Tagged With "shooter drills"

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, and James Doubek, National Public Radio, November 10, 2019 A regular drumbeat of mass shootings in the U.S., both inside schools and out, has ramped up pressure on education and law enforcement officials to do all they can to prevent the next attack. Close to all public schools in the U.S. conducted some kind of lockdown drill in 2015-2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Last year, 57% of teens told researchers they...

Greetings, ACN Community! I wanted to share this fantastic new resource guide developed by one of the work groups from the Georgia Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force. This guide provides background on best practice, principles of prevention, identifying resources for the classroom, developing a prevention plan, age appropriate teaching suggestions, analysis of specific programs, and guidelines for implementation and evaluation. It is really quite thorough and is full of excellent ideas...

School safety has been a major concern in Broward County Public Schools since the bloody Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. As a result of hard work of BCPS superintendent Robert Runcie (who, by the way, has recently received a “highly effective” evaluation for his outstanding performance and has been given a raise) new strategies have been implemented to ensure safety on BCPS campuses across the county. First and foremostly, all BCPS students...

Picture this. Its 10:00 am and you have had to evacuate students from your class. There are posters on the floor, several of them ripped up. Pens and markers thrown across the room. You have one student, Carly, standing in front of you, with a chair raised over her head, threatening to throw it at you. Carly’s eyes are glazed over, she keeps calling you “mum” and you’re worried she is going to step onto a shard of your favourite coffee mug she broke a few minutes back. What are you going to...

Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am . 2012 January Responding to Students with PTSD in Schools Sheryl Kataoka, MD, MSHS, Audra Langley, PhD, Marleen Wong, PhD, Shilpa Baweja, MA, and Bradley Stein, MD, PhD The prevalence of trauma exposure among youth is a major public health concern, with a third of adolescents nationally reporting that they have been in a physical fight in the past twelve months and 9% having been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property. Studies have...

Many blog readers know that my niece Carly is a survivor of the Parkland shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You may know that my father also survived a mass murder, and like Carly, hid in a closet until the police arrived. Almost 70 years separated the two tragedies. Our guest blogger this week is my sister Merri, Carly's mom. Merri shares her first-hand account of what happened the afternoon of February 14, 2018, when Carly sent this text, “Mom don’t freak out but we are on...

The Relentless School Nurse: Speaking Truth to Power in a Collaborative Op-Ed The power of social media cannot be underestimated! A few short months ago, I connected with Sunny Hallowell, PhD, RN, a Nurse Faculty from Villanova University on Twitter. Sunny had just returned from Florida where she was presenting Nursing Rounds at a Miami hospital the day of the Parkland shootings. When she returned home, her 5-year-old son shared his experience during his school’s active shooter drill. Sunny...

The Relentless School Nurse: Speaking Truth to Power in a Collaborative Op-Ed The power of social media cannot be underestimated! A few short months ago, I connected with Sunny Hallowell, PhD, RN, a Nurse Faculty from Villanova University on Twitter. Sunny had just returned from Florida where she was presenting Nursing Rounds at a Miami hospital the day of the Parkland shootings. When she returned home, her 5-year-old son shared his experience during his school’s active shooter drill. Sunny...

Every novelist, psychologist, anthropologist and your Aunt Jane have wanted to know this. What motivates people and what’s going on when their behavior is irritating or just plain doesn’t make sense? At Echo, we encourage adults to look beneath the behavior of children and to understand ‘behavior as communication.’ It may be that the child is choosing a way of communicating that is hard for you to deal with but that doesn’t diminish the fact that the behavior is driven by some deep need or...

Greetings, My community is just starting Active Shooting drills using the ALICE model. A number of the teachers, parents and students have expressed concerns that these drills (because they are designed to simulate a real active threat) could be traumatizing and/or re-traumatizing for those in the schools. I'm wondering if anyone has any information (sample policies, procedures or practices) that can make an active shooting drill more trauma informed.

Emily, Your blog post goes straight to my heart and speaks to the work I am doing in gun violence prevention. As a school nurse, your fears, and those of your friend's are not only warranted but grounded in unimaginable tragedy that has played itself out over and over again. Reactions from school districts have included recreating hyper-realistic scenarios in an effort to prepare students and staff for an active shooter. This creates additional trauma, and while school shootings are still...