Students injured in shooting could be helped by information

Last week six high school students were injured by gun shots when two other students opened fire on them as they got off a school bus. The incident happened in Las Vegas. Click this USA Today report for the full story.

Information can be a huge, and sometimes critical, way to minimize the harm to school students when they are endangered and injured. Defywire provides those responsible for school children with two major kinds of information that is very important in a situation like the one in Las Vegas:
- how to reach a student’s parents or guardian
- health facts about the child that are a factor in his or her treatment.

In the Las Vegas incident, Defywire Guardian would have made it possible for the bus driver to use his or her mobile phone to provide both kinds of information for each of the injured students. The mobile could also have been an instantly available communications focal point for notifying law enforcement and other school officials. The school officials could then have used their Defywire data to find out the names of all of the students on the bus making it possible to let the parents of all children involved know the status of their own child.

Stop Disasters! – a training game for the real world

The Stop Disasters! game from International Strategy for Disaster Reduction is serious training. There are games to play in which the player assumes the role of managing each of these types of disaster: wildfire, earthquake, flood, and tsunami. There are different scenarios and levels of difficulty for each type of disaster. The games can be played in English and four other languages.

The games are not appropriate for small children, but middle and high school students can use them to obtain in-depth understanding of how disasters can be minimized when responsible people know what to do. The games are used by professionals who train for real world disaster management. One of the strong educational values of the online world is that it can give students access to professional resources to use in their education. The games are an example of training kids can get as virtual apprentices to real life activities.

The Stop Disasters! games are also good training for school officials and teachers who may one day have to take responsibility in a fire, earthquake, flood — or even a tsunami. Having adults who know what to do increases the safety of students at their school.

Washington Post on “dangerous school” designation

In an in-depth article posted today, Washington Post Staff Writer Nelson Hernandez examines: ‘No Child’ Data on Violence Skewed: Each State Defines ‘Dangerous School’:

A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify “persistently dangerous schools” is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year.

Recognizing strangers who enter schools

USA Today reports on a new system that will be tested in three Nashville schools beginning December 1st:

Nashville will take digital photos of students and workers at the three test schools and store them in the new camera system. . . . When a camera spots a face in a school that it cannot match to a stored photo, it will alert security. The system also could detect suspended and expelled students and fired employees . . . .

Pros and cons of the system are discussed in the USA Today article. The powerful face recognition technology has been controversial with regard to some privacy issues. In Nashville, where several intruders have entered schools in the past year, a school official quoted in the article says, “This will give us an edge in providing safety for our students and teachers.”

Defywire’s Mobile Guardian complements other safety technologies by providing parents, schools and students the means to focus on what to do in an emergency situation when their safety and security are threatened.

Having student health information available in crises

An article in Edutopia titled Vital Statistics: Documenting Your Health explores the importance for all of us of having our health records when there is an emergency. The article includes this story illustrating that for students, having access to health records can keep unexpected mishaps from becoming more serious :

Wolter also knows firsthand the usefulness of record keeping in school settings. She created personal health records for 110 teens who went on a trip to Europe. Those came in handy when one youngster was accused of having illicit drugs in his room, and a consultation with the flash drive showed he was prescribed medication for attention deficit disorder. In another case, two kids collided while dancing in a club and one needed stitches. His medical information was at hand and usable by the doctors in Prague.

Defywire Mobile Guardian makes student health information accessible by a few clicks on the mobile phone of a teacher who is coping with a student health crisis.

The most available way to call for help

In media accounts of crises that occur in schools, usually there is a line or two something like this:

In calls to 911, students described Mr. Coon as 5 foot 5, white and “kind of chubby.”

The above line is from the New York Times article today about the school shooting yesterday in Cleveland. The report also includes this description of the scene at the school:

Mychael said she darted down a flight of stairs before hiding with five other students in a classroom on the third floor. After several minutes, the group, sobbing, decided to sprint down the rest of the stairs, she said.

Looking at these reports from a school safety perspective in the 21st century, we can be sure that the kids who called 911 did not go to a phone booth or use a landline at all. The most immediate way to share information electronically within and from a school today is by using the phones that staff, teachers and students carry. Using this new way to effect safety can both prevent trouble and protect young people and those responsible for their care.