This morning, yet another school shooting took place. When school officials were interviewed after the shooting, they stated, “Yes it can happen here, and it did.” No one and no place is free from this violence.
While authorities examine how this could have happened again and possible reasons and logical solutions are presented to help stem this tide of violence, not much is done to take the temperature of the students and staff regarding how they feel about the potential of violence occurring in their schools. One thing we learned a long time ago is that the people who are affected the most, the ones closest to the situation, are often the most overlooked. Yet these folks are your best line of defense and should not be ignored.
Twenty years ago, we came out with our first set of tools to help measure the potential for violence and to help prevent its occurrence. Our efforts at that time were mostly ignored. and the phrase we heard over and over in 1998 was, “This couldn’t happen here.”
Fast forward twenty years and this phrase still echoes in many of our schools and workplaces. We know for a fact that this mentality is the very breeding ground for the potential for violence.
The question we asked back then and now is, “What does it take to make people aware that the potential for violence is real and can happen anytime, anywhere?”
We know that it is very difficult to admit that violence could happen in your organization. But difficult or not, this does not take away the responsibility of those in charge for gathering information and providing the safest environment possible.
It is time to get a pulse on what your students and staff are thinking about their safety and security, and to implement policies to reduce the risk of violence. Our cloud-based Violence Prevention Program was designed to get a read on the potential for violence in an organization by measuring the feelings of the individual members of the organization (Violence Prevention Map), as well the feelings of all members within the organization (Violence Prevention Group Map), regarding their feelings of safety and security.
