How We Protect Our Children At School
BY PGF
1 year, 6 months ago
The best way “we” can protect “our” children is not to give them to the government. Or, put another way, avoid crowds; schools are crowds. But for those who can’t or won’t, this information may be valuable.
What does it mean to protect our children at school? For the past decade, I’ve been following a program that protects school children from celebrity-seeking mass-murderers. This program teaches school staff to be first responders who provide both armed defense and medical first aid. We’ve learned a lot over the past decade, but there are still unanswered questions.
Protecting our children at school actually covers a lot of ground. Being “at school” is really a shorthand way of saying we want to protect the children when they are out of their parents care. That includes when they are off campus and on the school bus before school starts. It includes the school events after the last class period ends. We want to protect our children from the ball field to the classroom and into the parking lot.
Once you see the scope of the problem, you realize why a single uniformed School Resource Officer is only the beginning of a safety plan. One defender, no matter how well-trained or effective, can’t be everywhere all the time.
First responders must be near the children because we don’t want to give a murderer time to kill. That means an armed defender has to be within a few hundred feet of every child. The number of defenders that we want depends on the size of the campus and the layout of the buildings. A one-room school house takes fewer defenders than a sprawling K-12 campus.
More at the link.
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