Preparing for Worst Case Scenarios
Proactively preparing for the worst case scenario is critical to ensuring the best possible outcome should the worst happen. The costs of being unprepared are almost unspeakable, including unnecessary loss of innocent lives. The first, critical step any school must take in protecting students and staff against an active shooter is developing a plan of action for how to handle active shooter emergencies. Creating a comprehensive plan and making sure staff is trained on how to execute the plan requires the knowledge and assistance of security experts to get the best possible outcome. No school should leave their response to an active shooter to chance.
To help schools shore up their active shooter response, Edgeworth’s team of security experts have developed a series of advanced security training and emergency preparedness courses that connects schools to the latest in security industry insights, knowledge, and best practices. Edgeworth’s Active Shooter Training for Schools equips faculty with policies and procedures created with their specific campus in mind, arming them with straight-forward, research-based answers on what they need to do in emergency situations.
Edgeworth recently partnered with one of our long standing clients, a private day school in Pennsylvania,* to deliver our Active Shooter Training. This training consists of several different phases, all constructed to ensure that the school received training that is tailored, specific, and most importantly effective at preventing or reducing harm in active shooter situations.
Before the training event, Edgeworth worked with the school’s administration and security to craft a customized curriculum for their particular campus. Our professional instructors conducted a security assessment and area walkthrough to tailor the training to the school’s individualized security needs. They marked access points, investigating the entire perimeter of the school, and reviewed the previous safety policies to target possible areas of concern.
The Assessment Phase ensures that the training material presented is fresh and relevant, and avoids the trap of a cookie-cutter response to unique challenges.
The prevention component of Edgeworth’s Active Shooter curriculum, Behavior Awareness is the key to recognizing and initiating the steps of preventing an active shooter incident before it occurs.
In this phase of the training, participants first learn how to increase awareness during daily interactions. Driven by participation and discussion, training is focused on highlighting the verbal and nonverbal cues of violence, the role of a person’s subconscious intuition, and actions that can be taken to increase safety in everyday life. The school’s faculty were guided through observation techniques designed to be applied in varied environments and scenarios.
Next, participants construct a baseline of what is typical behavior to the school’s community: what time should students be transitioning, who is authorized to be on the grounds and when, and other such standard activities. This level of collaboration also improves incident response times, as all faculty and staff are now working on the same information and can better identify when something might not be operating correctly.
Lastly, Edgeworth instructors partner with the participants to create their own planned responses when those baselines are broken. With these tools, the school faculty are better prepared to analyze their own observations in real time, recognize the early indicators of violence, and be empowered to make the immediate decisions that will mitigate the potential for violent encounters.
After equipping the school faculty with the tools to recognize violence before it occurs, Edgeworth instructors then pivoted to preparing participants on how to act if violence is unavoidable. Edgeworth instructors utilized the pre-training assessment to carefully guide them through a practice Active Shooter situation created specifically for the Pennsylvanian private day school.
The Active Shooter Response training phase begins with an overview of past Active Shooter events. This instruction is focused on helping individuals better understand an active shooter’s common triggers and characteristics. Instructors then walked the school’s faculty step-by-step through Edgeworth’s proprietary methodology, which is designed around the sole purpose of preserving life. The Active Shooter Response training focuses on critical actions the participants can carry out that are intended to save lives. Focuses also include positional management and active techniques for direct and indirect scene organization.
This hands-on Active Response training phase is developed to help refine, refresh, and reinforce the concepts taught throughout the entire course. It also serves to illustrate how the techniques taught could apply to the school’s unique environment.
The Active Shooter Training is created to not only make safer communities, but also to make individuals more confident in the safety of their communities. Now having completed this training, faculty at the private day school are better equipped to address and prevent emergency situations. Thanks to our amazing partnerships, our team of security experts, and the trust of our clients, we are transforming schools, communities, and organizations one step at a time, ensuring superior security for all. Together, we are creating a formidable shield against potential threats.
As another layer of that shield, Edgeworth offers our premiere remote monitoring solution, Remote Guarding, to school campuses. We will personally craft a bespoke Remote Guarding integration to address all of your particular campus’ security wants and needs. Through Remote Guarding, Edgeworth allows school administration to both better secure the perimeter of school property and prevent common points of security failure. Our Peace of Mind panic button service lets faculty and students summon assistance within seconds. In the event of an active security concern, Edgeworth Security provides live, in-the-moment camera views that law enforcement and school staff need in critical moments to be able to bring those incidents to the best possible conclusion.
Remote Guarding is currently successfully deployed in many school campuses, from Pre-K to higher learning institutions across the nation. Our private day school client has employed Remote Guarding for many years, and is extremely satisfied with the superior protection and peace of mind it gives to faculty, students, and the greater community.
If you would like to learn more about our available array of security trainings, or would like to get a quote for an Edgeworth Security training event in your community, contact (412) 334-1961 for more information.
*Edgeworth takes client privacy extremely seriously—especially when it comes to school campuses—so we have anonymized our client to protect their privacy while still being able to communicate our concrete subject matter expertise.
