Guy Grace’s theory of holistic school security came as a result of the tragedy in 2013. It’s not as if Grace was new to the world of school security before 2013. He had decades of experience, leading a 12-person security department for Littleton Public Schools. But in 2013, a student attacked Arapahoe High School, one of Grace’s schools, armed with a shotgun, machete and Molotov cocktails.
It was a life-changing event for Grace. In his words: “There were things the student did beforehand that frankly should have been acted on. Or, that when they were acted on, were not acted on effectively. We actually did a threat assessment on him. In fact, we are one of the only schools that ever did a threat assessment on a person who ended up a committing a school shooting.
“The problem being, at the end of the day a threat assessment is only a piece of paper.”
This was the beginning of the shift in Grace’s approach to school security. As he says, “You can harden your buildings all you want, but it doesn’t mean anything to active shooters. I’m an armed responder myself, but active shooters just don’t give care anymore that there are people like me at the schools. And no matter how quickly we stop a shooter at the school, it’s always too late. It’s still a tragedy.”
The Arapahoe High School shooting speaks to Grace’s point. The active-shooter was stopped in 80 seconds by an armed school resource officer, but not before one student had already been shot, and would later die.
For Grace, a holistic approach to school security means opening the detection of threats and applying a security approach to all facets of school culture. That begins with the responsibility he takes for his district’s mental health responses. “We get about 700 mental health calls a year,” he says. “They include kids who say that they are going to shoot up the school the next day. When that happens, we get a response to that person immediately. Maybe they’re just talking, maybe not. But we show up.”
Nor is it just threats to the school that Grace responds to. “We respond to kids who are suicidal, or need other kinds of intervention. We show up in the middle of the night for kids who’ve overdosed, or cut their wrists, or are hanging on a rope. We get help to them, and those kids live, he adds”
Technology is also part of Grace’s holistic approach. Not only to protect the students, but also to provide to provide peace of mind for the rest of his community and staff. After all, K-12 schools today are frequently multi-building campuses with a student body and staff as culturally complex as any town in America.
“The staff, all of us, are part of the community too,” Grace explains. “As a person who was recently diagnosed with complex PTSD as a result of being a first responder, I think a lot about the mental health of both students and staff. These schools are communities. They’re little cities. The tragedies that affect one of us, affect us all.
“We just had a situation in an elementary school where a parent became very aggressive with the staff, and everybody was pretty upset,” Grace continues. “Afterwards, we had a sit down with all the employees about it. HR, myself, the principal, and all the staff members. I brought a duress pendant with me that was integrated with the lockdown system, and pushed the button and showed them how it immediately initiated a lockdown. Then I told them that I was going to be providing one to every single staff member. That took away a lot of their fear. When you give a cop a gun, or when you give somebody a self-defense tool, it empowers them. There’s a tremendous psychological benefit to security technology in school districts when it’s deployed correctly. It empowers people and removes the worry, so that teachers can teach and students can learn.”
In Grace’s schools, the security system is not just holistic in its providing of peace of mind to staff, but in its very design. “At our schools, the security system itself is a unified system that’s part of the holistic approach. The duress pendants not only initiate lockdowns, but they’re also integrated with our audio and video surveillance systems,” he says. “When somebody pushes a panic button, we can hear and see whatever’s happening at their location. We can watch from our control center, or even on a tablet as we’re moving towards the scene. At the same time, we can send out mass notifications. We can even enable pendants for staff working outside the school, up to about 500 yards, so that they can activate a lockdown using a duress pendant before a threat even makes it to the school’s entrance.”
“That’s part of what I mean about the role of technology in a holistic approach, but that’s not all of it,” Grace continues. “Even though security technology focuses on active shooters, that’s not the only threat our schools face. Our security systems need to cover all of the potential hazards. They need to give us the ability to respond to everything from weather hazards to those aggressive parents. We can’t afford to overlook anything. They have to protect the building after hours, the roofs of the facilities, the perimeter and the classrooms, and also provide the ability for people to call for help.”
That’s what holistic security means to Guy Grace, whether it comes in the form of performing welfare checks on students in crisis, or empowering staff members through technology: Peace of mind, for the entire community.
About the Author:
Craig Dever is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Inovonics, which provides high-performance wireless sensor networks in industries such as commercial security, senior living, multifamily submetering, commercial monitoring and commercial fire.
