A State-Level View of School Safety
Craig Apperson, director of the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) School Safety Center, is deeply committed to the issue of school safety. From the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., to the one not far from his office in Olympia, nearly everyone involved in the effort to make our public schools safer has met Apperson, seen him at a conference, or heard about the work being done in Washington. Generous with his time and knowledge, and refreshingly forthright, he spoke with Northwest Education about the new school safety legislation in his state, as well as what’s going on at the federal level.
Northwest Education: The Washington State Senate passed bill 5097 in the wake of the Virginia Tech incident. How is that bill going to affect school safety issues in the state?
Apperson: OSPI was involved in the discussions leading up to that bill, although perhaps less about the bill as it finally came out than about the broader concepts. We were very invested in seeing a safety planning bill passed that would assist schools in terms of formulating the boundaries of what an acceptable, comprehensive school safety plan amounted to. There were a lot of stakeholders involved in the development and evolution of that bill. The bill that passed the legislature is not the same bill that actually started the discussion back in December of 2006.
But where we are now—we need to take a look at the actual costs that the bill incurs and develop a plan for how schools can pay for this, both in the long and the short term. The issue here is that the bill was passed—and let’s be frank about this—the bill was passed in part as an emotional reaction to Virginia Tech. And the reality is that the small amount of funding that was attached to it through a budget appropriation vastly understates the actual need in terms of the provisions of the bill. We’ve gone through the bill and there are 23 separate but overlapping obligations for schools. And some of those obligations are fairly involved. They may be one line on a bill, but they may involve quite a bit of work on the part of schools and their safety stakeholders.
Can you give me an example of one of those new obligations?
Yes. We’ve formed several committees to examine the various issues that came up in the bill. One of them is Hazmat—providing a list of hazardous materials on school grounds to the statewide mapping system. That’s a bigger task than you might think, because while schools maintain records of their hazardous materials—particularly in terms of chemistry labs—you have to ask the question: Is this really the same list that they currently keep track of, and, by the way, do they do so in an electronic format? Part of the issue is that we’re stepping up what’s required so that it’s compatible with current technology. That’s new. No one has ever asked that of schools before. And in order to comply with that we need to look at what really needs to occur.
So we have a committee of folks from Environment Health, the Department of Health, Washington State Emergency Management, the fire marshals—people who are actually content, subject matter experts. And we’re going to be guided by what they tell us. That’s just one example of the many things that are in 5097.
Has the reaction to the senate bill been that it’s another unfunded mandate, or has it been more of a “this is great—at least we’re getting some attention to the issue”?
It’s a mixed reaction. It’s what you would expect. It’s a blend of both of those, plus some additional elements. I think there is some understandable anxiety. There’s some feeling of—now that we have this obligation, what exactly do you folks at OSPI want us to do? OSPI has the obligation to ramrod a lot of this through. And until such time as we have the guidance from some of the subject matter experts, we can’t provide an exact methodology—it’s not something that we can invent overnight. But that understandably makes folks at the ground level nervous, because they don’t know what the expectation is. If I were in their shoes I would feel the same way.
Do you see problems with what the bill is asking OSPI to do?
Well, no. The biggest problem is that the money we got for this particular appropriation was so small. We’re not going to be able to spread the dollars as far as we would like to in order to address all the different elements of the bill. Key legislators interested in this issue have basically thrown us a challenge and said, “Come back to the next legislative session with a budget request that more adequately meets the needs of schools.” And we fully intend to do that.
How far off is the 1.6 million over two years that was initially appropriated?
I couldn’t even estimate at this point. I mean, 1.6 million essentially buys a small array of things. For example, how do we deal with the technology piece? There’s going to be a grant program, and I have to hire somebody to manage that program. The money is appropriated so that we get half of it in this fiscal year and half in the following fiscal year, so we have to parcel it out. What that means is that there won’t be a lot of money for the grants in any one period. So, we’re looking at a two-year grant period for districts on a demonstration basis. In other words, the focus is on what we can do to show the rest of the schools how to accomplish the objective of documenting their comprehensive safety plans in a coordinated way. That’s one way to stretch those dollars.
What does that phrase—“a coordinated way”—imply?
Making sure that you’re covering all the bases in terms of: Is it multi-hazard? Does it include the major stakeholders such as fire, law enforcement, and emergency management? Another group that has come to the forefront in the last couple years is public health. In the past, if you look at most of the safety plans, public health was not a major presence, but they are now. Some places have done that. Clark County, for one, has been doing that kind of work for a long time.
School violence—school shootings like Virginia Tech—obviously get a lot of media attention, but are there more day-to-day, immediate problems such as public health, Hazmat, or the safety of facilities that are actually more important?
I think that’s highly variable to the community. Several years ago, for example, we had a big chemical stockpile fire in Grandview, Washington. Who could have predicted that? Who would have predicted that you were going to have to evacuate the entire Grandview community, or that 30 different professional agencies would show up at the command center to help orchestrate it—which apparently was an issue by itself? Sometimes you can’t predict. When you think about the hazards, you need to be thinking larger than just the school campus.
And then another issue is: How do you say that one hazard is more important than another? If you were in one of the school districts around Mt. St. Helens when it blew up, that would be your hazard of the moment. It really depends on what’s going on at any specific time. It’s so contextual. But there are some constants. If you talk to most school nurses or public health officials they’ll tell you that involuntary injuries are still an issue at school and probably always will be. The nature of kids is that they hurt themselves periodically in the school environment, although it’s probably much safer than being out in the community in general, because of the level of supervision and care that goes on in a school environment.
I heard that message a lot at the Washington State Safe Schools Conference—that schools are still the safest place for kids to be, Monday through Friday, from 8 to 4, or whatever.
I think that’s true. You have knowledgeable, caring people managing the kids, and they take their jobs seriously. Periodically there are threats that overwhelm the normal operational standards. An example of that certainly would be an intruder or a school shooter. Another could be something as simple as a natural gas explosion. It’s simply something that can happen. It could happen anywhere, including a school.
Were comprehensive school safety plans already required in Washington before Senate Bill 5097? For instance, I’m referring to the September 1, 2008, deadline for schools to have their safety plans submitted.
That’s new to the bill. Some of the elements of 5097 go beyond the original bill that was passed in the 2002 legislature, and that’s largely because of the things that we have learned since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. This is the big picture piece of safety planning, where we’re always learning. It’s anything but a static professional environment. There are always things you can learn to do better. From every one of these disasters and emergencies that have happened across the country—and frankly, across the world—we’re learning new things. And we hope that pays off in terms of better methods of prevention and mitigation.
In the original law neither preparedness nor mitigation were included in the criteria for a comprehensive safety plan. And they are now. And the reason why, I think you can look very closely at things like Katrina: There are some things you just can’t prevent. So what are you going to do to prepare and what are you going to do to mitigate? Those are important questions that schools have to answer in their plans.
When schools are looking to put those large-scale, comprehensive plans together, where are they typically looking for information and research?
We’ve got a partnership with a lot of agencies, not the least of which is the Washington State Emergency Management Division. On their Web site they’ve created some new templates that form the foundation of a lot of the planning processes. We also have our own Web site, so they’re linked.
Emergency Management is going to focus mostly on preparedness, mitigation, emergency response, and post-incident recovery issues for large-scale disasters. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so what we’re focusing on are the other elements and how they link together.
Do districts carry most of the responsibility for putting these plans together, or is it at the school level?
Districts. And you’re going to see different kinds of plans, but in some ways the plans shouldn’t vary too much if the district is actually linking up with local emergency planning committees, fire departments, and emergency management agencies, because they have the master template. I don’t know if people know this, but the state is broken up into nine Homeland Security coordinating regions. Those are based on public health districts. In each coordinating region there is one lead county. Some of those regions, of course, are single large counties, such as King County and Pierce County. But what that means is that if the schools are linking up in a meaningful way, the regional plan should set the standard for how the school system plan would be developed. So, it’s not just: “Here is the content and here are the players and go out and do wonderful things.” It’s also about looking at where the school district sits in the scope of regional efforts. A lot has happened in that arena over the last several years, and Washington State has a strategic homeland security plan that we’re asking schools to take a look at and use as a benchmark.
How do the federal mandates play into this?
The federal mandates are minimal for K–12 public schools at the moment. There is a requirement for schools that receive federal preparedness funds to become what’s called NIMS compliant. NIMS is the National Incident Management System. There’s a grant program that came out a few years ago, the Emergency Response and Crisis Management (ERCM) grant, which is now called the Readiness grant. This grant works from a federal perspective and it requires grantees to establish a link, essentially, to the local emergency management community. Their safety plans have to be linked in a meaningful way. A lot of that has to do with resource distribution. What NIMS is really about is resource management in a large scale incident. Think Katrina. It didn’t work very well there, but regardless, the idea is that if there’s a big disaster NIMS allows us to use the same language and the same basic system of response across the state, the region, and the country, so that there’s a higher likelihood that we’ll have a coordinated response. What’s happened in the past is that every state has kind of done its own thing. NIMS is an effort to get all the states using the same language, the same system for documentation, and the same basic approaches so that those resources can be managed much more efficiently than what we saw during Katrina.
What does NCLB require of states?
NCLB really has minimal safety requirements, other than Title IV Safe & Drug-Free School elements. We’re collecting data and we’re providing assistance to the extent that Title IV can. It’s my understanding that Title IV is going to be cut in this next iteration by about 20 percent, so it’s a depleting resource. And I do think it’s a little bit problematic if the federal government decides to increase the mandates at the same time that they’re decreasing the funding.
What’s your opinion of the persistently dangerous schools program?
I have some thoughts about that, and they’re mostly my personal assessment of what I think has been going on, but I haven’t studied it thoroughly. I’ll put it this way: Our state developed a plan for implementing the persistently dangerous schools requirement that met the approval of the U.S. Department of Education. However, I think most educators in the state would agree that a better system would be to identify the schools that are struggling, in terms of key safety issues, and assist those schools to get better in those areas. You could offer them some kind of incentive grants and other methods to give them a leg up. I think it’s problematic when a system is developed to identify struggling schools and then you just say, well, the solution to this is that all the people that go to that school can dis-enroll and go to another school. I’m not convinced that this is the best method to address school safety.
It seems like the result is that schools really don’t want to get on that list, and so they’re underreporting their safety issues.
Obviously, schools have no incentive to be on a list of persistently dangerous schools. But, we have no actionable evidence that underreporting of safety issues is occurring.
Because you’re not going to get any help to improve?
I don’t know that—there may be a way to get that help, but the common perception out there is that if you’re on that list you’re going to have a massive defection from your school. And virtually all the public schools I know of are funded based on their enrollment. So, it doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize that a problem exists. However, we need to have a more productive approach to resolving the problem. 