School safety: Active shooter prevention seminar held at CSUSB Palm Desert campus
Following a rise in school shootings in recent years, members of the community came to the Cal State San Bernardino Palm Desert campus to be a part of a Zero Tolerance training.
It's where they learned about what could be done in order to prevent another one from happening.
“Where are we vulnerable? Where can we begin to mitigate some of the risks in our schools and be able to help our children and our communities feel safe?" said Dr. Stephanie Dailey, who helped organize the event. Dr. Dailey is an assistant professor at George Mason University.
This comes just days after the Nashville school shooting that took the lives of 3 adults and 3 children. Dailey tells us this training is needed now, more than ever.
She says the Zero Tolerance approach does not aim to compete with existing school security programs.
“It’s not redoing what schools are already doing but it’s adding to. It’s looking at a prevention based mitigation," Dailey explained. "Not reaction, not what do we do when an event happens, but what can we do before so we don’t even have to think about the inevitable in some schools.”
Parents, teachers and concerned members of the community sat down to understand what threats schools face.
Dr. Thomas McWeeney, a professor for CSUSB, tells us that there are plenty of ways to implement safety measures in classrooms
“It’s the accountability in the school itself to have some process of looking at, is that gate open? Is the door locked? Have we checked that information? Did we hear something? What do we do with it?"
As well as addressing mental health in students.
“What we see when we look around that there’s so much that the individual school can do. Locking the doors, closing the windows, being attentive to troubled children," he said. "That is where the prevention comes in.”
