. You want to guess how many I had the year before or the year after? It wasn't eight! I've had eight calls from attorneys and lawsuits during that time period, but not for training. But he says, "How much time do you need?" And I said – and he'd seen me speak when he was assistant superintendent somewhere – and I said, "Well, truth is, I need at least a day to lay a foundation, to really get to where to plant some seeds and give something people go with." And I said, "But I know you're not going to give that to me." And I said, "So I'd like at least a half a day." And in my mind, I'm thinking, "I really hope to get two hours out of this." And he says, "I'll pay you for the full day, you've got 40 minutes!" There you go. And it's a three-day – a three-day leadership team – or leadership retreat, rather, with building front administrators, central office administrators, your board members. So, a good guy, and we talk for a while. And it happened, I was sitting out in the school parking lot, my daughter was attending a Sunday play performance, and I'm eating a Philly cheesesteak, waiting for her, talking with the superintendent who had enough time on that Sunday to talk. We went back and forth for about an hour just talking about the focus of things. He gave me – finally said, "All right, I'll give you an hour and a half." And when it was done, they said – and I mean, you know how it is, you make it work, right? And when it was done, he says, "You know, it's the best thing that we did." He says, "You never would have hit it in 40 minutes."

So, the point is, it's a leadership issue. It's not a money issue. If it comes from the board, it comes from the superintendent, it comes from your building principal, it becomes a priority, right? So, you have to make it a leadership issue to say this is a priority and to keep it up on the agenda. And those who do – those who get it, get it. And I think we're working on it, but it's small wins. Look, I was in a County School District in West Virginia last month, and the superintendent said, "I know it's a big ask, but can you do six 50-minute back-to-back presentations?" 50 minutes, 10-minute break, 50, 10-minute break, lunch in between. And I said, "Yes," not realizing that, you know, I'm not 40 anymore, and my legs, and then a three-hour drive home, may have had a different opinion on the situation. But I knocked it out. But the cool thing about it was, it was everybody from custodial/facility people, bus drivers, all the way up to assistant superintendent, superintendent, and everybody in between. They were rotating all their employees through a series of six different back-to-school training options. So, everybody got through. And it's the most – it's the most impactful thing you do. You get people, you do the best you can. I knocked it out in 50 minutes. You hit the core of things, tell them, "Look, I know you've got to have your manual, but let's talk about situational awareness stuff, pattern recognition." And then the big one: cognitive decision-making under stress. Because educators are good at recognizing the abnormalities and patterns. Yes, we're struggling with getting people to be fully present and engaging in supervision. I had a superintendent tell me, "I need you to come in to do a training." I'm going, "What do you want me to hit? What do you want out of this so I can see how to make sure I blend it in in terms of focus?" They said, "I really need you to tell three teachers that standing in the corner of the playground with 60 kids and them looking at their phones, talking to each other, is not active supervision and they're not fully aware of what's going on around them." So that piece needs work. Pattern recognition and abnormalities, I think, again, you know, the research and experience, they're good at it because they live it every day. They recognize what's abnormal. They're the experts. And then we get to the cognitive decision-making under stress, and we're stuck again. So, those two end pieces, they're the ones that are struggling. I think we can nurture and support the pattern piece because they've got it there, they get it. I mean, how many times do people say, "Oh, there's a stranger in the hallway, I knew something was up there. That car didn't belong at pickup and arrival. Hey, there's something with that car in the back parking lot." They lean – they can always get better through training, but they lean better in that direction. It's those other pieces that we're working on. And none of those things have to do with the 85-page emergency plan.

Yeah, now you're exactly right. It's a human-to-human breakdown and failure that has been around since Plato. And that's why they used to sit on the steps and look face to face and solve these problems. And the thing is, it's okay to have an advocate in Congress, it's okay to have somebody write a law, but that doesn't mean it's enforceable. That doesn't mean it's the most prudent decision when education and training are available all around you. And I, like Brian as well, like starting at the grassroots level, and I start like regional training level, and I think everybody needs to be included, not just a supervisor. Oh, okay, good. I'll back up. And yeah, I didn't know how much time you have, because Greg's got a hard stop in a few minutes. But I kind of wanted to just go over some of the legal stuff, a legal precedent stuff. So, we can either finish tomorrow, if you're good to stay on for a little bit, you can just be me and you to finish up, and then I can edit that out.

Yeah, let's knock it out now.

Okay, listen, thank you, Ken. I've got to drop off. It's 11:00, I'm sorry about that. I hope we get a chance to collaborate and talk some more soon. And then, Brian, I'm not going to leave the studio, I'm just going to shut down the audio on my part so I can upload my piece.

Yeah, you can click "Leave Studio," it should be fine. And then it'll still upload – well, it'll upload when you get back home and connect to internet, you know what I'm saying?

Okay. All right, buddy, hey, thanks, Ken.

All right, thanks, Greg.

Yeah. Sorry about that, technology! Hey, if it's any better, it happens with CNN or Fox. Yeah, no, I got you. So, had a little – yeah, all good, I'll edit that out. But we had some audio issues there, folks, and then Greg has a hard stop, but he had to kind of jump off. But, you know, the kind of one other thing I wanted to ask you about was sort of this legal precedent that's been set with parents being held criminally negligent for the school shootings that were conducted by their kids, right? So, it already happened with a father in Georgia, the most recent one. And then we know Ethan Crumbley and his parents in Oxford High School in Michigan. So, I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on that because that obviously opens a whole legal door. And what you think in general when it comes to negligence on who's responsible, because a lot of people are just to say, "Well, the school is responsible for the safety of the children." But they're also not given, like we talked about, a lot of the resources or things to deal with these situations. So, I just kind of want to get your thoughts on that.

Yeah, what I've seen is creeping up and it's intensifying. It's really hit a head here in the last, this incident and certainly with Uvalde and other things that have happened that haven't captured the extent of national attention is, look, people are desperate and fed up. They're searching for accountability, they're demanding accountability, they're looking for somebody to blame. And in some cases, there are legitimate places to blame depending on the facts of each case. And we've seen that with the uptick in civil litigation and school safety in general. As I say, I often get more calls in a month from attorneys than I do from superintendents. Lawsuits versus proactive stuff. Anecdotally, I think there's a correlation there, if you're not doing the training and you're not doing the proactive stuff, anecdotally, I would think that you're probably higher risk for having some liability. But this – so we've seen the uptick in the school security litigation piece of it, and not just shootings, but rape, other sexual assaults, gang violence, aggravated assault, so all kinds of other cases in addition to the shootings, it's not just limited to that.

So that's the call, and the point to the schools. And now, and that still hasn't solved it, right? People are looking for it to solve, to end, to drop. It's a wicked problem. We know from research and literature on wicked problems: there are no five things you could do and just stop and solve it. And if you do one thing on one side to address one piece, that affects the other end. So, you have all these tentacles of the problem. So now the move is, "Okay, hold parents accountable." And hey, I am totally supportive of parental accountability. I think there are some huge gaps there in terms of why we see the things that we're seeing: the focus on the home, the parenting, the family structure, the family function or dysfunction, all are elements. But the parents, now let's bring them into play. And typically, it's around access to the firearms, so that's the peg, the hole to get them in. But then – and I'm not saying we shouldn't have schools held accountable, I'm not saying we shouldn't have parents held accountable. What I am saying is, when we continue to see school shootings in spite of those two things, we're still going to be grasping for accountability.

The reality is, we work – and I've worked 40 years, and you've worked in your field – everybody's working for risk elimination. The reality is what we can achieve at best is risk reduction, and we try to tighten that hole. And the good news is – I shine a little light here – the good thing is, schools are much better at threat assessment and preventing, and security, than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. The bad news is, we're dealing with human behavior. Well, here we go again, right? Behavior. And when you're dealing with human behavior, you're going to slip through the cracks. Whether that's alleged failures in human factors, or whether that's not recognizing the warning signs, whether that's not responding to your expectations and appropriately when an incident occurs, it still comes back to human behavior. We can't solve a behavior problem with a technology solution.

I think that's a good way to look at it. And, you know, again, you're never going to – you can't prevent everything, right? You can't have a completely secure – you can't have a completely secure world and live in a free society at the same time. So, you don't – my thing is like, you don't need to, meaning you can greatly reduce some of these issues and some of the things that you see by getting people more involved and focusing on some of the things that matter and how you can control things within your own community. And like you said even earlier, what are the foundational elements? What is this? What are we building this on? What is the overall thing we're trying to achieve? Because there are a lot of different solutions for that, or different ways that are going to work depending on the type of school and the environment. I mean, it's just like any other type of threat, it's going to be different everywhere you go. And trying to over-legislate something kind of ends up putting people in a box. Now they're forced to do something, now it's like, "Well, I don't really have control, I have to do this." And now we're relying on these technological solutions, and you brought up all the different drawbacks to that. And it's just, we're creating a massive industry and process and system without addressing those key factors.

Well, schools aren't factories. They're not City Hall, they're not federal office buildings, they're not military installations, they're not your major corporation and plant and factory. They are community centers. And they're community centers not only for kids who come in and represent a microcosm of the broader community and the good, the bad, and the challenges that come with that. But they're also community centers after school, in the evenings. I mean, they're the heart of many small communities, many mid-size communities, many big communities, where that's the heart of activities for after school: performing arts, athletics, community use of schools, recreation centers, senior meetings, whatever it is. Schools that you talk to the school custodian, and I say, "You have an alarm system? What time do you typically turn it off?" They say, "Sunday night for four hours because the building's open, you've got cleaning people in." He said, "The buildings are open 10:00 at night, six to seven days a week," in a good high school on average, that's what we hear. 10:00 at night. So, somebody's using that beyond the academic day. So, it's not a sterile environment, it's not a TSA and airport. And you have to look at that context, the purpose, the function, what fits reasonable technology support. But it's a supplement to, but not a substitute for, the human factors again. And until we button that up and recognize that and say what parents want to know two things, or should want to know two things: Parents want to know two things: Number one, what do you have in place to reduce the risks? And number two, how well prepared are you to manage something you can't prevent?

And then that's a great starting point too. And engaging those people in the community as well, to get on board with this. And I always tell people, no matter where I'm at, whether we're working with a private company, law enforcement, schools, it's like, "Look, you have a lot more say in this than you're recognizing." Like, you are – if you're in charge here, then be in charge and say, "This is what we're going to do." And there's obviously a lot of fear with that, because people don't want to think, they don't want to make the wrong decision. It's like, "Okay, but making a decision and articulating why you did it and saying these are our policies, you have a legal leg to stand on if it fits in line with what are common accepted practices. And you can make it local to your community, you can modify what you need to given the resources and tools that you have." So...

That's why they say, "If you've seen one school, if you've done an assessment on one school, you've seen one school." And it's kind of like that with school shootings: "You've seen one school shooting, you've seen one," because the fact patterns are different. But it comes down to – bottom line is, when security works, it's because of people. When it fails, it's because of people. And people equates to behaviors.

Yep. I obviously completely agree with that, because that's our whole approach. But I'm going to have a bunch of links in the episode details so people can get in touch with you and go to your website and everything. But what's the best way for folks that want to reach out and get a hold of you, or have you at their school, or find out more? What's the best way to do that?

Yeah, easiest way to reach out is the website: schoolsecurity.org, or ken@schoolsecurity.org. Also, on LinkedIn, I do a lot of posts, doing a lot more in-depth as far as the social platforms. On LinkedIn, you can find me there, connect. I try to put some more detailed things to stimulate thoughts and fuel that almost daily.

Yeah, and I'll put that link in the details as well, because that's where we kind of first came across you a while back, and I've been following what you're posting. Because I think it's great, there's a ton of information in there, and even just a way to look at some of these things, you're giving some really good thinking points for parents, administrators, anyone in the industry to think about. And you're backing it up with data and what we actually know, not what the news story is out there, or what someone's story of being involved with their children, which is heartbreaking. But at the same time, I get it, but that might not be the right thing to do in this situation.

Critical thinking. Absolutely, critical thinking. Can't say it enough. We've got to learn how to do that, though.

So that's obviously where we come into play and what we love doing. But, singing from the same sheet of music, I enjoy talking with you guys. Absolutely, Ken, I really appreciate it, appreciate your time. We'll follow up with you and keep the conversation going. We kind of actually wanted to have a following discussion with Joan Johnson on The Human Behavior Podcast; we've had her on a while back, to get into some of this with the decision-making and her area of expertise, because she's brilliant. And hopefully, have her on as well.

She is. We spent about an hour and a half for what we thought would be a very short conversation and realized we need more, so we're continuing that conversation. So, I think we're all singing from the same sheet of music, and we just need to build a bigger choir.

Yep. Well, that's great. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Ken. I know you're a busy guy, and the schedule is just a suggestion, as you told us, which I agree with. So, we thank you, thank you for your time, and keep up the work, and we'll be in touch. All right, thanks to you and Greg as well, Brian. Take care, thanks, Ken.