A Contrarian’s Perspective of the Unconventional, Exceptional Rescue of 500,000 People. The following excerpt is from an article that will be published in School Business Affairs, February, 2017. ANYTHING YOU WANT, BUT NOT EVERYTHING YOU WANT: I worked with a school business manager who regularly reminded administrators and school board members that he could do anything that they wanted and not everything that they wanted. His moniker was especially relevant amongst the cyclonic opinions that school safety must center expensive fortifications. Regrettably, public perception about the issue is strongly influenced by field experts making recommendations often extremely disconnected from what has been revealed by empirical studies of the topic. Hysteria following the Sandy Hook massacre led to 450 school safety state-level legislative bills. Some bills called for the elimination of windows in schools or arming staff even though such measures were not validated by research findings. In fact, a large-scale study correlated the positive impact of natural sunlight in schools to students’ academic achievement. SCHOOL SAFETY IS HEURISTICS. School safety is about the process of identifying and maintaining heuristics. It’s knowing your options and keeping as many options on the table as possible. In most high-stakes safety situations, responders will be on scene within minutes and the incident command system will default to law enforcement. REFERENCES: Rosenstein, E. (2011). Boatlift [Motion picture]. United States: Eyepop Productions. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg Spillane, J. P., & Orlina, E. C. (2005). Investigating Leadership Practice: Exploring the Entailments of Taking a Distributed Perspective. Leadership & Policy In Schools, 4(3), 158. doi: 10.1080/15700760500244728; Weick, K., Sutcliffe, K., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing the Process of Sensemaking. Organizational Science, 16(4), p.409. OTHER FORMATS: You can also watch to this podcast on YouTube https://youtu.be/1hKZ1XbiiEQ or on The 405 Media http://the405media.com/the-safety-doc/ FOLLOW ME. On Twitter @SafetyPhd and subscribe to this YouTube channel. DR. PERRODIN'S BLOG. https://crisisprepconsulting.wordpress.com/ SAFETY DOC WEBSITE: www.safetyphd.com
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