School Safety is a Community Effort

In my last blog, I wrote about "see something, say something", as I saw a drug deal and called the police.  This concept is at the heart of today's blog post.

Community Effort

Keeping a school safe in today's world is not the job of law enforcement, or the fire department, or of people trained in school safety.  It's the job of everyone in the community, including those who do not have children in school.  The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary showed us the damage that cane be done to a community when children are killed.  Therefore each and every member of the community has a stake in school safety.

Everyone does not need to do the same thing.  Fire fighters are different from police officers.  They do different types of jobs.  Along those lines, people can do different things.  The least that people can do is "see something, say something".

See Something, Say Something

People see things everyday that should be brought to the attention of someone.  However, for numerous reasons, they don't think to say anything.  Gavin de Becker wrote an excellent book, The Gift of Fear.  In it he explores the power of intuition in keeping people safe.  Too often people dismiss their intuition, leading to bad things.

People do this out of fear.  Fear of being wrong, fear of looking "silly", or any number of other fears.  These fears often prevent us from taking actions that we know, deep down, to be the right ones.  As a community, we have to identify these fears, face them, and do whatever needs to be done to keep our children safe.

Children are, indeed, our future.