In this episode of Real Talk, KJK Student Defense Attorneys Susan Stone and Kristina Supler are joined by Joe Hendry, a Senior Director of onsite services for Navigate 360. They discuss school safety and best practices. The conversation includes why schools are still a relatively safe space for kids , the importance and limitations of a threat assessment in today’s day and age, and what parents, students, and school faculty need to know to properly prevent and manage threatening school situations.
Links Mentioned In the Show:
Show Notes:
- (01:06) What makes today’s guest perfect to discuss children’s safety in school
- (02:48) Are schools in this day and age considered a safe environment for kids?
- (03:15) The unprecedented spike in mental health issues in schools since the onset of the pandemic
- (03:56) Have professionals and experts in the field determined a specific profile that indicates one can become an active shooter?
- (04:50) The limitations of threat assessment in a school setting
- (05:50) An instance where 2 separate threat assessments were fatally inaccurate
- (07:49) How to distinguish a possible threat indicator from an unremarkable firearm post on social media
- (08:45) How conducting risk assessments can aid in improving safety and security protocols in the school setting overall
- (09:37) Typical issues Joe and his team identify during risk assessments in school districts
- (11:10) Why over 90% of these catastrophic incidents are actually internal threats
- (12:00) The importance of early intervention to prevent behavioral issues in students from escalating
- (13:43) What parents and their children need to know about school lockdowns during dire situations
- (16:28) Why simply containing dangerous situations within the school physically is not always to correct solution and might even work in favor of the assailant
- (18:29) Flexibility is the key to an effective lockdown protocol; there is no one-size-fits-all lockdown
Transcript:
Susan Stone: Today’s topic is quite serious. School safety.
Kristina Supler: This is a really difficult topic to discuss. It’s. It’s a topic that evokes anxiety and fear and. It’s top of mind for all of us, particularly as families and households are getting ready for children to go back to school. So we really thought it was essential to do an episode on school safety.
Susan Stone: And every time there is another school shooting, it seems like there’s a lot of finger pointing and blame placed and it’s not constructive to constantly place blame. So we really wanted to have a guest here to talk about what are steps we could take to. Be more solution focused.
Kristina Supler: With that in mind. Let’s kick it off with today’s guest, Joe Hendry.
We’re here today to talk about school safety and best practices. We’re so pleased to be joined by our guest, Joe Henry, Joe served in the Marine Corps and then was a law enforcement officer for nearly 30 years. Now he’s transitioned. He’s in the private sector where he’s senior director of onsite services for Navigate 360, which is basically a company that provides safety solutions for school.
Susan Stone: We really are lucky to have you here, Joe, can I just brag about you a little bit before we ask you questions? You were named by the Ohio department of Homeland security. I’m gonna do it anyways. Even if it embarrasses you and the Ohio attorney General’s office, as an expert in civilian and law enforcement responses to active threats.
Mr Hendry he was also selected as a one of only 18 subject matter experts in school security in the world, by his peers at the, and correct me if I get this wrong, Joe, the ASIS International organization. And we’ve really avoided this topic, Kristina, because fortunately school safety hasn’t been hasn’t really hit our practice.
We haven’t really dealt with that issue in terms of our clients and our cases, but too much has happened. And we felt it was really important to bring you on Joel. And thank you so much for agreeing to talk about school safety.
Joe Hendry: Sure.
Kristina Supler: Thanks again for joining us. through the pandemic, Susan and I in our practice have seen a, a surge in students with mental health issues.
And now we turn on the news and here we are. So let’s start with the big question. Are schools safe today?
Joe Hendry: I think schools are relatively safe compared to a lot of other locations because there’s so much, in place from prior events since Columbine occurred Schools have taken security for the most part fairly seriously.
So a lot of things were in place potentially physically security wise from incidents at Columbine and Virginia tech and, Sandy hook that started requiring, special locks, doors, fencing, things like that. But you are correct. There’s been a huge uptick in mental health issues. Since the pandemic And that affects security in ways that we haven’t seen before prepared for actually,
Susan Stone: Kristine and I deal with mental health issues that impact the types of accommodations that students need in schools, such as ADHD or dyslexia or autism.
We’re talking about something very, very, very different. And I just wanna know in your experience working on these issues, is there a profile of the type of person or who would become an active shooter?
Joe Hendry: So the secret service is done two major studies since Columbine and has been really unable to come up with a definitive answer.
There’s a profile for an active shooter. We have a profile for someone who’s a serial killer. There are indicators of person who may become an active shooter, but having a set threat assessment profile of one there isn’t there’s overlap with things, obviously the most recent one at all day that individual really didn’t have any run ins may have had some mental health issues that really didn’t.
Very obvious through the education system. I’ve read that he was denied access to some educational benefits to him because he wasn’t classified as needing them by the school district. It sounds like he began to leave the education system in a very slow way was having problems at Develop fascination with guns, things like that. Those are indicators potentially of someone who may be prone to violence. It’s one of those things where you know, it, when you see it, but because we don’t train people how to identify it sometimes threat assessment works and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s not the exact science.
So the way you guys deal with a lot of things, you see ADA access, ADA access, things like that. What I see on my side of the house and I’m trained in NTAC that’s national threat assessment center for mental health, you know, identifying people with mental health issues that may become violent.
Those type of people require professional assessment by people who are psychologists people who are involved, potentially parents, teachers. Law enforcement security people that run into them in the education system. And even that isn’t particularly 100% full proof in identifying those people because there is no exact profile.
So a lot of times you may not even know you stop somebody in the path to violence by doing a good behavioral threat assessment on them. But a lot of times it becomes an issue where they don’t even. Be able to identify people. You guys remember the Arapahoe shooting a few years ago? Yeah. At the stem school.
So that individual it had two threat assessments, one done by the school and one, his mother actually had done by a professional psychologist and both of them actually identified him as a low threat and here he becomes an active shooter. There’s no 100% cure all for some of the threats we see in the education system that all makes.
Yeah,
Kristina Supler: well, it it’s, it’s actually frightening to think about what you’re saying in that there’s all these mental health professionals and experts and law enforcement professionals, and other safety professionals who study this for a living. And you say there’s no specific. Profile. And it begs the question, Susan and I regularly handle student misconduct cases that might involve the student getting in trouble for posting a picture with a toy gun or fake bullets, things like that.
And we’ve seen believe it or not. We’ve seen students expelled for these types of social media posts. So can you talk to us a little bit about what’s the difference between. Maybe a real warning sign versus something along the lines of a student making a joke. That of course is not funny.
Susan Stone: No. And I just wanna add, because the, every year it seems like Kristina, wouldn’t you agree?
They always happen in September. The jokes come online often,
often. Yeah. That’s a good
point. And we’re seeing middle school kids because they have access to devices younger and younger, and I don’t wanna profile, but typically boys who will post pictures. And they, they really do think it’s a joke or that it’s just for friends.
They don’t expect it to get out. So how’s a school supposed to know the difference between this is just a normal kid. And if you expel this kid, you’re really derailing their education or causing a school to prison pipeline, versus we gotta watch this kid,
Joe Hendry: right. It’s really the entirety of behavior of the student who actually has the incident, right.
A kid drawing a picture of a gun could go either way. Right. Does he have an unhealthy obsession with a gun? Does he have access to firearms? Has he done things in the past? That would lead people to believe that he’s violent, that has, tendencies potentially is the individual suicidal. Does he have.
Does he bully other children? All those things come together, drawing the picture of the firearm itself in and of itself may be absolutely nothing. And that’s one of the problems we have. Since Columbine, there was this big, huge zero tolerance for violence policy. Sure. Yeah. And that doesn’t work.
Really doesn’t that’s why professional behavioral threat assessment is. So I. There’s a couple different programs out there. And, you know, in my role as a school professional, one of the things that I do is we do company does risk assessments and I go and conduct risk assessments. In fact, I’m in the process of actually writing a risk assessment for a school district that had an active shooter last year that we were at.
And one of the things we at you
Susan Stone: clarify, Joe, when you say a risk assessment, I just wanna understand for the institution, or do you do it on a specific student? I just wanna make sure
Joe Hendry: we’re doing it on the institution. Thank you. The entire, I just didn’t understand that. Okay. Facility. So we’re looking at all their safety and security procedures and their personnel and their training.
And there’s a lot of interviews. We look at the physical security safety, and all those things come together because that require. Safety and security requires a very comprehensive plan and it’s not just the physical side of things. It’s the mental health side of things. Are you providing, behavioral threat assessment you’re providing training to people, are you training, emergency operation plan, continuity of operation plans?
All those things go into a risk assessment. But one of the things we see is when we start going to do a risk assessment of district, and we ask for paperwork, they’ll tell us that they have a threat assessment team, right? They maybe have a school psychologist or social worker on the team. They have a, maybe a school resource officer, principal teacher sometimes outside professionals, depending on the case, what we find is they’re meeting, but they really don’t have a good guide sense of guidelines on how to conduct the assessment.
They don’t have good record keeping they’re not using, the national threat assessment center from the secret service has professional standards and. In order how to conduct a risk assessment for someone who potentially could be violent or potentially it’s a student acting out, or like you said, it could be a student who just did something that thought it would be funny among his friends and it blew up in their face.
So what’s the decision has to be, what is the difference between all three of those individuals? Having a policy that says if anyone does anything, we kick them outta school. doesn’t benefit anyone, especially the student that is the subject of the behavioral threat assessment.
Kristina Supler: So, so was, let me ask you, is there any way there’s a lot that goes into this.
This is a complicated issue, of course. Is there any way for schools to identify early on before the catastrophe happens? When a, a potential shooter a student. Who might engage in some sort of violence enters the building
Susan Stone: or a stranger? Sure. Doesn’t have to be a, a student. It could be just, you know, unidentified citizen,
Joe Hendry: you know, a lot of people don’t understand specifically active shooter events in education over 90% of them are internal threats.
There’re students, staff members of people. Wow. That’s really interesting’s. So it’s not strange. It’s meant associated with the school.
Wow. Okay. When you say associated, could you tell. Who, what are the who’s in that 90%?
I’m curious. So if you’re talking students, there’s been staff members, obviously there have been, husbands of teachers parents, they’re all people that are intimately associated with the school, that know facility that know where people are, all of that stuff.
And I’m not gonna get in the lockdown right now, cuz we’re on a different topic. When you realize they’re gonna get there,
Susan Stone: Joe. Hey, tight.
Joe Hendry: okay. When you get to 90, when you’re thinking about 90% of the people are either from the facility or intimately acquainted with it, these are people that a lot of times that are known now, sometimes it’s former students that commit crimes, but a lot of times, if we can identify behavioral issues and students that are young without labeling them as a threat, maybe they just had behavioral issues.
That, they need to work on kind of stuff. Those kind of things are early interventions with students that, you can maybe potentially change behaviors in young students so that they don’t become disillusioned, that they don’t become bullies or victim of bullying, things like that.
Those are all things that kind of need identified early in the process. A lot of times I’ll see and hear from teachers and staff on risk assessments that they. Anti-bullying training maybe at the junior or high level and the high school level, but they’re not doing it at elementary school when it actually really is beginning.
Susan Stone: Well, when you talk about early intervention, you’re speaking our language, cuz we’re all about advocating for early intervention, but I wanna shift a little bit. Sure. Because this podcast, we’re both parents; you’re a parent, Joe; you’re talking to parents. So if you were going to speak to parents, what you’re doing now, what should parents be telling their children about?
God forbid, if something happens how to respond. I know, I would say, and it’s probably the wrong thing. You’re gonna tell me it. But my instinct is that fight flight, but really in this case, it’s flight, like run away, go
Kristina Supler: don’t. Yeah. I’m not sure that I, I don’t think when I hear my daughter talk about the training she does, it’s it?
Her school it’s it’s the opposite. So I I’m curious, Joe, you’re you’re the expert. What should parents be talking to their kids about? Realistically?
Joe Hendry: So what a lot of people don’t understand is, you know, we, we talk about it in a very ubiquitous way, the word lockdown, right? It kind of covers everything.
Everybody uses it for everything, lockdowns a code word, number one, which we shouldn’t even be thinking about using, FEMA came out in 2050 that don’t use codes, tell people exactly what’s happening so they know how to respond. And I keep hearing the word lockdown. It
Susan Stone: scares me. I don’t feel trapped.
Joe Hendry: It’s a verbal word. You’re actually trapping. You’re doing the one thing that someone who becomes an active shooter or, you know, is a suspect in one of these things. Lockdown actually does. The one thing that the gunman is completely unable to do by themselves. That is gain control of an entire facility that is populated on by almost every room by people and gives ’em complete and utter control of the facility.
And absolutely almost in no way, is there anything that’s going to happen other than potentially you put a door lock between a suspect and a room full of kids, but that door lock the windows in the doors, the doors, none of those are manufactured to withstand gunfire. There. The infrastructure doesn’t match the response.
Kristina Supler: Everyone wants to get in the room. They’re gonna get in the room, right? Yeah, no,
Susan Stone: I, I, I, like I said, my instinct has always has not like the idea of telling your kid to stay in the room. So what do you do, joe?
Joe Hendry: Yeah, here’s the thing. And really, we have examples of this already nationally in training and fire response.
I mean, fire response, all of us know how to respond to a fire and we’ve been train. Nationally to how to respond to a fire since 1960. And that 62 years of training has told us that if the building’s on fire and you’re under danger, you should leave. But it also gives us other options. Like if we’re in contact with a fire, you catch on, fire’s supposed to stop, drop and roll.
We train people if other people on fire and they panic and they start to run, knock them down, roll on top of them. Extinguish. With your own body. We’re trained in fire extinguishers, the infrastructure, the buildings built around us surviving a fire and everything. But the interesting thing is, and this is originally why we got on this call is we don’t train people to fight fires.
Right. We just, we don’t do that, but we train ’em how to do everything else, active shooters, the exact same thing. But because back Lockdown tactics and active shooter come from Southern California from the 1970s. But the problem is rooted in the 1960s. The riots in Watts in Los Angeles caused a Los Angeles unified school district to fence in several of their properties around their schools to keep threats outside.
Right. A very common concept called concentric rings of security to prevent threats from coming from the neighborhoods onto the school. That concept worked very well for particular types of threat. However, at that moment in time, too, at that moment in time, and that moment in time, cuz that
infrastructure works very well, right for certain threats.
But however, in the 1970s, when the FBI defeats the mafia in Southern California, basically, right, it creates power vacuum, the power vacuum still by gangs. Those gangs begin to target each other where the mafia really targeted people in a. Particular way, right? They found a target. That was the person was the target.
The gangs began to just spray gunfire in the streets and drive-by shootings became like a major event in these cities. And still to some extent they are, but really in the seventies and eighties, this was huge problem into the 1990s. But what happened was the kids who were at the school when they were shot at, on the street, had the ability to run away.
But the fencing for the threats that was installed in the 60. Became a trap for the students that were on school ground, know anything about Los Angeles, the school grounds. A lot of the it’s warm all day, right? So the kids are outside. Their cafeterias are outside. Their lunch rooms are outside. Their gyms are outside.
They have courtyard open schools with doors that open in the courtyards. There’s no interior hallways. So when these events happen, the ability to run away was fixed by the fence mm-hmm and they could not leave the area. So Los Angeles had to come up with a different response and they actually began to call what’s called drive-by shooting drills.
You can actually look these up. The first reference I can find to them in a national publication is an ed week in January of 1993, where a reporter does a study on how drive-by shooting drills are being used for shootings that are beginning to happen on school campuses. So this is 30 years ago.
Susan Stone: Apply those however day.
Are we supposed to train? Are students in an orderly way, how to get out of the building,
Joe Hendry: For fire. Yes. But here’s the problem. When we see training, right. Organizations good in training and you, you know, you need to crawl, walk, run when you do training. Right. But we don’t pick the time, the place or the victims of an event.
And if you have a one size fits all plan like lockdown, single option or. And you have to be in a room and you have to do certain steps in order to remain safe. Those plans are not flexible. They’re not like a fire plan that has flexibility based on your location to the fire. You know, if I told you to go into a room and close the door and wait for the fire department to come save you during a fire, you would tell me I was insane.
But that’s the fact, but let ask you this
Kristina Supler: practice shooter what’s that if, if. One teacher, it sounds like. So I hear you. We can’t have one size fits all cuz you can’t, you don’t know exactly what threat is going to present itself, but I isn’t. It also true. You can’t have some teachers evacuating students and other teachers in the same school, keeping students locked in cuz isn’t that a, a, a total recipe for chaos
Joe Hendry: actually chaos works on our favor during these events.
These are human beings committing these crimes. Human beings can only focus on one thing at a time. And if you give them control of an entire facility, in which every room in that facility, I don’t people say you’re hiding and they turn off the lights and all that stuff. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard because the threat is 90% of ’em come from the facility or intimately acquainted with it.
And you know, at 1:23 in the afternoon, on a Tuesday at a school, how many rooms are occupied?
Susan Stone: So Joe, I’m gonna press you. Because our listeners need something to take home. What would you tell your child to do depending on the age? Could you break it up between sure. Elementary, middle and a high school student,
Joe Hendry: young elementary school students should listen to the teachers, but that requires the teachers to be properly trained based on the location of the event.
Right. So my kids. Regardless of where they’re at in school right now in elementary school, only about 60 to 70% of the school day spent in a classroom. So you could potentially lock down in a classroom, right? That may be an option based on your location, based on where the threat is. However, they’re also on the playground in the cafeteria and the bathroom and the hallways and the library, um, in the gym.
All of those locations may require a different. That may require evacuation. So it doesn’t mean everyone in the building does the same thing. Every response is based on your location, based on where the threat is. And you have to have some type of ability to adjust to a threat. If you are in contact with it.
I’m sure everyone read
Susan Stone: about what’s that I gotta push you on this. And I normally don’t push my guests hard. Oh no, go ahead. But what should the parent tell the high school kids, the high school kids,
Joe Hendry: high school kids. I, I told my high school kids, the first thing you do, regardless of what’s happening, if you know there’s a threat and you’re able to evacuate the facility, the policy means nothing.
Leave the facility.
Kristina Supler: There you go. Susans in
Susan Stone: thinks we’re correct leaves. What I’ve always told
Joe Hendry: my kids. Leave, leave the facility. Number two, if you don’t know where the threat is, or you’re in close contact with it and you have the ability. You don’t have the ability to leave the facility. That’s when you use lockdown, but it’s not traditional lockdown.
I’m only relying on a door. I’m barricading a door. There’s a lot of doors in schools where students cannot lock them because they don’t have keys. Right. Teachers may not be present. All those things affect the response. That’s why you need the ability to be flexible. So students need to know how to barricade a location.
They need to know how to prepare countermeasures inside. If the location is. All of these things, the people killing them normally are their classmates. So they know these people and they know who they are, the ability to barricade. Location’s good. If my, and I’ve told my children, if you are in contact, you know, once they probably hit junior high, I told them if you’re in contact and you cannot evacuate, and there’s no ability to barricade, cuz like I said, bad guy pick the time, the place and the victims, you do whatever you need to do to survive that.
It could be swarming the gunman. It could be throwing things at the gunman’s face to crack them. It could be trying to run past the gunman. We’re all different as human beings training. You know, I did a, there’s a scientific study that I had published with two professors in the journal of school violence, where we actually studied response with lockdown and, and multi option response with active shooter.
Individuals that use multi option response. It doesn’t mean everyone survives. It doesn’t mean no one’s injured. What it does mean is the casualties decrease in that circumstance by over 75%, when you use multi option response over lockdown, when there’s an actual threat. So it becomes important to tell the kids everything that they can do to survive.
Not just one single thing, because if the one single thing fails, then pretty much everyone that’s at that location ends up being shot.
Susan Stone: Thank you. So
Kristina Supler: it’s such a, it’s such a complicated issue. I I’d like to take a few moments to turn our attention to the report. That’s recently come out examining the Uvalde shooting.
We know that there were the report indicates that it was total chaos and in a multitude of systemic failures what transpired that day? How do we prevent the chaos when people realize a shooter might be in the building and it’s terrifying. And, and can you tell us what are some of the key takeaways from that report and what do you think we should all know and learn from that report?
Joe Hendry: I guess we’ll start with the school response. It’s pretty obvious that the school and it’s interesting because the state of Texas certified that school is being prepared for an active shooter.
Kristina Supler: Oh, my gosh.
Joe Hendry: I, so that was one of the big, huge takeaways from the report. The state said they were okay. Which means obviously what they had in place.
It’s not just the law enforcement failure. It was the failure of their training. It was the failure of their planning. It was the failure of whatever they had told their students to do when something happened, the teacher in the one classroom where all the students were killed and the teacher survived which I, I don’t know if I.
How I feel about myself. The teacher said that their plan failed and when the gunman came in the room, they were all sitting on the floor where they had been told to hide. And the gunman just block down, shot all of them. And that’s not the first time that it’s happened in the use of lockdown. So the school did not have, whatever the state said they had in place, obviously didn’t work.
There were sounds like broken door locks or doors that were propped things like. Those are huge safety concerns. Any at any time, especially with a school that was having a ton of lockdowns because of the border patrol activity in the area, things like that, where they were leaving doors open, apparently which anyone could have come into the school.
They had fencing around the school. It was only five feet high. That is not a proper height. It doesn’t sound like they had professional risk assessment, which is the basis of everything you do. And you never one you never, ever, and you guys know this never, ever assess yourself. And your capabilities, you always have.
Kristina Supler: No. Cause of course we’re biased. We also, no.
Susan Stone: And, and Joe, I don’t know if you agree with this, but I think that in preparing for today and just every day, reading the news, the response, both healthcare workers, getting kids out of there, getting them medical attention Having law enforcement go in and know how to manage it.
Having school safety officers know how to manage it. There was a lot to take away from this situation.
Joe Hendry: When I, so it was a former law enforcement officer and a master trainer for our state and solo engagement. Um, and I was former SWAT member. There were 376 police officers there and no one took charge.
No one. No one ran operations inside. It sounds like no one ran operations outside. It was mass chaos. I was kind of hoping the report would maybe talk about whatever the fire and emergency medical service response was. You know, were they organized? Were they prepared? Because usually, there’s a thing called unified command and unified command is the law enforcement fire response.
And you guys didn’t mention this in my bio, but I sit on NFPA 3000, which writes the national standards for law enforcement, fire and EMS to respond. Those things that are in the code in NFPA 3000. I don’t believe were followed at all from what I’ve read, uh, and know so far it’s to me as a law enforcement officer, it’s very disheartening to see what happened.
And to know that one of the, and it came out in the report that one of the agencies that supposedly talked about the law enforcement response didn’t even conduct their own investigation. They took state reports and were trying to tell what went wrong during the incident. Obviously from a legal standpoint, we all know that is completely the wrong way to do that.
And it’ll be very interesting when the interview started happening with the officers, especially the command level officers that were there. And it’s now come out with the report that the, the majority of officers at the scene were actually federal and state level law enforcement officers, not local law enforcement officer.
So Joe, that tells me training had failed at all levels.
Susan Stone: I, I agree that that is an example and it’s tragic. But can you give us a positive example of where something has gone, right. Because yeah, we
Kristina Supler: only hear, are there any, are there any
Susan Stone: positive success? Are there stories where there was a potential actor shooter, a school sought responded, and that is the model that we should be promoting.
And I, I do wanna, I always try to give a takeaway to parents and end on some positive notes because all we’re hearing is what went wrong
Joe Hendry: . Trying to think of a good one that probably everyone would know. And I I’ll go with Ohio. Chardon’s response was actually pretty good. 10 years ago to their event.
Um,
Kristina Supler: oh yes. The TJ Lane shooting. That’s right.
Joe Hendry: Yeah. Okay. I never say the gunman’s names, but yeah, that shooting, um, who was in the media so we can say yeah, there, there that incident. Well, not perfect. Actually went fairly well because. You guys all remember Frank Hall, right? The, the football coach hero, the football coach, the students initially some of the classrooms and stuff, barricaded, things like that.
So that response was pretty good. Students were hiding under cafeteria tables, which was a lesson learned. It’s like get out of the cafeteria. We had a student in the cafeteria whose mother was trained by one of my instructors at Kent state at the time. and her, she had told her child to evacuate and the, in, when that incident happened the gunman was shooting children underneath the cafeteria table and she was at the table next to it.
She actually grabbed her friend and some kitchen even know at the time and drugged them out of cafeteria and left. So there were some good lessons learned there. Frank Hall charging at the gunman, distracted him from shooting students. Frank actually chases him out of the building. And definitely Frank’s actions while there were still students that were wounded and killed.
His response stopped that incident from being way worse than it could have. There, one of the things we learned from that incident Chardon nationally was how important the reunification process is. Um, because the reunification process worked very well when they evacuated the building with the students.
That’s important things to work on for events could be applied to other incidences and crimes or incidents in the school, but those were good takeaways, you know, not trying to hide in direct contact with a gun and obviously was a lesson learned, but other rooms in the facility, students evacuating students, barricading locations, that was, those were all good actions taken actually on the scene by the students themselves.
Because obviously it was before school started. Some of the students weren’t even. Uh, really supervisor or even had the ability to take direction from teacher. When an incident occurred. So it also showed how,
Kristina Supler: and that’s a good point because to what you said earlier about the older kids, essentially older students, I should say use their judgment and respond to what’s going on immediately around them.
That incident unfolded in the early hours of the school day before school even was ahead. Officially started. I, I think and correct me if I’m wrong.
Joe Hendry: They were, my kids were in the cafeteria. Some were waiting for buses and some were, so those
Kristina Supler: students, they, they instinctively their instincts and, and. We’re able to respond better.
Susan Stone: Look, I think from a career working with students, it is important for parents to tell students. And it’s the first question we ask: schools are safe. This is happening, but school, you, you need to have some, we all have to live our lives. We can’t walk around being fearful every day or the other mental health issues are gonna skyrocket and then you’ll have other problems.
We don’t want more anxiety. We don’t want more depression. But we have to be ready. And. Joe. I just wanna thank you because we need people like you to come into the schools. We need to learn from the errors that have occurred and move forward somehow. So I appreciate the conversation today.
Joe Hendry: Yeah. I thought it was very good.
Kristina Supler: Thanks for joining us. It was really time well spent to hear from you as an expert and, and there’s so much more to learn and consider on this topic. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate
Susan Stone: it. Bye
Joe Hendry: Joe. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.