Keeping Our Schools Safe: What Have We Learned from Sandy Hook? Most School Violence is Preventable.

7 years ago, on December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and took the lives of 20 first-graders and six staff members.

IT’S A DAY NO AMERICAN CAN FORGET.

Little children preparing for the excitement of Christmas had been gunned down at a place where they should have felt safe and secure – their classroom at their elementary school.

Since that horrible day in 2012, we have seen more violence perpetrated among our nation’s schools.

Click here to watch the founder of Safe Hiring Solutions talk about this on HLN.

What is the answer? To be sure, there is a myriad of action that need to be taken, including – and especially -- intervention for troubled students as a means of prevention of future possible violence.

Most School Violence Is Preventable.

In the 2019 Secret Service report on School Violence (under the Department of Homeland Security directive) there was one continuing theme that brought much hope to our nation’s battle with school violence – All of the attacks are preventable.

Maybe that seems surprising to you, but to law enforcement and violence prevention experts like myself, it is a problem that does have a multifaceted answer.

Intervention plays a vital role, as does prevention by way of knowing the signs, reporting, and securing the physical buildings of schools through high-tech and multi-layered red flag and background checking security systems.

I recently appeared on CNN’s HLN news channel to discuss this very topic. Click here to watch the segment.

The bottom line is that we all must work together to keep our schools, our children, our teachers, and our very system of education safe and secure.