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>> Well worth a look for Mr. Very pleased today to welcome Chris Christie going to talk to this target for terrorism crimes Well I think you're going to be as impressed by Kristen as I am or you could be Chris just paperwork to your international affairs major here if you were to attack Chris also works for safe havens International which is the world's leading non profit School Safety Center he's got eight years of experience in the field already take a guess at how old.

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Twenty. Years experience is through his work in six countries and he's presented it professional in more than twenty five organizations. T.S.A. Homeland Security the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms the Israeli National Police change information group and NATIONAL UNIVERSITY He's perhaps best known for his concealed weapons demonstration and he's done this on Good Morning America.

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That I give you Chris Lawrence. Thanks good morning I want to thank you guys for being here and I also want to thank the library for having me here because it's kind of an honor as a student to be doing this I've always wanted to be a professor so this is about the closest I've gotten so far so thanks for all that.

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This is the first time I've given this presentation it's kind of put together from a lot of other stuff and I just threw this together I had an all nighter on it so if there's a few mistakes in there I apologize but it will go pretty well and keep you entertained I'm going to start out with a quick short video clip scrapbook store knew.

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The importance of being prepared. And best to get a suspicious package that's near the trash can and he's done he does what he's not supposed to do and this case. And. I want to point out that it's not necessarily officers fault about what happened there I would put the agency that he worked for if.

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Since they didn't really drill this into his head quite enough I'm sure they mention this in training but like a lot of police officers probably most police officers he's not going to do that every time he's going to probably touch most precious packages so we want to make sure that in the some of the planning phases that I'm going to talk about from.

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This rock and roll with the research that we're going to make sure that plans are not only good plans but they're also tested and that's one of the keys to making school safer we found. And then I want to read of things if you guys remember the incident with a.

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Couple years ago and then the more recent incident in Boston where the city was kind of shut down for a day because what turned out to be an ad campaign. The incident here at Tech you know a guy a student freshman was experimenting with some stuff he learned chemistry and ended up injuring somebody.

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And of course he made bad decisions he violated housing policy the he probably shouldn't of done it the way he did it if he was going to do something like that but I would put that it made both sides of the issue look bad it made him look bad it affected him for the rest of his life because of a simple mistake and it made the city of Atlanta and the first university look kind of silly in the noose when.

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Places like M.T.V. got out of it and I'm not faulting the response because of course you know they didn't know what they were dealing with but he was the best available information that was possible to bad to respond to it but it's a situation like that it's going to look bad and I just one of the things that I noticed was on M.T.V. The picture was of this I guess is a bomb squad van truck and the caption is the Georgia Tech mascot and so these are some of the issues that the schools have to consider in dealing with terrorism not just the things you think about but also this kind of stuff the backlash and how best to.

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Do With that in the planning process. And then the incident in Boston which caused a big response and turned out to be these devices were part of an ad campaign for a T.V. show a local T.V. show actually and in the same situation the Boston Police responded probably how the should of when they have these suspicious devices all over but the news media obviously makes them look kind of ridiculous when they put in perspective what actually was so there are a lot of issues involved just like with the war on terror the war in Iraq with public support and kind of dealing with things in a way that's not to infringing on the rights of course and then of course there are different concerns for all different groups what are some of you guys concerns about actual safety on the Georgia Tech campus for example do you guys have any concerns about terrorism.

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Which we found most people don't really have too much except the fact that we're in Atlanta. What about simple issues like rape robbery simple stuff stuff like that that is going to require more often students are going to be more focused on some of that stuff that's affecting them personally of course on the faculty of staff administration is going to look at it from the other point of view and then you've got parents who see the completely different picture of what's going on and so you've got a lot of different concerns obviously to deal with built in with the actual tangible planning process the nuts and bolts of it.

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We found that school terrorism around the world what it does occur is is it's pretty rare event but when it does occur it's obviously a horrific event but I want to point out that in the last forty years we've had about on average one incident per year school terrorism around the world which is a pretty low ratio obviously it's something that we need to address because it is a possibility but when you have things like heart attacks rolling fights going on in K.

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twelve schools every year we know there are going to be deaths from some of these issues yet we kind of drop that and rush to plan for terrorism or let's make our terrorism plan and kind of forget our main plan and so. There's a big. Concern that with acting irrationally especially the stuff that coming out the news media.

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And. Also there's a big focus on specific planning for example someone will say we're going to react reenact the Columbine attack in your school or to see it how do you how you would have responded to it or we're going to be in at this Russian terrorist attack to see how you would respond if this happened well the attack in Russia first of all it was probably never going to happen again the same way it did but second that's Russia the outskirts of the country where they've got a lot of problems with terrorism so far the or just the whole infrastructure of society is pretty much gone and some of those places first is the U.S. where we've got obviously a completely different situation so it's helpful to look at some of those incidents but not really to focus on what happened here because that wouldn't happen here as bad as it did obviously we should prepare for something that horrific but we don't want to focus too much on actual incidents rather on planning on functions which will get into things like evacuation how to respond to specific events that you can apply to a wide range of functions rather than just certain ones the training for and then them switches the National Incident Management System or I.C.'s command system that's one of the also the key things that screeners need to put in place in the agency really for responding to an emergency as we saw in nine eleven.

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A lot of people had to work together that New York State Police and my P.D. all the schools the federal government working on it together and they had some problems with communication but in other ways it worked pretty well because of the the right that integrated with the C.S. system and another way of putting it would be if a rural school in the middle of South Georgia had some kind of incident where they've got the F.B.I. Homeland Security State police a couple different police agencies from my own and then random police agencies from across the country that may want to volunteer they can put all those resources together and work a lot more efficiently when they've got the command system which is basically a way of operating within the chain of command using a common language and so these are some of the most important things we learned and looking at these terrorist incidents.

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A couple reasons why schools are popular targets and have been used for these for terrorists. And a manipulation of the public is. There obviously a symbolic target sorry. When you attack a school or kids you know it's like a second punch to the country because we're talking someone who's innocent someone who is is pretty much in defenseless and.

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Since this is messing up I try to take him on I forgot to mention I've got a few interactive points but if you guys want to stop me with a question feel free this is the talk or if you are trying to go and stop at the end and ask questions then we can do that OK back to us saying.

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There are obviously a very big symbolic target and I get a lot of media attention rather than something. That's maybe it was more expected for example if the World Trade Center attacks on nine eleven one of the school you know the impact was probably would have been about a hundred times more schools are pretty soft targets for example to attack is not as well tended as maybe the state capital the Atlanta airport or other places like that that may be kind of a mainstream target but they look at a school as somebody that you know you're not expecting someone to come in this room committing an attack right now so it's kind of more of a.

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That kind of appeal as well and a mass casualty present potential because you've got a lot of people in a small space especially with a lot of smaller schools where they've got the smaller facility it's mobile classrooms and trailers things like that can really help them to raise the casualty level and is there is one kind of copy out there with this there is a obviously a risk of alienating their their base their support if a terrorist group does use a school because it's kind of a dirty tactic and so they may lose some of their support and.

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That's why it's still kind of a rare incident we see them. And I read with some. Of the French group the hard core groups I wouldn't be surprised if al Qaeda attacked a school because they obviously don't have that many reservations but mainstream group is actually trying to gain some public support may not use these tactics.

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There's also difficulty with doing with terrorism inherently because it's just such a gray area there's not really a black and white. Accepted definition of what terrorism is there about one hundred or more definitions around the world because for example if you are fighting for a country but using clandestine means like suicide bombers is that terrorism or is that fighting for a country or how do you define a civil rights revolution versus terrorism and so there are a lot of difficulties there and in addition some of the war since we see run out even after acts of terrorism one of the worst violence acts in the U.S..

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On a school was in one thousand twenty seven actually most people think of Columbine as kind of the worst school attack Well actually thirty nine people died in this and it's that incident we're describing former. Due to new taxes he went he was described pretty upset at the city for it because of that a very small town he put dynamite on his house killed his wife then put up as house struck with dynamite drove through a school and started shooting people really trust people started responding to the incident including most of the high ranking city officials and then shot his trunk which is car and ended up killing quite a few people quite a few important parts of the town and that was he was angry at the government he was trying to make a statement but he wasn't really part of a unifying ideology he wasn't fighting for anything more than kind of a simple revenge and so we didn't classify that as terrorism while some people do consider that school terrorism and then you've got incidents in the countries here of Iraq Afghanistan which would kind of skewer numbers for a couple reasons.

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It's kind of an all out war going on obviously so they're going to have more attacks and situations a bit more different for example in Turkey they've had over seven hundred schools closed because of terrorism and that's obviously a different situation we have so we did include numbers from places like that Iraq there are hundreds of incidents that could be qualified in school terrorism and it's but it's just it would be very beneficial for the purpose of the way we did our research.

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Just a few highlights from around the world places it has happened these are some of the different countries and I want a few of them the key incidents one was the massacre in one hundred seventy four in Israel a group of terrorists went into a school dressed as Israeli Defense Force soldiers and took hostages they end up killing twenty two students and several adults as well a lot of the casualties were because of the botched rescue attempt by the Israeli Israeli army and that resulted in the creation of a lot of new units to to come by this kind of stuff and kind of a sea change in the way they dealt with stuff as we know Israel do it without much terrorism than we do and so they're kind of a testing ground as they call themselves for some of the stuff they said they're not the best of dealing with it but they're the most experienced and so all of our knowledge comes from the way they've been doing this stuff for years obviously there's a different situation there though since they have things like armored school buses and soldiers accompanying all field trips because of things like this so we may not be ready to put all men out of school buses but it's interesting to look at some of the tactics they've used and how they've worked.

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And isn't it that people don't know about when and how and where. There's a fourteen day standoff with thirteen terrorists actually seems to school with four terrorists in the same time a train car with nine terrorists and they were holding hostages for quite a long time there were some issues with kids getting sick with meningitis inside the school so let some kids go and eventually they decided there was not going to be.

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A reasonable. Solution to the problem and so the Dutch marines actually had a pretty good response to it they used a an Air Force jet afterburners to fly over the train set off the afterburners and they knew that at the time when they set off after minus the hostages would all duck down to the ground and they used imaging to find out where the terrorists were standing so they did that to make the hostages struck down and killed most of the terrorists and captured the rest of them and at the same time they attacked the school using a tank to bust through the wall and succeeded in capturing all the terrorists alive with no deaths at all of the hostages and so that was kind of an interesting approach that I would box to to do that but it's an example of how well an incident could end Well obviously it's still a terrible incident to happen but it's a lot better than it could have like we saw in Russia which is the opposite it's an example of how not to prepare for an incident how not to respond I could really teach the whole session on that there are sessions on on the response and how it's messed up for a couple reasons one there's distrust of the Russian government by the people and within different agencies for example imagine if the Green Berets the Army Rangers the Navy SEALs and then the rest of the military all didn't trust each other and they all wanted to be the one group to respond because they knew they could do better so you had that kind of conflict then conflict from the people and the terrorists and all of mixing the lot of people parents in the crowd drunk firing automatic weapons towards a school or a firing back of the terrorists and eventually it ended up and ended.

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Over three hundred dead we're not really sure how many because of the way the Russian government deals with information initially they said there were less than three hundred people in the square and then they kept the number kept rising and so they say there are about three hundred dead but we could be a lot higher and never really know probably.

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And so it's important to look at some of these incidents to get ideas and to learn terrorist tactics but. Not to focus too much on the actual incidents like I mentioned and then we've got a couple incidents in the US as well there are more that I'm not going to address but these are just some of the some two to look at both World Trade Center attacks affected schools in the area the most recent one it was a really.

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It was a tragic event but it was also a good way to test. The reaction of the schools and to improve some of the plans for example some of the schools used each other as evacuation points and. Pretty much all the schools in the area were had to be evacuated so.

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The evacuation point had to be scratched and they ended up having to to rock across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to some of the accusation but we did see that some of communications issues how they work and how we can improve some of those and other things did go really well we don't want to hurt people who did what they should have done at the time and had some really good plans in place so we saw a big reduction in the loss of life it could've been a lot worse but that was a really big.

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A big event to show us how about of agencies can work together like I mentioned earlier then there's the Beltway sniper incident one of the victims was on the steps of the school and as a result of that one person being wounded that student all the schools in the area went into a frenzy neighboring districts had to put in place their plans to deal with threat of a shooting and the deal with parents who put their kids out of school I came up with the figures but they had a huge reduction in attendance for the couple days after the incident because parents can still trust the kids being in a school so for example one school across the country may have to deal with an incident that happens in Atlanta because their parents are going to be afraid of an attack happening at their school even though it could be very far apart or a very unlikely that will happen again and that's another one of those considerations to think about one of the interesting cases I found was a guy who was a bus driver.

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Was. He came into the country. Married somebody paid a woman to marry him so he could get citizenship back in the eighty's Eventually he was convicted of fraud and deported he served in Afghanistan and he claimed to have visited some training camps OK the training camps and met a few key people in the organization including some of the people that play nine eleven and somehow he got back into the U.S. and started working as a taxi driver as a repair shop owner photograph a couple different odd jobs and he used these jobs to order a few of radios and shipped them to Afghanistan and he denies that but the same radios that he would have found and he says he didn't know what's in the packages he just sent them for people and then later on after that he ended up moving to Minnesota becoming a bus driver for a press corp called for student they provide contract services to schools in the area across the country and he was one of their drivers and they had no idea he passes a background check with the F.B.I. to get a hazmat sort of occasion a few years earlier and the only way they actually ended up catching this guy was that he didn't show up to work and they fired him he came back asking for his job and he got reported.

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To the F.B.I. who I think were looking for him at the time and now it's pretty clear that he's had a lot of ties he provided mailing addresses for several different terrorists around the world that come in attacks or attempted attacks and just the activities that are listed out or raise a lot of questions about his his motives and so that's a pretty scary incident to see that someone could get that far in and have access to kids it's unclear whether or not that was just a job that he was doing or whether it was.

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Working towards something further to have access to the kids but either way it's red flag and then and running there was actually a kind of a weird incident where two militia members it has been a wife going into a school with a firebomb and demands to have they want a bunch of money to build a brave new world.

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Based on their ideals and they were negotiating there are a lot of mistakes made there in the negotiating process on how to deal with the situation and one of the militia members actually ended up shooting a teacher in the back by accident setting off the bomb and they believe a lot of the fuel leak out on the way into the school so it didn't.

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Many people as many as it would have but I believe everybody would have died if the bomb had been better constructed and so that was kind of. An audience as well so it's important to keep in mind that we've got things like al Qaeda the World Trade Center attacks but we don't forget about people here in the U.S. like that that are still operating the Oklahoma City bombing things like that which that also affected schools in the area.

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And just a few more incidents a better balance in the U.S. These aren't instance of terrorism per se but they're kind of related and the response is going to be similar to the right a district or a school is going to need to be prepared for the stuff just like terrorism and one of the most interesting here is this incident in Nevada the student actually used a sword to hijack the bus and took it across state lines and that was kind of an odd incident but they do use all kinds of weapons transportation is one of the most popular targets of terrorism.

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Both with school terrorism and just terrorism in general they found through through looking and since that about forty two percent of targets are terror and sort of transportation targets for example nine eleven use planes the London bombings on the subways the train bombings and Spain. Or the terrorist incidents are going to be transportation and about forty percent of those are buses and then we find a similar percentage and square incidence of about forty percent that are generally best ready for school bus and there are a couple reasons for this one transportation in general is a again a place to get a lot of people together just like a school building but and it's a way to.

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Get a message from one part of the world to another but buses in particular they're pretty easy targets they're soft targets second mentioned earlier with school since most press drivers are going to be trained or if they are trained it's going to be some something very minimal something like you're getting today and how to respond to my office and then because of these things it's going to be hard to respond to and it can be often pretty difficult for example a school building is at one point and a premier can be set up beforehand to say well if something happens here's what will respond Here's how or spawned but a bus has how many miles of route each day but the incident that occurred like to take the bus out of the district state there's a lot of possibilities there and so that makes our target for us to respond to you know and in addition it's even more of a powerful target than a school because the American tradition of using a yellow school bus is across the country so in other countries this could be a school bus for example in Israel but for us a yellow school bus is just a common language for us so if there was an attack just like we think of the World Trade Center the two towers we think of nine eleven we think of every time we see a school bus that would remind us of that attack potentially and I can mention parents across the country are going to be reacting the same way as if there was next door to them.

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There are few tactical reasons as well buses and other pieces of transport ocular if you notice the the bomb that was in this bus did not only affect the bus but also there's a lot of carnage around this car that was nearby and probably the stuff that's not in the picture and that's because the enclosed space actually acts as a magnifier for the blast if I just put the bomb on the street here it would have probably hit the side of the bus the side of the car etc But when you put it inside something when the windows are off again be closed The same goes for a subway train airplanes it's magnified the effect of it and the casualties and the tactic is to wait until the bus sort of the other vehicles near something to detonate the bomb for example.

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The London bombings two of the trains I remember the bombs were set off one of the passing another train there was I wasn't involved but it was affected by the blast because of that and that's probably they probably did that on purpose. And then there's some of the things that are being sold in America I mention that the domestic terrorism.

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Books like this to serve as a blueprint for. Racist attacks ways to make germs weapons. All kinds of dirty stuff that shouldn't really be. Put out there and I do value the freedom of speech and the rights we have but this is some of stuff that we have to.

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Have to deal with as a resource as a result of that. And there's a lot of stuff out there and by the way if you see the typos in the quotes That's their mistake that we just quoted these are sold in the Melbourne catalogues. Greasing the wheels of the governments and and it will collapse all kinds of stuff to basically make a home a terrorist if you want and now it's on the Internet and then there's stuff like this discussed weapons this is a plastic knife designed to go through a metal detector undetected and it's actually pretty hard it could kill someone if used in the right way and stuff like the same kind of thing there's all kinds of the stuff out there to just further complicate the issue there's tons of things that schools need to deal with as far as safety and other facilities.

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And then if they don't buy it they can also make stuff this is a sword I mean I'm sorry a cane rifle cane used for as an assassination in Israel there's homemade the reason they make stuff there is because guns are so expensive they can't afford them they're pretty easy to get but just expensive so the make stuff like these penguins and we see the same kind of stuff made in the US in some situations I think it's probably going to be easier for them to buy something.

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Now. This is what got most popular with starting out so many mass may have seen this in Bowling for Columbine or other news shows this is me in the eighth grade and and we use this demonstration force to show the effect of some effectiveness of dress code and I showed some type here and that's where pretty much all the stuff is hidden so if my shirt was tucked in my pants or a little baggy it was easier to protect the stuff and harder to hide it.

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So like I said this is how I got my start into this business and it may seem odd that I'm so young and have so much experience this was like I said it's great my dad used to do this demonstration as a thirty something year old police chief for the school district but he would and he would dress in gang clothing and try to do this but it just I felt like I could probably do it as well as he could so I offered and I started practicing and you know better than he did he would do twenty or thirty weapons that was twelve in the video my record started about forty and built up my record is one hundred seventy one weapons and basically the same clothing there and so will show when we go to schools across the country conferences what have you and do I do that demonstration to kind of get attention usually when I present that's what I start with live but I'm not going to do that here obviously.

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And. Then after we do that training to get their attention. We'll show things that can be used to prevent that kind of stuff for sure dress code can be pretty effective but also there's techniques called visual screening which is the way a way to watch people as they walk in the Act for example if I have a gun in my wrist band I'm going to react to it and touch it unconsciously or subconsciously throughout the day without really knowing it or ever noticing possibly or there are other things that I may notice that I'm trying to cover and those are some of the signals that we can teach school staff to look for and so we although some of the stuff like this video seems kind of alarmist and shocking that's really not approach we're nonprofit School Safety Center that our own mission is really to count on a lot of the.

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Aroma stuff especially for example the terrorist information has been getting out after the best an attack and after a lot of the school terrorism people come out the media saying if you have a polling place in your schools on Election Day for the two thousand and four elections you're going to have an attack on your schools because al Qaeda is looking to attack schools in the US and.

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And. Schools across the country either move the polling place or they hired off duty police officers for a ton of money to come in and protect the school that was probably empty except for the voters and so they spent a lot of money but it turns out that there is actually no basis for the.

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The threats the claims that there would be an attack yes it's possible there's tons of things that are possible but there was no actual intelligence to support that and that's one of the big risks that that in dealing with terrorism and that's why we we did this research and wrote this book should try to counter that and say yes it's a serious issue there are a lot of things we need to do but like I said there are other things that we should be focusing on but never time on.

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Can anybody just name some problems that you might think of occurring on a school campus college or K. twelve. Right. Right and that's something you see a lot with my senior year of high school the last week of school we were on the football field pretty much every day because we kept getting bomb threats called in and it's pretty depressing because my school had a pretty bad response when you evacuate you should evacuate to different points so that someone can't pattern you can't figure out where you can evacuate to and there are a couple different ways to do the regulation to minimize the effects of hoaxes like that and they didn't really do that as we've accurate to the football field right next to the school which is not really far enough and you write every day at over and over and it's just kind of no fracking to know this kind of stuff yet my school's not quite doing the right kind of stuff as you might know it's just anything off the top your head what could happen like terrorism natural disaster or anything.

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Because there are actually a lot of I believe there are. There's a range of about three to five years that have actually sixty five actual bombs in schools across the U.S. So while the majority are hoaxes we're going to see a lot of them that are up to deal with.

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There and sure there are pretty much and the supply of possibilities that you could think of we could go on for days thinking about. A kid coming in that student a parent coming in. All manner of people. That you could you could just go on for trying to think of different incidents to prepare for and so like this quote if you try to protect everything if you try to think of every little thing that could happen you're going to just waste your time and so we focus on functional protocols for planning rather than incident specific I touched on this earlier but just give you some examples functional protocols these are a few examples for example during the bomb threat you would enact the bomb threat protocol but it doesn't matter if it's a kid in a hospital it's probably a hoax if it's someone with an Arabic accent I mean it doesn't matter what you're going to respond the same way and so you don't train for the bomb threat hoax that we've been having you don't train for al-Qaeda bombing a school you train for a bomb threat or for evacuation a hostage situation in general all of different functions that would.

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That you could use for a wide range of scenarios for example the family family reunification process is one that would be put in place after pretty much any size and school there. Was the rash of school shootings with Columbine written in Jonesboro all across the country and there was a shooting a suicide in Georgia in a school on the news it was immediately reported as yet another school shooting in our community and so parents got divorced they rushed to the school to try to deal with this but because.

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They had a good family unification protocol in place it went really well and it was again a tragic incident but it was a good way to show them that their plans actually worked pretty well and they could deal with a flood of tears to the school because whenever parents think that anything is going wrong with their kids they're going to watch the school run from that actually it's about three adults per student because there's maybe one parent two parents some other kind of grandparent family friends to think I will do that work I may have to I'm free so I'll go pick up and then you've got issues of non-custodial parents picking up kids type of things to deal with and so focusing on these different functions rather than just specific incidents is good but then you know of course you will address the stuff but instead of having to say well for fire you do the slimmest of things you say for a fire initiate evacuation protocol and then you do X.Y.Z. and it streamlines things so that way when you have something that you never dealt with before for example a terrorist attack that's completely new and different you're going to say well OK we do the evacuation we do this this this instead of we don't have this plan for.

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It keeps going to pop up so here are some things that we found as traits of these are focused on tape K. twelve schools but they apply to pretty much any school facility. Looking at. The different people and organizations we've examined over twenty two thousand different school district safety plans and so we've seen a lot of good and bad ones Sadly none of the bad ones and we have a top ten list of the worst things you can do but I adapted it to the other way around to show what a good campus would look like a prepared campus first of all they've got a crisis plan or in the E.O.P. or whatever they're going to call it internally developed instead of having someone come outs come in from outside and write it which we see a lot of times people just pay one hundred thousand dollars or however much money they are asked for to get.

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But a lot of times when that being what we call plan they can get a plan that's maybe it's very well written plan but it's basically fill in the blanks with your district name here and that doesn't work because obviously each school going to have a different. Scenarios different situations even in the same district one school may be near a train tracks with hazmat materials and the school may be near a nuclear facility and another school may not be nearing hazards at all and so they may need to address those things but they don't need to put the full front of their plan in dealing with the hazard that in the square may they need to look at as their main concern.

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And then if you if you don't have and put it from the appropriate organizations the main ones would be first responders police fire you messed services but also the emergency management officials who that's their job is to plan for emergencies plan for crisis and respond to crises and so not involving them in the process is a big mistake because it's just it's a big destruction of the reality when you don't involve those people and they're not using all hazards that do use a hazard playing process that is dealing with everything on the one big umbrella like I've mentioned not saying well we've got natural disasters in our plant here and here it's the manmade disasters this is the should Roosevelt that I was in there's a terrorism plan over here because they administered it doesn't have time to think well I smell gas is this a gas leak is a someone messing with the gas just a student playing a prank or is this a terrorist attack a gas attack so which plan shall look at their initial response is basically going to be the same for the first five minutes or set up and say well they'll have their show response and then modify as they go along where it's really stratified and say you have to decide whether it's terrorism or not it's really going to mess up the response.

[00:36:47]
And then like I mentioned it can be different so you need a standardized plan for the district that So if a teacher moves from building to building or staff members come and go they. Can pretty well operate within the district but each school is going to have a customized version of that plan and when.

[00:37:05]
The commission have an external. Plan from other agencies but also internal development you have one you don't have both of those sets of people review it just like kids in class have to trade papers to proofread because you get too close to your paper to see the mistakes then the plan is the same right when you've got a three hundred page document outlining all these different steps to take then obviously they're going to be mistakes and so having as many people as possible look at it it's great and then testing is one of most important parts of this process because you can have a great plan but if it's a book a book and then it's not going to be good you have to have people reading it and testing it so those are some of the traits that we see in schools that respond effectively for example schools starting at eleven that responded very well there are some good case studies there uses some of these these techniques they had training in place they had backup systems in place for the communications and they had people that could think up their feet really well and save a lot of kids' lives whereas other places like Russia of course probably.

[00:38:03]
This is relevant for their situation. Before the planning process. Of a community hazardous assessment is to be done I mentioned things like train tracks nuclear facilities that's what he would look for those are for example Georgia Tech has plenty concerns because of the area. And so that will be put into place and that will be made the focus of of the planning process where is another school is going to have completely different situations things to deal with and one thing to point out here is that.

[00:38:39]
Most schools across the country do drop down drills that's just where we have a personal school we don't want to get into classrooms for example during a school shooting you would going to walk down every loss in the classrooms and doesn't move. And that's pretty common and that's great but less than ten percent of schools on average do shelter in place trails that we have a chemical cloud coming this way or there's some kind of has made it so that we need to lock down the school so that something doesn't occur and really this is this is what's going to a lot more common if you guys remember and I think it was in Conyers or Clayton County several years ago the plant fire as soon as that came on the news pretty much everybody assumed a terrorist attack and then after a couple hours went by turns out it was just an accident and the chemical cloud of the entire county and maybe other counties to be evacuated and we were doing exercise where for a school system in Florida where that was the scenario pretty much there was a chemical crowd going over the district and what do you do and the people in the district were saying well that would never happen that's not something we have why would we have to evacuate the entire county and we found out that X.

[00:39:44]
Actually that's one of the more common incidents we see focus on violence but. This is the sense that we know of. Violent deaths in schools in the US from a gas explosion that's There were gas fumes and a school and I believe the custodian was buffing the floor and we turn the machine on set off the fumes and pretty much got to have school and that was.

[00:40:09]
Quite a long time ago and then the. Worst incident we have from actually had an attack but it's a bit different in the bath national get attacked with a farmer it's a bit different than this this was an arson committed by a very young student he was under ten years old I believe something very young and while he was made out of or was the first and only if what he was doing he was clear that he knew people could die for his actions so we consider that an arson and he was a good school in Chicago so it burned very easily.

[00:40:41]
The two students and three nuns died in the fire and so on and actually this is what caused a big revolution in the way we do a fire we don't usually have deaths from fires in the US and Iran because of a lot of things we do quite reduced from what we used to have in schools it's prematurity when you used to have incidents like this all the time because now we do fire drills all the time and we do have these things to keep in place and that's the only good things that can come out of these incidents similar to the hazard assessment but more focused on the actual campus as a tactical site survey and take there's something similar to this a belief each year of the.

[00:41:21]
Safety rocks that were. Faculty walk around campus with students looking for unsafe I really apologize for the. Admissions. Basically looking for things that might cause a hazard might pose an unsafe environment for example if there's a place on campus where I walk through to get to my dorm and it's always kind of dark and there are people going to hide but it's a lot quicker than going all the way around and that creates an environment conducive to being robbed or raped then we may want to think about blocking that every off putting lights in that area there are a lot of ways that you deal with that situation and this would look for issues like that all manner of issues things like fire hazards this output needs to be replaced because it's not because these chemicals should be stored next to each other or things I can mention with my focus on violence and there's some just some different considerations that the school should use when one from the INS a lot of people.

[00:42:22]
Will use the concept of conception to come in there was one guy that went to some schools in Indiana the church fifteen thousand dollars per building to do the walk through basically this kind of walk through he didn't involve an internal team of people that knew the school people that know.

[00:42:38]
The local issues and local. Things and you deal with yet he charges that much money and getting a report and he would happily coming back and do that again next year and year after that and so they did just three schools and that was forty five thousand dollars for one year that's obviously out of the reach of the budget I would say any district that should be wasting that much money on that and so what we recommend would have that conceptually come in and do that but then train people on how to do that for example or have your team an internal training somehow trained on that so then a school can create a culture of safety.

[00:43:10]
By saying their internal personnel are going to see these hazards and are going to stick out to them every day. And see the stuff the more and and sort of someone coming in from the outside or getting paid a bunch of money to say you need to fix this your classroom is really dangerous this desk is just a hazard Campbell you're still a teacher and that kind of stuff instead you have.

[00:43:31]
A teacher that you know that works with you come in and say you know this this thing your classroom is pretty dangerous we noticed this you should change that classroom to have a hazard here or what have you so it has a longer and more beneficial effect then bring in some and and that's what we see with a lot of the sort of schools make the mistake of trying to take a short cut have someone to come in a lot of people who would love to hire to pay them tons of money just to do all the work for them and as I've pretty much I wanted it's it's not a very effective way to do planning.

[00:44:04]
And there are a lot of different components to to the crisis plan. You've got the system protocols the basic plan and I was other stuff is kind of built around that for example. Software systems maybe on CD-ROM or on the Internet where a SWAT team can come in the look and see photos and video of the Interior the school in Columbine they had issues where kids who had just seen their friends shot who just a doctor at the school were brought maps to show the SWAT team a blueprint the school and make cases turn out to be wrong and so instead of that we could have a photo procedure is software to help respond to the incident to help us respond to a school.

[00:44:43]
And then things like flip charts that are pretty easy to quickly a teacher would have this in a classroom for example and a fire she flips to fire bomb threat what have you. And this is not the whole plan obviously but this would just kind of on the first five minutes the first twenty minutes of an incident until they can go get the plan and get further instructions and so there's tons of things that can be involved in this and it's just a very in-depth process.

[00:45:10]
And I keep watching the officers play model it's built upon a first phase approach to preparing for something and they're pretty straightforward listed here and I'll briefly outline them and this this indicates it's just a continuous cycle commitment training you make a plan you train and then you come back later to fix your plan it should never stop because things are always changing plans are always being updated and new situations always arise in this this model kind of became the new paradigm and two thousand and three it's a little bit up because I'm carrying around a lot but this is the U.S.D.A. we guide to the Department of Education guide to this planning process it's a very straight for very simple and not very in-depth guide to describe this is something really great that the federal government is doing they can't maintain the schools used to use these techniques because they don't have that authority but they can recommend it and say its best practices and so this guy does for free on the Internet or the merit to teachers and school boards and so that's kind of what's become the best practices across the country recently and it's been in place for a decade or more but really it's just kind of getting.

[00:46:24]
Put in place more commonly and there's just some different incidents examples of things that would happen on campus these are pretty obvious things that we would think of happening but we often forget the off campus incidents that we need to prepare for in the plan things that may happen across the district across the state across the country that could somehow be over for example transportation disaster could span the whole interstate or the whole state.

[00:46:51]
All kinds of things here that we have these power grid attacks one that's not listed here would be an. Attack the attack on the computer systems of a district or just in general. Attack would be pretty pretty effective against us right now. Prevention immigration medications the first phase of the plan this is kind of the passive section that deals with day to day operations things like facility is access control the day to day security the police operations and just the cultural climate the school for example in the section a plan a school lists they do programs or peer peer mediation.

[00:47:34]
Simple things like that that are really too big of a deal Torrent to present but they are doing a little bit to help make the school a safer place. And then things like access control that we find you know obviously this is one of the big things for terrorism we don't want terrorists to have access to our information our kids our facilities a lot of these things that there are a lot of planing So this is important to look at but also at the same time these are things these are reasons that we want to be doing this anyway huge problems across the country with.

[00:48:05]
Child molestation where parents and. Teachers will move from state to state for example there was a case I believe in Washington where they found a coach had moved nine different communities across the state to get away and he kept getting fired quietly he would go to another district and get fired quietly again and so really look at our access control background checks on who would lead and doing thorough enough background checks Well people say we did a background check but it wasn't then and what they don't realize is may not be thorough enough to include things like out of state convictions or drop charges which maybe the person was innocent the charges were dropped but we may want to know if they were charged three times with child molestation and found that all three times that may be a warning sign.

[00:48:51]
And then September is another another concept that's kind of a passive security approach ways that it brings are designed to make them less. Prone to violence and just inviting things like colors that you choose for the room the way the holes are designed so you can see. You have a vision in ways that entrances are designed so say for example the secretary the front desk can watch and physically view everybody who comes into the school but pair of eyes that would be free because of the way you layout the office can easily replace a dozen cameras that would not be very effective because maybe the person is not watching the camera or the camera's not very accurately and so looking at the way a school is designed before it's built but also modifying it after it's been mentioned a few examples of things that you do but if you find for example you have a lot of problems with people getting cells in a certain area or vandalism kids keep tearing off this part of the wall then you look at a right to change the environment to maybe increase supervision or disallow access to that area.

[00:49:58]
Just a few basic things that should be being done get physical security increase surveillance. I mentioned if there's an attack across the country parents are going to react as if it happened near them in some cases and so do you have the ability in your school district to increase law enforcement presence can you put an officer on every school bus for the next week if your parents or are that scared there are some different considerations for a school nurse they should be looking at.

[00:50:25]
Preparedness is what most most people think of when I think of the crisis plan this is the the ME What are we going to do for these different types of scenarios. And this is basically the planning process for that and again mamzer I.C.'s is a very crucial point in this planning process.

[00:50:43]
And just all different considerations but most importantly practicing. This is the. Response to a shooting in Georgia if you can get into the right place. So it was built in. In a second they're going to show the road here you can see these are all news trucks news media from across the country this was a local incident and this is what happened because it was during the craze of Columbine and that era and so you can see that stretched on for quite a while actually went for about a mile out of the school there's been a lot of problems with.

[00:51:32]
Incidents where paramedics have had to get out a mile away from the school to carry the stretcher to get to the injured kids and that's obviously going to put a hindrance on the response and so media staging areas and a lot of access or wanting to consider this is kind of funny clip this is from a shooting or actually a hostage situation in Georgia where they didn't really have control and here the parents reacting he's yelling about how they don't have any control they don't know what's going on all the parents are going pretty disgruntled and this guy's trying to calm him down from the pick up truck because they don't have family reunification procedures in place they don't have parental notification in place a lot of things that were not done right here that were running right and wrong about how to respond better and.

[00:52:13]
In that incident nobody died by the way as it was funny and so I don't know anybody get it wrong idea. Different people need to be involved in the planning process these are all pretty obvious except maybe the local business these are a great resource for school. Either for profit providing resources like bottled water during an incident can you provide us with X.

[00:52:36]
amount about water for this price and we'll do an invoice afterwards but can we have this agreement in place or any kind of emergency supplies. One reason to do this is there was an incident in Georgia where Chick fil A A belief. Offered they said the local chief right said hey we'll provide you a bunch of sandwiches and stuff because we know you guys are out here doing with us and it's been a real tough situation so here we provide some food for you guys and they said sure would be great we appreciate it and then later on they got a bill for some huge amount of money for the food was a reasonable price but the.

[00:53:09]
That's something they want they want expecting they don't have the budget for that and so bring the stuff in beforehand and also there are ways for a lot of cases. They'll be intangible they can be offered for example one district was having a P.T.A. meeting talking about this and a parent stood up and said Rah don't know anything about school safety I'm just a software engineer isn't the I can do to help let me know and they used him actually to write a lot of software programs like I was talking about which can really cost dozens of tens of thousands of dollars to get it.

[00:53:41]
Done professionally yet this guy was able to do them only I system because of his expertise so that a lot of different facets of the planning process really involving the whole community in this. And another reason in the support to cooperate when we're doing the planning this is a bomb inside a car not a car bomb the reason it matters is because a car bomb would be a lot bigger and the door just fell down.

[00:54:06]
This is something a lot of people wouldn't think about when they're doing their regulation plan for example unless they have law enforcement fire in the room A.T.F. to tell them they need to be a certain distance away a thousand feet away from the building Fossil watch out for the stuff in the parking lot well first may say well we're going to do a sweep of the evacuation route before you take take the kids through there because of stuff like this and we see a lot of schools kind of weaving that stuff out the response part of the plan is the crystallisation of the last part of preparedness part it's taking all that stuff and bringing it down to.

[00:54:38]
These guys like I talked about just the first five minutes you have this would be part of the response plan a training aid for staff to respond you might have checklists logs to make sure that other functions are carried out these are the ten things you need to do for a weapons incident and let's make sure that all these will carry out certain quote later on we can prove that we were not negligent that we were supposed to do etc and also just looking at it and saying well how do we perform does our planet need to be adjusted there's a big misconception.

[00:55:09]
That people are failing in these incidents or people fail during an exercise but really it's a product of the plan failing because the plan was not adapted to fit how people are going to react there are incidents where people have been trying to dial nine one one during incident and they know that they have to dial nine to get out to an outside line yet they doubt anyone.

[00:55:28]
Because their plan doesn't say about nine one one they weren't trying to dial that way and so a lot of things like that. That we can look at and say roll out all they kept trying to dial nine one one it took them ten minutes to get out we need to change the way we train them on that and also these you have different guides for different staff members like you have this one for bus drivers for example this one to be the teacher will because each each staff positions probably going to have a different.

[00:55:56]
Role in it to carry out an addition you have crisis team members and parent volunteers that need separate protocols and etc and then the recovery sections the final phase of the plan most people used to leave this out they just don't think of this is because after the fact.

[00:56:12]
But really it's one of the most important parts of it still is with Business continuity planning just keeping your records keeping payroll going so that people aren't left living paycheck to paycheck and being many of us penniless for a couple weeks but also mental health recovery are all people really focusing just on the victims of the attack but they don't realize that this is a very important part of the planning process Columbine lost I believe one thousand people on the day of the shooting and they've had actually twenty deaths to suicide since the shooting so they've had more deaths because of the Recovery Planning failure then the actual shooting that day because people weren't you derive some right ways they weren't.

[00:56:51]
But instead of counseling centers so the kids could go seek out counseling because a lot of people are going to show any signs they're not going to necessarily ask for help and you've got to have the support staff in place to watch for those kinds of risks. And then we know what the most graphic image this.

[00:57:09]
In its report of nine eleven the most they stuck in their mind. That's what gets reported and so to all the teachers or adults that are showing this for example when it happened all across rooms in my school merely went to C.N.N. or whatever news station and we watched this for a couple hours.

[00:57:30]
This is the kind of stuff I deal with on a daily basis day to day basis from from work but it still is kind of draining to watch the stuff and so kids seeing the stuff. They are in day out all day is always going to affect them some right and maybe it's not going to have a great big tangible effect but it may be something they need to get some assistance about some of the need to for example the teacher may say well they haven't said anything they're not really acting too weird but I think that Johnny might be a little upset so they can go in there for them so I like this.

[00:58:05]
And then. A few other things. Just some miscellaneous stuff one thing that we see a lot of mistakes is people who have this plan they get their great plan and they want to disseminate to their parents to the public to show that they're doing something so they put the plan on the internet a couple years ago actually found tax plan with the whole response for W M D's and all kinds of different things and I look for it I don't think it's there anymore but that's the kind of stuff that you were not getting out to terrorists for example or the disgruntled parent in a lot of school districts do that and they've actually film school these plans that are put on the Internet and not text but in general school plans in Afghanistan and Iraq on hard drives where people have actually gotten this kind of information this is a bomb threat check rest from a state university it's not tech but I'm going to mention who it is and I found this just on my web site and this is not a big deal it doesn't tell you exactly how they're going to spawn but if I was going to call in a bomb threat I might want to look at this list and see what they're going to be looking for and making notes about in case I want to try to mess with this or.

[00:59:09]
Spot SOME. I was looking for a text plan this morning actually I found this article which made me pretty happy it talks about an exercise that they didn't June where they were testing a few different functions they did they cooperated with their line of fire department the F.B.I. And I believe that it put the police department to test what would happen during a chemical spill and it went really well they found and it's a good example of for a good exercise they tested first of all cooperating with other agencies they're going to be responding with these different agencies they're working with so they're going to get to know them they've tested it has made response they tested their communications capabilities and just in general basic functions like responding the M.S. probably had to come out and just do some.

[00:59:59]
Basic functions that you wouldn't really. Think about because they're so basic but stuff that needs to be practiced and so I'm really happy to see that tech is doing a lot of progressive stuff here because a lot of people just aren't really dealing with this we were kind of forced to and I don't be repetitive but all people like to see these.

[01:00:19]
Video clips and this is a new version the one you saw is about eight years ago the weapons demonstration and this one I did a few months ago. And a lot of complaints that I was faking it and there are video there about ten videos on You Tube showing me and talking about how I have hidden pockets and it's a trick and other stuff and so I want to do different camera angles here to show the stuff one could actually make fun of me he made a video of himself playing all these weapons in the end he reaches under the table and pulls out a huge two a bazooka they could not possibly couldn't and so I want to show the you can see the side of the table and different things here and this is more what I do for the larger groups of teachers when I do a live I would have a lot more weapons but this is the kind of stuff and.

[01:01:15]
Some of the stuff we've bought you can tell it's kind of new but a lot of these things are either actual weapons that were seized from schools or the same kinds of weapons have the access so bit weird but there was actually a fight in a school parking lot with a guy one guy had an axe another had a sword and they had to be broken up by police so you do see it here this is fifty small pocket knives they all fit all my pocket we bought a bucket of them for about twelve dollars most people would kind of overlook these when dealing with school safety as just a Swiss army knife it's only one inch blade it's in a sense but we need to make people realize that something like that actually can kill someone one inch blade if used the right way.

[01:01:56]
And of course you get the good stuff like this. And this is actually been done before and some more attacks believe it or not. The most weapons we know of ever being used in a score attack with the clip I showed with the parents getting upset because they lack information that kid was a kid who had been bullied because of his props he brought in a duffel bag with ninety seven pounds of weapons and took hostages in the school because he'd been treated so badly he decided to have a bus to Mexico and he made a bad decision but that's a good point is that he was put in that position.

[01:02:42]
The environment was created to allow him to do that because. He was being exposed to kids reflect the lights on and off the classroom to make him have seizures and even on and on and finally that's what he in doing now he's I think he's in prison after that but I want to point out this is not just this this is to catch attention like I mentioned earlier but really the minor stuff is what we try to focus on and I hope that kind of.

[01:03:06]
Came across all hazards. Rational approach to things now will take some questions if you guys want to email me or look at our website feel free but I'll take life questions if you guys have any. Right I think is dangerous to say that anybody is. Definitely prepared for something you don't want to say for example that tech can handle anything but they've been they've done some pretty good stuff they exercise like that and just a response to the bottle bomb incident.

[01:03:56]
It allowed them to practice and show that they can respond to something I think it was handled pretty well considering despite the fact that it turned out to be what it was if it had been a real incident I think that they probably have been in pretty good response you know there's a danger and stuff like that because we see that incident the incident in Boston and people say well you're overreacting and then you have things like Katrina where we under reacted and so there's a balance to that but I think tech is probably pretty proficient because of the stuff I mean we're pretty advanced with a lot of the information technology stuff and being in Atlanta and it looks like we have some good resources.

[01:04:34]
And I think that I think that tech is probably ahead of Atlanta preparedness at least. I'm going to continue doing this. I'm doing this full time in school full time stop so it's kind of I get I want to see us because of that and I'm going to get more time to work hopefully and just.

[01:05:03]
Relax go to grad school think about staying here but I'm not sure I think it would probably be ready to get out. But I think I'm a stick into the Status field for a little while it's pretty fulfilling and pretty pretty good job I can't complain. Well I would like to point out that actually that.

[01:05:25]
It's a really neat experience for me to be doing this kind of stuff and going to school the same time especially here because I think the classes are great here and it's just neat because I can when I get an assignment in class I see it as a work experience thing like one of my classes some having to do presentations for a grade for example and for me that's just practice for work and papers practice for writing journal articles.

[01:05:49]
And I really get to see some of value that I get here and that's just kind of an eruption I think that a lot of students don't really get is going to see the application of the busy work they're doing in that location of the. All the stress and so for example this.

[01:06:04]
Is a great opportunity appreciate you guys for sitting through it so if I had. To. Drag the times or my presentation and getting ahead of me. Thinking.