A school safety checklist should involve every member of the community. While security officers are hired specifically to deal with safety, violent threats are not the only type of safety issue with which faculty and students should be concerned. Developing a safety checklist can ensure that the school has an atmosphere that is conducive to learning and most beneficial to the students.

As a precaution, you might inquire about training faculty members how to deal with crises. While an incident in the immediate present can pose a physical threat to students, there may also be psychological effects which must be dealt with in the aftermath. Furthermore, all faculty members should be aware of the protocols for dealing with all manner of threats or crises. This will help to minimize confusion in the event of an emergency.

Students should also know how to react in the event of an emergency. The regular use of fire drills is one example of a common security precaution in which everyone is instructed how to respond to a dangerous situation. While you might not have a drill for how to deal with an attack from within the school, the procedures that students should follow need to be clearly explicated to them early in the year.

School Safety on a Daily Basis

These scenarios will hopefully be very rare--but because they are truly dire, it's easy to get students and faculty to pay attention when you talk about how to deal with them. The more routine and day-to-day aspects of security, however, often slip through the cracks--particularly because the students themselves do not take the related issues seriously. The simplest way to promote a safe and secure atmosphere is by making sure that everyone in the school at a given time has been accounted for and everyone displays an ID giving them permission to be in the building. That way, even when students are apathetic or take a casual attitude, you can protect them and help them protect themselves.