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School Safety in America: Rhetoric vs. Reality

– Welcome everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, and we’re here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Wisconsin 4H program, which is part of the Division of Extension here at UW-Madison as of three days ago. And on behalf of those folks, and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to welcome back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab David Perrodin. He’s with Viterbo University, and he’ll be talking with us about school safety in America, rhetoric versus reality. David was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, and graduated from Marathon High School in Marathon, Wisconsin. And then, he went to UW-Stevens Point, where he studied speech and language pathology. He got both a bachelor’s degree there, and a master’s degree at Point.

And then, he got a master’s degree in education at UW-Superior. Then came to UW-Madison to get his PhD in educational leadership and policy analysis. He promotes a safety initiative, taking action before disaster strikes. He’s an author, researcher, professor, legal expert, witness consultant, and the host of the Safety Doc podcast. While he was here getting his PhD, he researched high stakes safety decisions in education, health care, and the military. He was here at Wednesday Nite @ the Lab back in 2013. Since then, he wrote and directed a film about school safety with Pulitzer Prize winner David Obst. His book, School of Errors: Rethinking School Safety in America, challenges the unchecked expansion of school fortification and hyper-realistic drills, and questions the realized benefit of inter-agency collaboration during a sentinel event. Please join me in welcoming David Perrodin back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [audience applauding]

– Thank you, Tom, for welcoming me back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, and I’m glad to be back.

It’s great to be here. We’re going to focus on school safety, rhetoric versus reality, and kind of what’s changed in that narrative since I was here in 2013. I do have a podcast, the Safety Doc podcast, with more than 100 episodes focusing on school and community safety, and also, my book, School of Errors: Rethinking School Safety in America, with an outstanding foreword by actor Danny Woodburn. When I presented in 2013, it was school statistics, the history of school attacks, school shooter situations, and crisis preparedness and response. But since my presentation, we have sustained the frequency of school violence incidents. We’ve had Parkland, Santa Fe, Highlands. So, what’s going on? I will discuss rhetoric, accountability, school safety industrial complex, fortification, student mental health paradox, teaching students about safety, a recently developed threat to school safety, optimism, and reality. What is rhetoric? It’s persuasion, it’s discourse. It’s what people say about school safety, but it’s not necessarily eager to research or data. This is what we’ll read about in the newspapers, we’ll hear about on the radio, we’ll see on our social media feeds.

Schools can fortify their way to safety. School safety is steadfastly monitored and regulated. Student health mental services make schools safer. There is a profile of a student attacker. Limiting students’ experiences makes them safer. K-12 education in America. Everyday, 55 million students attend more than 140,000 public and private school buildings. But we also need to consider that we have community preschool sites, thousands of portable classrooms, and also, students taking online courses. When I bring that up, when I do safety consulting, people say, “Oh, we didn’t include “those students in our safety plans. ” They often get overlooked in the narrative of safety.

So, who’s in charge of school safety? Initially, you would think it’s the federal government. But actually, the federal government is terrific at giving recommendations about school safety. It is the state which creates the laws and the regulations. The school districts, then, interpret and implement those laws and regulations. 43 out of 50 states require that schools have safety plans and do safety drills. So, 43 out of 50, you’re wondering, who are the seven states? Well, Wisconsin is not in that group of seven, and I’m not going to identify those states right now. But hopefully, after watching this, they’re gonna get on board, and we’re gonna have 50 out of 50. But site-based discretion comes into play. Because we have school districts, and the way school districts operate is they typically embrace site-based discretion, meaning that principals are in charge of interpreting school safety, how it should be implemented in their buildings. And that makes sense, because the buildings are different, the populations are different, elementary, middle, and high.

In Wisconsin, we have 421 school districts, 2,216 school buildings, so safety looks significantly different from building to building, even within the same school district. Before 2017, the only form that needed to be submitted to indicate that you are compliant as a school district with school safety was this one form, right here, to the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services. This is completely inadequate. What day did you do the drill, how many people participated? There aren’t learning objectives. This is just a checklist activity. Most states still do this, or they don’t even come to this level. Something had to change, and it did. We had Act 143. It came about, Wisconsin Act 143, Department of Justice, 2017 to present. So, now the DOJ has taken over school safety in Wisconsin, we’ve had big changes.

Schools are required to submit their blueprints to the DOJ. Safety plans, safety training records, and also conduct an annual drill in the proper response to a school violence event, and then produce a summary for the school board. But this is subjective, because what is a proper response to a school violent event? Districts will go and do large, full-scale exercises to meet this requirement, other districts will not go to that extent. So, we still have some subjective, interpretive nature in this. But the DOJ stepped forward and elevated Wisconsin, notably, on the national scene, for school safety. School safety is a $3 billion industrial complex. And when we look at the dollars that get encumbered under school referendums across the United States, that number’s closer to $5 billion. That’s different than when I was here in 2013. The school safety industrial complex did not exist back then. So, the majority of dollars are being spent on fortifications, a smaller portion, student mental health, training staff, and also providing mental health services.

We have a sliver, we have a small sliver, right here. There is a sliver, it’s safety research. It’s less than 1%. You’d have to slice it, and it’s even less than that. We get down to such a small part of safety research. So, we’re treating direct causes, we’re not getting at root causes. We keep funding fortifications, and this is snowballing. A rise in school security. The middle line indicates surveillance cameras being sold. That has become a very robust industry.

The top is fortified entrances. Actually, the bottom line, which has stayed flat, metal detectors, for some reason, that hasn’t caught on. We’re talking millions and millions of dollars that are going into these types of devices, and the question, are they making schools safer? And empirically, we know we’re not seeing a decrease in the frequency of school shootings and school attacks. The youth code of silence. Well, we’ve known about this for 30 years, and we’ve known it’s been widely published for 20 years, since the 1999 Columbine attack, where prior to most attacks, somebody else knew that the attack was going to happen. At least one other person, but multiple. In Bethel, Alaska, in 1997, there were more than 20 students assembled on a mezzanine who showed up to watch the school shooting. So, they didn’t tell an adult. Now, threat detection, the most important part of your threat detection isn’t $3 billion worth of devices that you’re putting in schools, it’s your students, and we are not researching, we’re not putting the investment into breaking the youth code of silence. When establishing a threat assessment, we have to make sure we do not profile a student attacker.

There is not a profile. Students have been high academic achievers, low academic achievers, loners, have had friends, have identified as being bullied, identified as not being the recipient of bullying. But we tend to put this profile together in the rhetoric, in the narrative of it. Somebody that’s been bullied, it’s somebody who probably dressed in black, in goth, and was into Kiss-type music. Well, if that was the case, half my class in middle school would have been on a watch list, because that’s just the way that it was. And we have to be very vigilant, because there are bills on the horizon, in some states, to allow teachers to potentially profile who they think the next school shooter could be. That’s terrifying. Again, since 2013, we’ve been on a pace of 400 safety bills proposed by the states per year, and about 80 of those get enacted. And that stayed pretty constant. So, we can see where the bills get enacted, the funding usually follows.

We have the $3 billion industry, and something is different, though, this year. Something is different in 2019. Through April 25th, 257 bills were proposed. This will be a record-setting year for the number of bills proposed, and the number of bills passed, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. The counter-argument to this is, we have to reach saturation at some point, right? We can only put so many cameras in, and so many bullet-resistant doors, and things like that, but there’s always something else that you can sell, or an update, or an upgrade, or a second fence outside of the first fence. And believe me, these things are marketed. There’s a new app. We’re gonna see some things today that I never thought I would see as a veteran in the safety profession. So, we go back to 2018. The Department of Justice awarded $100 million in grants for school safety enhancements, impacted 600 public and private schools in Wisconsin, part of Act 143.

Fortifications, mental health and threat assessment training, and also, mental health community partnerships were working with clinics and hospitals so they might be able to train school staff and also work with students identified with mental health needs in the school setting. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has some similar grants to put together school-based mental health services. They expire in 2021. But there’s an inherent problem with grant funding. Grant funding expires. You have to sustain whatever initiative is that you put together with grant funding. So, with the DOJ dollars, the $100 million, if it’s a device that you purchased, you’re responsible for maintaining that device. You can’t contact DOJ and say, “We bought this “out of our grant money, and now we need money “to do an upgrade, or to do maintenance to it. ” It’s the same thing with training. Now, this is huge.

So, if we do mental health and threat assessment training for staff, Wisconsin did a wonderful job with this in the last year or two, but we have a high turnover in teachers, and also, principals. Principals, two or three years, superintendents, every two or three years, turn over. And teachers, it’s really free agency in Wisconsin after Act 10, meaning teachers go from district to district, and also burn out. So, you have to have an induction process for the people coming in, and schools don’t have that. So, this will fade, the impact of the trainings will fade because it’s just not sustainable. Anybody can become a school safety expert. Arguably, you could leave here today, print this slide off, and put your name on it, and you could be a school safety expert. It is vendors, marketers, taking advantage of this, because no certification, license, registration, permit, nothing. So, schools are confused. They get approached by a vendor, and they assume this vendor has expertise in the area of safety, and the vendor probably doesn’t have a great depth of expertise, generally, in assessing the needs of the district.

Now, the vendor knows the vendor catalog, knows what the vendor can sell you. But as far as a needs assessment, no. So, this has really clouded and fogged school safety across the country. I wrote in my book, School of Errors: Rethinking School Safety in America, that I recommend schools go right to their insurance carriers, and ask their insurance carriers to come in and send someone to do a risk assessment for the facility. I think that’s an authentic way to find someone who would meet what I would say is a robust set of criteria for school safety expert. Customer perceived value. It’s a marketing term, but it applies to schools right now. The customer is the parent. This is obvious. The customer is the parent.

When the perceived value is increased, student safety, it’s practically unthinkable to assign a price tag to peace of mind. The moment you do this, you can justify anything. If I come in, and I sell this, and I say, “This device, right here, can detect a gunshot,” or “This device can do some other magical thing, “you need to have it,” they’re probably going to purchase it, especially if I’m a good salesperson. I think I probably would be. But again, it’s peace of mind, lead to decisions to fuel this 3 to $5 billion school safety industry, using peace of mind. We’re gonna see some really stretched examples of where peace of mind came into play in some school safety decisions. But remember, the customer is the parent, and the perceived value is increased student safety, you’re gonna spend those dollars. A school administrator. So, with Viterbo University, I teach legal issues for school superintendents, and also special education law for aspiring special education directors, and I’ve done that for 16 years. Very proud to be a faculty member with Viterbo University, and working with administrators.

So, I stay in contact with what’s happening around the state. I have a pretty– I have a number of inputs of telling me what’s happening in the state of Wisconsin, including my national work. A school administrator shared with me, he said, “David, parents in the community want to see safety. “This is the reason we’ve put a ring of new fencing “around our school complex, but our PA systems “aren’t heard in all parts of our building. ” So, there’s a fundamental flaw in that, because let’s think of an intruder situation. If somebody is unable to hear that announcement being made, they can’t get to a safe area, or tornado, or some other announcement that would be made. So, this whole thing comes into a needs assessment, a prioritization matrix. But again, vendors come in, and they tell schools what they want to hear, and not what they need to hear. That’s a big difference, what you want to hear, and what you need to hear. And again, schools have allowed the vendors to become the experts.

Looking externally for the answers. Schools want something that they can purchase. And I’ll have an example of that later. When I work with schools, I have nothing to sell them, outside of my staff training, and the expertise that hopefully, I can impart into their systems. I don’t have any device, anything in a box, that is going to magically make their school safer. That’s just a myth, also. And we have so much House money right now, through the form of grants, 257 bills through April 25th. The dollars are flowing in, the vendors and marketers are going after it, they’re going after the schools. They’re taking advantage of panicked parents and superintendents who feel the stress. Superintendents will also say to me, “Dave, if I don’t go along with this, “I might not be renewed.

“I might not have a job here next year. “Then I have to up my family, and I have “to go somewhere else, and I don’t wanna do that, “so I’m gonna go with it, even though I know “it’s not the right thing, as far as our needs. “Maybe our two-way radios are a higher priority, “but this is what the board wants. ” And people want to see safety. School safety devices aren’t required to undergo any research trials or be certified. So a school district might buy an app because 300 other schools in the state use it. It’s saturation. You’re convincing people upon saturation. Just because a lot of people use it doesn’t mean that it’s effective. Saturation’s not the same as effectiveness, but it is very effective to use it as a marketing technique, coming in and saying, “Eight districts around you use this app, “why don’t you use it?” They give in to the pressure.

NBC 15, February 21st, 2018. Somerset High School in Wisconsin, senior, Justin Case. Not Justin Case, Justin Revard, invented a tool he calls the Justin Case. He made this in shop class, in school. It’s steel plates, connecting rods, and it fits under doors, jam. With it in place, Revard has said, “If high school football players have charged “into the door, it’s held, with my device in place. ” Okay. So, taking initiative, have to commend him for that. But here’s the device, these images were taken off of Amazon. It’s marketed, right now, on Amazon.

He has some other versions of it, but it slides under a door. Not sure how it fully works. So, here’s what happened. So, he develops this, the school buys 50 of them. And the principal said, “We start at the high school, “then we went to the middle school, “then we went to the elementary school. ” So, we have a very, very small amount of time between something that gets invented by someone who’s not an engineer. This is a high school student, and the school buys it. So, who’s liable for this? What’s the scientific method to say that this works across all different settings, and what if somebody uses this to lock students into a room, and you can’t get in from the outside? Those scenarios, for these types of devices. Now, I will say I’m not making any claim about the quality of Justin Revard’s product. I’m just pointing out here, that we go from conception to actually creating and marketing products in a very small amount of time.

We don’t have the scientific method at all. So, some of the things are going to be effective for what they’re marketed for, and some of the things aren’t. This is the bulletproof igloo. I never thought I would see a bulletproof igloo, and this is in Oklahoma, where it doesn’t even get that cold. But here’s the bulletproof igloo. Paul Hunter from CBC, Canadian News, came down to check this thing out. This is a couple weeks ago, folks. This bulletproof igloo, right here, this is a few weeks ago. It can accommodate up to 30 people. I’m sure it takes in a lot of room in your class to do this.

So, the thought is, if there was an intruder, you could get 30 people inside of here, seal this up, and they would be safe from the intruder. So, here’s how they made the decision to purchase the bulletproof igloo. The school superintendent went inside of an igloo that was outside, and this is what he said. “AR-15s, nine millimeters, 380s, full metal jackets, “they unloaded on us, and they enjoyed it. “It was a surreal feeling. “The $30,000 price tag unit is a fair price “for peace of mind,” he said. “The feedback from parents has been wonderful. ” He purchased seven units. I think they purchased two more, actually, in the last week. Wow.

So, peace of mind, the feedback from parents. The parent is the customer. If the product can provide peace of mind, it’s purchased. $210,000. Now, all of the logistics that would have to play out for a scenario when this would actually be applicable in a school intruder situation are numerous. And also, what’s the status of your public address system? Can your intruder announcement be heard all parts of your building? But we see these types of things. And imagine, it’s theater, it’s on YouTube. People watching as a superintendent proudly goes into this igloo, and then people start shooting at him, or shooting at this igloo? But then, once you walk out, how do you not buy that product? How do you not say, “Yes, we’re gonna spend the money “on this, because if anything happens, we can get our kids “into one of these, and there’s an intruder “with a gun in the building, they’ll be safe. ” Wow. Wow, I never thought I’d see this.

This is an elementary school in Wisconsin that uses Department of Justice dollars to put in the yellow bollards in the front, which you can’t miss. So, somebody could not drive a vehicle into the front of a building. That’s not how schools are attacked. The odds of somebody doing this are one in two million, not that there would be an injury or fatality. One in two million. We know that this isn’t the way that schools are attacked. But what does this convey? You look at this, and it’s like, that’s safety. Those two tusks, right there, those two yellow tusks, that’s safety. Parents can see that, they can go up and tap it, they can kick it, if they want. It’s not going anywhere.

And it’s probably gonna stop a vehicle. If somebody charges a vehicle toward it, it would probably do that. But you have winter in Wisconsin. And you have to shovel around these. And you can tell, on either side of ’em, those are permanent benches. So, if you have a wheelchair, you’ve got one shot, down the middle, and you better be accurate. So, we have ice that develops, things like that. It just makes sense, in a district that, I know, has needs for a public address system, that, I know, in talking with the superintendent, also has needs for induction of staff at 4K sites, in a discussion I had less than one week ago. Why do we see this? It’s visible, people want to see it, people want to touch it. Well, we can’t fortify our way to safety, this doesn’t work.

In 2014, a New Jersey teenager went to the World Trade Center as it was being completed. He took what was available to him. He worked his way through some holes in fences, and he went through some open doors, some unsupervised stairwells, he worked his way up to the top, and he watched the sunrise, which sounds pretty awesome. I’m afraid of heights, it wouldn’t be for me. But every day, curiosity seekers are foiling our most secured venues. And I have hundreds, hundreds of examples just like this. Student mental health. We hear this in the same sentence as school safety. We need to increase school safety. We need to increase student mental health.

We have a definition paradox, though, with student mental health. How do you define it in children? The American Psychiatric Association has what’s called the DSM-5. It’s the book of medical mental disorder diagnoses. 957 pages long. So, this is where you buy my book first, which is 204 pages. It’s a good primer, nonfiction, get you started, more engaging. Hundreds of diagnoses in the DSM-5. You can diagnose anything. The number one diagnosis is Generalized Anxiety Disorder for children. It has been for a number of years, but then we have depression, suicidal ideation, and just a few.

But it’s not that you’d get one single diagnosis, it’s comorbid. You might get three, or four, or five, and different medications going with that, and how do you work all of this together? So, we don’t understand this nearly as well as what we do, what we think we do, what is portrayed in the media, the rhetoric that we have an understanding of student mental health needs. We don’t. We also have an out of control epidemic with suicide. 15 to 19 year olds, it’s increased 33% since 2009. The blue line going down, that was the last represented. We can indicate suicide prevalence continues to rise. Actually, it’s everywhere. Male, female, it doesn’t matter what age you are. It’s across demographics in the United States.

So, this is huge. Our number two cause of death for children is suicide, if we’re looking at age 18 and under. Number one cause, accidental death, mostly vehicular accidents, or overdoses. And of course, I had to include this slide, because it’s so significant. Since 2013, when I was here, again, the line going up, accidental death, our leading cause of death right now, with kids, is opioid overdose. That, combined, again, with car accidents, contributes to accidental death. So, the whole landscape of school safety has changed. So, we hear about intruders, and that we have to fortify, and all of that, and yet, we have this opioid epidemic, that’s just crazy, right now, in schools. It’s not slowing down. Mental health legislation.

Well, we said the feds recommend, they do a great job at recommending, right? But we had a chance, we had one chance, March 3rd, 2015, there were bills simultaneously introduced to the House and Senate, the Mental Health in Schools Act. It would have required a framework for mental health services in schools, funding, staff development, training family members, which was great, because now, we get family members, we get a wraparound support. Expanding successful, evidence-based programs. Here’s where the research dollars come in. It had overwhelming support, it was never enacted. So, we do not have a federal framework for student mental health. There’s nothing on the horizon. We had a chance, it never happened. So, states don’t require mental health screenings for individual students. They will give anonymous group surveys to high school students, middle school students, and they might find out, for example, in the last 90 days, 12% of our high school students indicated that they considered harm to self.

Okay, but what value is that? If we don’t know know the students who responded to that, how do we produce a response to that that benefits those students? So, this just gives a general barometer of where things are at, but it doesn’t really help us with putting together treatment plans. Teachers observe, but teachers don’t diagnose. We have to remember, educator licenses do not allow for medical evaluation, medical diagnoses, or medical treatment. Teachers can describe the behaviors that they have observed, that they’ve noticed, but they can’t, however, say, “This student has depression, ADHD, “anxiety, or mental illness. ” School-based mental health services. Since 2013, youth mental health first aid training has been provided for a lot of school districts. 2018, $100 million from DOJ. A lot of those dollars went into youth mental health first aid. That’s a formal program, it’s multiple days. I participated in it.

It helps staff to identify anxiety, signs of depression, signs of suicide, and then, refer out to medical providers. The treatment side of this, schools can directly hire mental health providers, but of course, where are you gonna get the dollars for that? ‘Cause grants are one time, you’re not gonna hire those folks out of a grant, because they’re gonna want to know they have a job after the grant is encumbered and expended. So, you can co-locate community mental health clinics in schools, bring in the mental health providers into schools, works very effective with the Kimberly School District for the last 10 years. But that’s a handful of districts in Wisconsin. 421 districts, a handful have programs that are this successful, and have lasted this long. So, the model is highly dependent upon your geographic location, which we’re gonna get to in just a moment. But let’s step back. Wisconsin has 148 practicing child psychiatrists. That’s 12 per every 100,000, or 75% less than the recommended level. There’s not enough, and they’re burning out.

We’re getting high turnover. Amy Herbst of Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, quoted in an article by Chris Miller of Appleton Post Crescent, May 22nd, 2019. She said, “The wait for an appointment for a child “could be weeks or months to see a mental health provider. ” Weeks or months. In the southern part of the state, probably weeks. Northern part of the state, probably months. So, believe it or not, I actually created this map. I’m pretty proud of myself. I was able to use Microsoft Paint to color in the four counties, it only took me two days. [audience chuckling] We can tell, we have four counties, Dane, Brown County, Waukeshaa, and Milwaukee, which are darkened in.

111 out of those 148 child psychiatrists practice in those four counties, that’s where they’re concentrated. And also, most of our population is in Dane County, in Milwaukee, southern part of the state. So, we have the red line going across roughly where Highway 29 is. Above that, we have service deserts. My superintendents in those areas tell me all the time, “We just don’t have the providers up here. ” The 37 indicates child psychiatrists practicing above Highway 29, or roughly half of the state. We also have some other barriers to this. Winter weather, which starts in October, if you’re in Bayfield, and ends in June, if you’re in Bayfield, right? So, you have that to deal with, and you don’t have the infrastructure. So, I don’t want to portray that the southern part of the state, the situation’s much better, because you have more population, so you don’t have to drive as far for an appointment, but you still have a waitlist for an appointment. So, until we do something to address this issue of service deserts, which really would probably come from a federal-level bill, we’re not gonna get anywhere.

Some districts will have some services, other districts will have nothing. And we know that there’s one district in Wisconsin, indicated last week that they want to dissolve their district. So, what kind of services happen there? And you have to keep thinking, we go back to induction process. The districts where you have high turnover, where somebody’s there for a year, they’re trained in youth mental health services, they leave, and their counties, they have turnover. I worked with one county above this red line, and the county, literally, was training four or five people at one time in the school, just so they had somebody left for the next year because of turnover, so they had some continuity. It’s that dire out there for mental health. So, mental health looks significantly different, depending upon which districts you’re in. But of the 421 schools in Wisconsin, the majority are really, really struggling to put in place any mental health programs. You have key questions, too. So, who evaluates? Who qualifies for services, what criteria do you have to have? One superintendent told me, “Well Dave, worst is first.

“We get everybody together, all of our principals, “and we just make a list of our students, “and whoever we rank as worst becomes first “when we have service slots available “for a provider which drives in and sees students “for three hours a week in our school district. ” So, what’s the best treatment? Who knows, right? We’ve only really worked with student mental health issues on a deep, empirical level probably since the 80s. And I’ll have a perfect example of that. How do we measure progress? How do we know if the student is benefiting from the service, or not? Or if something ancillary is happening, they’re getting more attention because they’re in a club, or something like that? We don’t have research to specifically say this works for this presentation of need. And also, discharge criteria. Again, a superintendent said, “Well, in our district, “if somebody qualifies for mental health services, “they get eight therapy sessions “with an outside provider, and then it’s done. ” Well, it doesn’t mean the need is done. It just means that they’ve qualified for their eight sessions, which the district has paid for. And if these needs continue, how do you address your waitlist, which districts will say “We have more and more students on our waitlist, “because we’re not discharging students. ” At the top, I have opt-in.

Parents have to agree, also, to this, and if they say no, then, really, the school doesn’t have an option. So, a summary of what we know, and this will close out our mental health segment. There’s not standardized protocol for defining what constitutes school-based mental health in America. We lost that opportunity with that 2015 fed bill, didn’t get passed. Teachers are trained to identify and respond to signs of mental illness, but they can’t diagnose children. We have insufficient empirical studies to support the efficacy of youth mental health treatments. In 1983, PBS did a documentary, Children of Darkness. You can find it, it’s on YouTube. This was, actually, a therapy. So, this was a student who was in a mental health institution in his state, not Wisconsin.

Pink bunny suit shaming therapy. Actually wore a pink bunny suit for weeks, several weeks. And the thought was, he would not run away from the facility in the bunny suit, because he’d be embarrassed to do that. He ran away four times after they did that, by the way. So, this whole thing with the pink bunny suit, no. But that’s where we were, and actually, people thought, psychiatrists and mental health providers, they were experimenting, they thought that this might be effective. We’re still kind of in our infancy. In 1983, the age of the kid in the video? That was me, I was that age. I wasn’t that kid, but I was that age. We have this nationwide shortage of mental health providers that only continues to increase, we have burnout.

And the whole question of, have we created the stigma by co-mingling mental health and school services? Do you want to be identified as having received mental health services? It’s a deep question, because the legislation coming out now, the narrative, it’s always school safety and mental health, school safety and mental health. The question is, does it kind of imply that if you receive mental health services, that you might be at risk of bringing harm to your school? That was a big threat after Adam Lanza, with Sandy Hook, for about two weeks. Parents who had children with autism were very afraid that their children were going to start to be profiled as potentially being at risk to bring harm to their fellow students. That didn’t happen, and it’s not authentic, that that could happen, but for about two weeks, there were articles in the media that were circling. So, you also open up this question. Have you ever been treated for a mental health condition? So, if you say “Yeah, when I was 15 years old, I had “mental health treatment for anxiety, when I was in school. ” So, is that a fair question? Well no, it’s not a fair question, and it becomes a lifetime scarlet letter. If you’re applying to be in law enforcement, a doctor, a pilot, that question will get asked. And personal privacy is also an authentic concern. I work with some of the top folks in the intelligence community, and my goodness, data hacks, what we know about, is the tip of the iceberg.

But how many times do you open up a letter, and it’s like, “Oh, your data from whatever “was just compromised again?” The parents are saying, “What if somebody finds out “that my child, when they were 15 years old, “received services for anxiety? “How will that impact them down the road?” Pink bunny suit. It didn’t work for Ralphie, either. Aunt Clara gave him that suit, and he has to wear it every time she visits, to this day. But it’s ironic, that was the same year, 1983. So, we have the bunny suit in Children of Darkness, and the bunny suit in A Christmas Story. Teaching safety to students, a collapsing roaming range. 100 years ago, the typical eight-year-old had 30 miles that they could traverse, woods, streams, having fun. Now, it is less than a mile. That’s a study by David Derbyshire. Less than a mile.

Write about this in my book. Exploration’s a type of safety exercise. We’ve just taken it away from kids, ’cause we don’t let them explore. You go 300 yards to the end of your block, and that’s it. We’re losing in-vivo experiences. Real world, in-world experiences. Here’s an example. In 2017, Ohio’s North Ridgeville City schools canceled the 8th grade field trip to D. C. over threats of terrorism.

There were no threats of terrorism at that time. They were just feeding off of the rhetoric. And they said, “Nope, we don’t want this to happen. “We don’t want our kids to go there. ” And the superintendent said, “Well, we’ve done this “for years, and there’s a program “where they meet us over there. ” But we have an irony, right? We have an irony. Founding fathers embraced peril, and 242 years later, their heirs won’t allow their kids to go to the Smithsonian to see the muskets. But here’s the replacement, here’s prize B. Virtual reality field trip. Everybody, today, we’re going to the gym.

And you’re gonna get your VR goggles. We contracted with a company who just sold us the D. C. trip, and you’re gonna get it in the gym. This happened, this happens. Here’s why it’s marketed so successfully. 15, 20 years ago, if you had this technology, you could market it and say it’s cost-effective. You don’t have to spend gas to D. C. , you don’t have to do lodging and all of that.

That would make sense, right? But it’s marketed now, as school safety. We can keep your kids safe if they never leave the building. And you experience it through the eyes of somebody else. Carol, your tour guide. Positionality, maybe one person. Instead of 40 kids individually experiencing Washington, D. C. , the superintendent said, “We did this trip, and one of the kids “had his wallet pick-pocketed, and he said it was “a learning experience,” and things like that. But he said, overall, they had a great time on the trip, and that kids, small groups of kids, learning. But yeah, this was all wiped out.

So, yeah, this isn’t the field trip of the future, this is the field trip of right now for panicked parents who are the customers, who want peace of mind. Hyper-realistic intruder full-scale exercises have become very popular and controversial. Have they gone too far, and are we focused too much on one crisis? This is when fire, ambulance, police, set up at a school, and basically simulate as if a shooter had been there. So, people will have simulated gunshot wounds, they’ll do the med flight choppers coming in, they’ll run through the school looking for shooters. I saw one where they put people in body bags and lined them up outside of the school, all announced in the local newspaper, so anybody could participate. You could play any role you wanted, right? Wow. Your odds of dying. Lifetime likelihood of dying in a school shooting is one in two million. Lifetime likelihood of dying from a lightning strike is one in 218,000. I could run a ton of statistics similar to this, but again, we’re out of whack with prevalence.

So, if we look at the $100 million from DOJ, if we look at the $3 billion school safety industry, they’re not selling you lightning strike detectors, that you can put on your ball fields and your playgrounds, which might make sense, statistically. Some of those things were marketed, short-term, after some localized events a number of years ago. But we’re preying on fear, we’re preying on panicked parents. In January of 2019, this made the news everywhere, the Indiana– some Indiana elementary school teachers were shot, execution-style, with plastic pellets, and injured during an active shooter training. The sheriff said, “Hey, we’re gonna stop “doing these active shooter trainings. ” Well, you don’t stop doing the trainings, you just don’t try to execute people during your trainings. You improve your training, you put learning objectives to it. You just don’t shut it down. And parents and teachers are now exempting some students from drills. I spoke with James Sibley, who’s an attorney out of San Jose, has a son with autism.

And he said, “Yeah, this is becoming an authentic issue “right now, because of the trauma that students “have inflicted upon them by these hyper-realistic drills. ” Wall Street’s Dan Frosch, if you want to do some reading, has curated a list of all litigation in this area. But let’s think about this, okay? If painting kids up with fake blood, role-playing as a gunshot victim, and firing blank rounds inside a school was the gold standard, why don’t we pump smoke into schools to simulate fire for every fire drill? Why don’t we fire up the old barn fan and throw those rubber pellets in it to simulate a tornado? And there’d be some basis for doing a hyper-realistic, full exercise tornado drill, because, well, June 8th, 1984, Barneveld, Wisconsin, during the night, an F5 tornado struck. Destroyed 90% of the community, nine fatalities, hundred injuries of the city’s 600 residents. Where’s Barneveld? 25 minutes from right here. Barneveld is 25 minutes from right here. Since 2017, 15 students have died when their schools have been ripped apart by tornadoes, but we don’t bring in the drama club when we’re doing tornado drills, we only save that for the intruder drills. I argue that, if it wouldn’t pass institutional review board, then we shouldn’t do this. And this is what I instruct my students at Viterbo. Institutional review board is something that universities have for research.

It came about in 1974, meaning you have to take into consideration the physical and psychological harm of your subjects during research to make sure that you weren’t bringing harm to them. We had some pretty wild research experiments going on. 1971, the Stanford prison experiment, which got so out of control, they had to shut it down early. In 1963, the Milgram shock experiment, so every time somebody was getting an answer wrong, another person was told to administer a shock, and the person would be yelling, “Oh, you’re killing me, “I have a heart condition, don’t do this. ” And they weren’t actually being shocked. The actor had a light that would come on, and then, they would play this. But the person didn’t know. They’re like, “I don’t think I should “be doing this,” but most people did. Virtually everybody turned the knob all the way up, and zapped ’em. And those people got paid $4, and were never told it was an experiment, by the way.

Walked away like, “I think I might “have hurt somebody really bad today. “But, it’s pizza and beer money, I guess. ” Here’s Barneveld, the morning of June 8th, 1984. Situational awareness has been compromised. We’ve lost roaming area. Kids spending seven to nine hours a day looking at their device. We have so many videos of people walking into signposts, and things like that. There’s also videos of people walking into traffic, being killed. Less recess, fewer field outings. Today’s youth have been robbed of the environmental awareness skills achieved by their predecessors.

Less aware equals less safe. It doesn’t matter what we spend on fortification. Less aware equals less safe. But there’s ways to combat this. We can address this and it doesn’t cost us money. In 1908, Sir Baden-Powell put together the book, Scouting Games, used by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, now military scouts, also military snipers, to this day. Here’s a variation of how you could do this in a school setting to develop a student’s capacity to observe and remember details. So, you’d take students on a truck around the campus, and you have some things set up ahead of time. A unicorn on a flagpole, “Jingle Bells” is playing by a slide, and you have a strong scent of oranges on a sidewalk. So, you have visual, you have auditory, you have olfactory.

You take students around, you don’t tell ’em what to expect, but you come back, and say, “What did you encounter when we did “this trek around the campus?” And often times, they’re not gonna detect these things right away. You take ’em through the second time, you point ’em out, and then you do this more and more, and pretty soon, they’re telling you, “Yeah, three blocks away, “the transformer on the telephone pole was humming loud. “I don’t think it’s gonna last long. “Someone should call the power company. ” They get that tuned in. It actually happens that way. It’s remarkable. But we don’t do this. Here’s something else. This is called Kim’s Game.

Kim’s Game involves just taking random things, putting them in a drawer, or on a table, and trying to remember what they are. And you could either visually do this, you could feel items, so forth. You could have a song that was playing, olfactory sense, however you wanted to do this. But very simple, Kim’s Game. Now, a sniper can remember about 200 items, but you can get a kid, a teenager, easily remembering over 50 items. And they’ll not only remember the items the more you do this, they’ll remember, yeah, there were three things made of wood. Wait, there were four things, ’cause the drawer was made out of wood. I’ll go to schools, and they’ll say, “This is great, Dave, we love this, how much does it cost?” It doesn’t cost anything. You just make this. If I put this in a box, and I sold this for $90, they’d put one in every classroom.

Probably store it inside their bulletproof igloo. It’s safe right there. This is insane. But this is what we do. Now, I said I wasn’t gonna profile, but I guess I violated my rule, here. Miquela Sousa’s our top threat to school safety. This is huge. This is huge. Miquela Sousa. Well, she looks the part, right? I mean, come on.

She looks the part of your top threat to school safety. Chess club, yearbook, varsity, Spanish, National Honor Society, glee club. The glee club thing kind of seals it, right? So, here’s some other photos. Look carefully. This is Miquela Sousa. Look carefully. Little Miquela’s an Instagram model. She claims to be from Downey, Illinois. She’s posting on Instagram since 2016. She has over a million social media followers.

She is a fictional person. There is no Miquela Sousa. She’s managed by a team of engineers, marketers, and dreamers. I have no idea what the job description is for a dreamer, but it sounds pretty awesome, if this is what you get to do. She’s actually used by Calvin Klein for marketing. So, she is benign. But there are more than 100 avatars right now, of avatar realism-quality of little Miquela on the net, and they’re not all benign. Katie Jones was one, just weeded out, and she had ties in government infiltration. Just took her our last week. We’ve done something.

Something has happened since 2011. We’ve crossed this uncanny valley. In 1970, robotics professor Masahiro Mori identified, the closer robots look like humans, the more humans were repulsed. They didn’t feel comfortable with them. So, he always kept a little bit of difference in the design. We also see that in movies, like the Incredibles were designed angular for this reason. The movie The Polar Express in 2004 tried to cross the uncanny valley, wasn’t successful. You’ll read a number of reviews where kids left the theater. They felt very uncomfortable with that movie. But about 2011, we got to the point where we could have avatar realism, Facebook messenger was a thing, streaming video, so suddenly, a little Miquela could come on board and start posting on her social media accounts, which she’s done.

We also have this phenomenon of replacing the meat tribe. When I was growing up, probably most of you, it was people getting together. Now, it’s people getting together with their phones, even if they’re in the same room. It’s the phone tribe, it’s replaced the meat tribe, we’ll never go back. Here is how this actually manifests in large-scale rescues, and schools need to be aware of this. So, in 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Harvey. Facebook Messenger, People are going to Facebook Messenger. So, let’s say this house up here in the right-hand corner, and this person said “Hey, my area’s flooded out, “no one’s rescuing me. ” Most of the fire departments outside of Houston, all the small communities, had one boat. They couldn’t do this, so they needed the Cajun Navy Relief to come in, which is a non-profit organization, there were some others.

They would contact them by Facebook Messenger, and say, “We need you to come in and help us. ” Then, someone from Cajun Navy Relief, just typical citizens, would respond with Zello, which is a free app, and they would contact these boaters. The person circles, he’d get the call, saying, “Yeah, it’s right in back of you is where you need to go. “They need water and they also need to be evacuated, “because the water’s rising. ” So, we have this whole system now, which is outside of FEMA, which is outside of 911, and these systems are rapidly developing these civilian rescues. And what might this look like if we have another Barneveld-type event? So, it’s just something that we’re not aware of when we talk about school safety. Six weeks ago, this is terrifying. Six weeks ago, Samsung engineers developed realistic talking heads that can be generated from a single image. So, on the left, we have static photographs. On the right, those are all AI, artificial intelligence-generated images.

I want to show you a very short video clip.

– Man: We can push the generalization even further, applying the system to famous photographs.

– That’s all manufactured.

– With each case, we automatically find people in the Vox celebrity dataset with landmarks suitable for the animation of a particular portrait. [gentle music]

– That’s simply terrifying. That came out of Samsung Moscow labs six weeks ago. You get eight static images, you can make someone look almost realistic. For $20, you can hire somebody to do deepfakes. For $250, you or I could buy the software, and probably be able to do this ourselves, and there now is full text capability, so you can make somebody say whatever you want them to say. So, how are schools gonna respond to these deepfakes? What’s gonna happen when a principal is presented a 20 second video of someone making a threat to the school, and that person says, “I never said this,” but yet you have the video? So, this erodes trust, and it introduces what’s called the Liar’s Dividend.

Even though that student might be proven that they didn’t make that video, there’s gonna be some doubt, because it’s a video, right? And were they intending to do this, or not, are they gonna be on some watch list if this happens again? It will elevate social media bullying to an unimaginable level. The Ruderman Foundation last week released a white paper study indicating that bullying of students with disabilities is at an all-time high. They continue to be the most at-risk population for being the recipients of bullying. Now, we throw this into the mix? And are we going to have students have to think proactively of how do you prove that you did not make this threatening statement? The psychological well-being of students is at risk. A reputation can be ruined in minutes, and that can overwhelm a teen, perhaps to suicide. Suicide’s a second-leading cause for youth in the United States. Check out the book, So You’ve Been Shamed by Jon Ronson, 2015. One tweet can ruin a career and a life, and almost take somebody to death. June of 2019, thankfully, the U. S.

lawmakers got together for a hearing devoted to the threat of artificially-generated imagery, but yeah, this seems too late, right? Like, right now, for just doing this, we’re so far behind, we are nowhere ready for this. But we have reasons to be optimistic in schools. We do have great things happening in school safety. This is Bart Barta and his son, Daniel. And Bart is a friend of mine, and he is a retired police commander. He’s the father of an autistic son. Daniel has autism. He trains emergency responders how to recognize, respond, and manage risk in students with autism. He’s trained officers in Wisconsin. So, one of the objectives would be, if you come in and you encounter a student with autism, they would authentically have a student with autism who might flap hands, might put hands into pockets, how do you interact successfully with that student in a high-stress situation? This is a concern, yeah, because that student could be at higher risk, could be shot at.

And attorney James Sibley, who also has a son with autism, shared this in a podcast where we talked about that. So, he is doing tremendous things, but we talk about these hyper-realistic, full-scale intruder drills, we need to introduce learning objectives like Bart Barta is doing. FEMA Teen CERT. Ted Zocco-Hochhalter, another friend of mine. He had two children at Columbine in 1999 during the shooting. His daughter was left a paraplegic from that shooting. He said to me, “David, whether we like it or not, “kids are stakeholders in all of this, “and there’s a program you should check out. ” FEMA Teen CERT, Community Emergency Response Team. This is a great way to help kids with environmental awareness. Here, kids are learning how to do cribbing, or how to lift something, if it was a heavy object, if it fell on somebody.

So, there’s some kids, there’s community safety responders there. Obviously, who wouldn’t want to do this? This is hands-on and generalizable skills. Embracing student focus groups. There’s a technology out there right now, what3words, and it is emerging as the primary safety response for the Netherlands, for Sweden, also United Nations, where I’m standing, right now, this spot, is achieving. land. keep. If I reported that to emergency responders, they would know to come right here to respond to me. It’s like telling people, “Hey, “David’s presentation is at UW-Madison. ” What good does that do you? If you say he’s gonna be at achieving. land.

keep, you know I’m right here. They’ve taken three meter by three meter squares and mapped out the world. Ford Motor Company will have this as their GPS system next year, Mercedes already has it. This will revolutionize school safety, for evacuation, for unification sites, where perimeters, now, can be miles, where you’re going to go. You can identify, here’s where you’re gonna go for your evacuation reunification. It’s a free app. But, again, this is embraced by United Nations, it’s really making a difference. Investing in research 81% of the time, somebody else knew, we gotta crack that code of silence. We gotta get reporting systems. They’re not accessible to students with disabilities and English language learners, we know that, we’ve got to get them in the mix so kids try all these systems that we know, that it works with them.

So, the reality. Systems can be foiled, crises are unpredictable. There’s minimal oversight and accountability in most states. Safety devices aren’t required to go through any testing or be certified. With mental health, we have partnerships and providers that can benefit children, but we don’t have the solid research indicating what works and what doesn’t. We have these service deserts, too. So, even if we had the dollars, we don’t have the people for the positions. There’s no profile of a student attacker, and exploration is a type of safety drill that improves situational awareness and threat detection. Instead of 400 kids, if we had 400 smoke detectors in our school, we’d want each one of those with a battery, so they were actively detecting threats. Students are our biggest threat detectors, yet we’ve limited the roaming ranges, and so much more, so they’re really only focused on the small area in front of them.

Thank you so much for inviting me back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. It’s been a blast. I continue to work diligently with a wonderful group of safety professionals to make our schools safer. Thank you for being here tonight. [audience applauding]