Summer Is the Most Important Time to Strengthen School Safety

For many educators, the end of the school year feels like a finish line. Students leave for summer break, hallways become quieter, and attention naturally shifts toward vacations, maintenance projects, and planning for the next academic year.

From a school safety perspective, however, summer is not a pause button.

In fact, after spending more than three decades in public safety, emergency management, and school security—including serving as Chief of Police, Director of Public Safety and Emergency Management for a large school district, and now working with schools across the country through Safeguard Risk Solutions—I have found that the summer months often present one of the greatest opportunities to improve emergency preparedness.

Why? Because summer provides two critical advantages: clarity and time.

The End of the School Year Reveals the Truth About Your Emergency Plans

Throughout the school year, schools conduct drills, manage special events, respond to incidents, address behavioral concerns, and navigate countless situations that test emergency procedures in real-world conditions.

By June, schools have accumulated valuable information about how their plans actually function under pressure.

The most important question is not whether an incident occurred. The question is: What did we learn?

School leaders should be asking:

• Where did staff hesitate during drills?

• Which procedures required clarification in real time?

• Were there communication breakdowns between departments?

• Did anyone struggle to locate critical information when it was needed?

• What near-misses exposed vulnerabilities that could become larger problems later?

Too often, these observations disappear once the school year ends. Staff move on to summer responsibilities, memories fade, and opportunities for improvement are lost.

The reality is that emergency preparedness is not simply about checking compliance boxes or conducting annual threat assessments. It is about identifying patterns and understanding where friction exists within your response systems.

In my experience, schools frequently discover recurring challenges such as unclear decision-making authority during emergencies, inconsistent communication procedures, staff uncertainty regarding their responsibilities, procedures that look effective on paper but create confustion during implementation, and Emergency Plans that are difficult to access when time matters most.

These findings should not be viewed as failures. Instead, they are valuable indicators that help schools prioritize improvements before the next school year begins.

The schools that enter the new academic year with confidence are rarely the ones that wait until August to think about safety.

They are the schools that use summer strategically.

They examine lessons learned from the previous year. They address identified vulnerabilities. They adjust plans to reflect operational realities. And they ensure staff have immediate access to the information they need when emergencies occur.

School safety is not a seasonal responsibility. It requires continuous evaluation, adaptation, and improvement.

Summer may bring quieter hallways, but it also offers one of the best opportunities of the year to strengthen preparedness before students, staff, and families return.

The work you do during these summer months can have a lasting impact on your school’s ability to respond effectively when it matters most.