Assessing Safety in Schools

There are a number of aspects that fall under the category of school safety, and it is important to teach students that they are an integral part of the process and how they can effectively safeguard themselves. Therefore, here are the three majors 21^st Century safety issues to address:

Physical Safety

The physical security of a place tends to cover various aspects such as the school building, electrical safety, safety during sports and other extra-curricular activities, laboratory safety, transportation safety, and so much more. But when it comes to school safety, the primary threat is access to students.

While it is crucial to have a regular CCTV monitoring system, ventilated laboratories, transportation facilities, alarm systems, and efficient water systems—all of which are just a few examples of common safety measures, students also must be aware of their surroundings and teaching them that propping doors open or not shutting them properly, leads to unsafe conditions and real vulnerabilities for the learning environment.

Social Safety

This safety factor centers around how safe students feel within their school. Are they surrounded by other students who are well-behaved and will not do them any harm?

To properly address this issue, some safety and social precautions you can take include teaching your students to appreciate appropriate behavior and social skills for their age. You can also conduct frequent sessions that guide students on how to deal with anger, fear, stress, and other negative emotions to help them avoid developing bad habits such as bullying, harassment, and the like.

Cyber Safety

Cybersecurity plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of all students in a school. It is the ideal act to use internet services safely without harming others or even yourself.

Through responsible means, using internet services can be a productive experience. Hence, it is always prudent for schools to block any sites that are irrelevant to students, teachers, and schools, but it is equally important to instruct students how to use their mobile phones, laptops, or other types of mobile devices responsibly and consistently educate students on the safe use of technology.

The book "Education in a Violent World: A Practical Guide to Keeping Our Kids Safe.", written by Dr. Steven Webb, who is known internationally to be one of the top safety experts of our time, identifies ways to stop violence before it occurs rather than just concentrating on run, hide and fight as most trainings do. In reality, there is so much that happens before a child ends up taking their own life or ends up coming to school to commit violence. According to Webb’s research, he found that cyberbullying, violent video games, sexting, over-prescribing drugs, etc. are some of the common examples that tend to glorify violence and being aware and educating children about the dangers is critical to violence prevention. In addition to that, further factors contribute to a student’s depressive and stressful mental capacities and teaching students and parents to identify the indicators of this “downward spiral” is key in saving lives.