Prevention Is a System, Not a Purchase

I recently had the opportunity to share some of the lessons I’ve learned over three decades in education and law enforcement in a new article for Domestic Preparedness: “A Responder’s Thoughts on Protecting Schools From Violent Threats.”

The piece pulls together something I see over and over in security and vulnerability assessments across the country: districts spend a lot of energy deciding what to buy, and not nearly enough energy asking whether what they already have is actually working. Cameras, door hardware, and detection technology all have a role to play, but none of them stop a weapon from reaching a campus if no one notices, no one reports, or no one acts on the warning signs first.

What the Article Covers

The research is consistent:

The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center and the FBI have both found that targeted school violence follows a pathway — and that other people almost always know something is wrong before an attack happens. Ohio has built that research into law through ORC 5502.669, which requires every district to run a multidisciplinary threat assessment process. The gap I keep finding in the field isn’t the law or the research. It’s implementation.

In the article, I walk through what that looks like in practice, using real situations from assessments I’ve conducted:

•  A custodian’s report about a withdrawn student who had started producing violent drawings — and how a functioning threat assessment team turned that report into support instead of a crisis.

• An unmonitored school entrance that looked fine on paper but wasn’t being staffed the way administrators believed — and what changed once it was.

• A bus driver whose report became the first link in a chain that led to counseling and a safety plan for a struggling student.

You can read the full article on Domestic Preparedness here, including the complete checklists and the full list of metrics boards should be requesting each year.

This Builds on What We’ve Been Saying

Longtime readers of my blog will recognize the theme — it’s one I keep coming back to because the pattern keeps showing up in district after district.

• In Locked Doors Do Not Save Lives by Themselves — People, Culture, and Compliance Do, I wrote about the same trap: hardware gets purchased, but the people and culture behind it don’t get the same investment.

• What Real School Safety Assessments Actually Reveal goes deeper into how these gaps — like the unmonitored entrance in the Domestic Preparedness piece — actually get found during a formal assessment.

• Not All Threats Are Serious, But Every Threat Deserves a Serious Response covers the reporting-and-response culture piece in more detail — what happens after someone speaks up.

• If you work with School Resource Officers, Training Ohio’s School Resource Officers and Part 2 cover the training side of building that prevention network, from legal considerations to the Six Domains framework.

• And for districts thinking about mandates versus resources, Alyssa’s Law Sounds Right. As an Unfunded Mandate, It’s Bad Policy. is a useful companion piece on what happens when good intentions outpace funding.

Where This Leaves Districts

The most important question a school board can ask isn’t “what have we bought?” It’s “how do we know our prevention system is working?” That’s the question I’d encourage every administrator and board member to sit with after reading the full article.

If you’d like help answering that question for your own district — whether that’s a security and vulnerability assessment, threat assessment team training, or a review of how your current systems hold up under Ohio Revised Code 5502.669 — reach out to our team using the form below.