School safety, security, and violence prevention resource

I’ve been not only writing about but studying violence in our schools.  Attacks on teachers, security, and student-on-student violence.  One thing I’ve noticed is a marked lack of appropriate training in ways to recognize signatures and other signs of approaching violence, and, of course, training in managing conflict – both verbally and physically – so that violent situations can be either prevented, or, when they do occur, the damage can be minimized.

In my experience, elementary, middle, and secondary educational institutions, school boards, and administrations, not to mention many colleges, are scared to death of any kind of training and/or policy/procedure/protocols that can in even the most minimal way, encourage teachers and even security officers to lay a hand on a student under any circumstance.  Even when the student in most cases, parents of students in others, and even dangerous dudes and dudettes who wander onto campus to sell drugs, to settle gang grudges and other scores, or just idiots and morons who have nothing better to do, is assaulting another student or the teacher.

Don’t look now, but violence is schools is approaching an epidemic (see my last post:  Teachers, Students:  Do You Feel Safe In and Around Your Schools?).  Administrators better get off their collective asses pretty damned soon and do something about it.  Like counter-violence training, including Defusing or Deescalation Techniques and Disruptive (Violent) Student Management. Neither of which promotes skills designed to harm or injure students, but, simply put, to allow the teacher to protect his or her students from danger and to escape and evade dangerous situations.

Speaking of Defusing Techniques, I just conducted a DSM (Disruptive Student Management) Instructor course yesterday near Reading, Pa.  Reading is one of the most dangerous school districts in the United States, let alone Pennsylvania.  One of my DSM Instructors, who is a teacher, noted that in many situations she has calmed one of her students who had become aggressive and borderline violent, had those students calmed down to the point that the student had taken, on her directions, some deep breaths and was calmly explaining what had triggered him or her when the police officer assigned to her school burst into the room and began shouting, cursing, and even threatening the student(s).

Now we have a scenario where the student(s) had already gone through the Cycle of Violence, had activated his SNS (Sympathetic Nervous System).  The teacher had artfully, skillfully, and compassionately brought the kid back to Earth so that he was no longer violent.   Now the kid is triggered again, and I can tell you, once Re-Triggered, he or she is going to be hell-on-wheels and harder to bring back to sanity.

Wisely, our teacher didn’t intervene at that point, but backed off so she wouldn’t be injured by the inevitable flying furniture, fists, feet, and other dangerous body parts.

In the next post.  How to properly defuse a potentially violent student.

 

Until then, stay safe.

 

Hammer

 

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