“We don’t just come and talk for four hours. We see what a school needs,” Amanda Klinger said. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to safety. How you respond to an incident at a mall is totally different to how you would respond to a school incident. A teacher has 30 children in her care.”
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"I am not coming here today to go, 'Boy, I hope you guys are OK.' I am coming here today to go, 'You can make yourself be OK,'" Klinger said. "We need to have options beyond just keeping [shooters] out. We need to have response options of what we should be doing if they come in, and I think that is one of the things you saw quite clearly in Sandy Hook."
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"Schools have a lot of things pulling at them. They have limited resources, they have limited time, they have test scores, they have all these different accountability measures. But safety issues have to rise to the top as we saw yesterday. Test scores didn't matter yesterday. What mattered yesterday was safety."
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...attorney-turned-advocate Amanda Klinger, a nationally-recognized expert on cyber bullying and school safety, instructed teachers on how to look for warning signs for troubled individuals, what can lead to a school shooting and how to think critically during that scenario. She also pointed out things that could have been done differently during several highly-publicized incidents of school violence and how teachers, were they more informed of what was happening in the building, could have saved lives.
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"We are trying to provide people with a range of options, tools and training to make better decisions that could save kids' lives," Amanda Klinger, said.
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Though school shooters have little in common other than they are male teenagers, they do exhibit behaviors before their attacks - threats on social media, planning the attack, giving away personal items, enlisting accomplices - if only family, friends, educators and police officers could work together.
"These kids are begging us to stop them," she said. "We're just not connecting the dots."
This can deter not only assaults, but also other forms of violence including teen suicide. "A student who kills himself is just as tragic," Klinger said.
One of the most important topics, according to Klinger, was what lockdown policies a school has in place. A common mistake is to have only one level of lockdown, which can result in total panic and uncertainty can set in among faculty and students.
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“Students really need to pause and think about the long-term effects on their reputation, their quality of life and their future,” Amy Klinger said. “Not everything you think has to go online. In this ‘post everything’ world, you have a right to be private.”
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"It is a good opportunity to get local people together to have conversations together about what law enforcement is looking for and what schools are looking for. How schools might be better prepared," says Amy Klinger, school safety consultant.
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