Law enforcement agencies and school systems can now obtain three important school safety programs at no cost on one CD-ROM.
A Critical Incident: What To Do in the First 20 Minutes, developed by the North Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, takes users through a scenario involving a shooter in a school. Viewers see the school’s response and how it implements its plan. At the end of the scenario, discussion questions allow them to discuss what went right, what went wrong, and how they can use the lessons learned to improve their own critical incident plans.
School Crime Operations Package (School COP), which has been an extremely popular program, enables school resource officers (SROs), SRO supervisors, school administrators, and security officers to enter a daily log of incidents, display incidents involving a particular student quickly (valuable for meetings with parents or students), and produce graphics showing school “hot spots” or year-to-year trends, which can help solve problems and communicate issues at school meetings. For example, a map can show where bullying incidents have occurred on a school campus. School COP can also provide evidence of activities undertaken or problems solved, which can help persuade a school board to continue funding an SRO program.
- School Safety Plan Generator, a software program developed by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), allows law enforcement personnel to create a document that serves as a foundation for preparing schools for violent critical incidents and as a reference guide for information needs during a critical incident. The software, created as a result of input from the members of NIJ’s National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center System and the School Safety Technology Working Group, allows users to answer questions about a particular school and use the information to set up a profile that includes demographics, members of the critical incident planning team and their roles and responsibilities, emergency locations, supplies and equipment on hand, and critical lines of communication.
To obtain copies of the School Safety CD-ROM, contact the Rural Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, 866-RURAL LE (866-787-2553), or NIJ program manager Mike O’Shea at Michael.OShea@usdoj.gov.
This article was reprinted from the Spring 2008 edition of TechBeat, the award-winning quarterly newsmagazine of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center System, a program of the National Institute of Justice under Cooperative Agreement #2005–MU–CX–K077, awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
