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My name is Dr. Amy Klinger and in the Department of Educational Administration here Ashland University
and I teach specifically at the Elyria and Cleveland centers in Ohio.
My area teaching here at Ashland is, I teach Educational Administration
and graduate-level courses, preparing in-service or currently-serving teachers
and other school staff to become administrators.
My area of expertise and research and really intense interest is in the area of school safety
and looking at crisis management and violence prevention in schools.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of experience here in the United States with crisis events in schools,
but we don't have a lot of familiarity at a school level with what to do, how to prevent them,
and more specifically how to prepare and plan for those sort of events that we
know unfortunately are going to occur.
I think the most significant development for us has been a publication that came out in June 2013.
It was a publication from FEMA and the US Department of Education
and it discusses how to create high-quality crisis management plans for schools.
The big seismic shift is moving away from a traditional lockdown.
Many schools throughout the United States embrace a traditional lockdown approach,
based on FEMA's recommendations. Well, those have changed.
FEMA's recommendations are that you adopt a more option-oriented approach,
where staff and students have options of what to do, based on the situation,
as opposed to a regimented response.
For us and the research that I do, it's very exciting because
it affirms what we've been talking about for a number of years,
in terms of our capabilities to do more and to do better,
and to not rely on just a traditional hideout and hope for the best
sort of approach, that research indicates does not work.
I think it's crucial because when parents send their kids to school,
they are sending us literally the most important thing in their lives,
they're sending us their most precious thing, their children,
and we have a very strong moral and ethical obligation to safety
above everything else, above academics above finances, above everything else.
I think this is very crucial because we know that an educator is going to face a crisis event.
You either are an educator, who has faced one or is going to.
We have an obligation as a preparation institution
to make sure that our students are going into classrooms and schools
with the capabilities to make the best possible decisions
to ensure their safety and to ensure an appropriate response
to protect the students and that school.
Typically, when the media involvement in these post-events, after there's been some sort of crisis event,
oftentimes I think as a nation, we take a look at the event
from a law enforcement perspective. We oftentimes don't have
an educational perspective of why the school did what they did,
what the school is up against, in terms of what they're trying to accomplish,
and I think it's really important to have someone who has a foot in both
worlds who understands the law enforcement component
but also understand educationally what it is a school is trying to do
and that's one of the things that I try very hard to do
to keep a law enforcement perspective,
but to also have the education perspective, first and foremost,
because it's very easy for a law enforcement person to say
what should happen on a daily basis,
but when we're trying to accomplish our primary mission of educating kids,
that needs to be taken into account when we look at what we should be doing to
ensure their safety as well.