Don’t give students a fish, teach them to fish.
By Elissa-Beth Gross
At Campus Risk Solutions, our mission is to train, and equip students with age-appropriate tools so they can safeguard their campuses and build more resilient communities alongside faculty, staff, and community partners. School security has been mostly top down and purchase driven. It’s time to fully recognize students -- the population being served, and only somewhat protected – as essential to school security. If the goal is to prevent and contain unwanted incidents on campuses, then students are the most important ingredient and largest untapped workforce.
Students can learn the components of both a safe campus and the threat landscape; how to identify, avoid, and prioritize threats; even to validate, implement, and test solutions. I envision beginning to develop these skills as early as Pre-K to have high school and college students who are experienced designers of safer campuses. This leap requires a unified and unifying platform with time sensitive goals for bringing about change. Campus Risk Solutions will be introducing the Campus Incident Management System (CIMS) to post secondary institutions first. CIMS software enables students to raise resilience level and lower threat level in accordance with a roadmap. Together, let's make students proficient decisions makers in the face of threats, and more self-reliant before, during, and after incidents including emergencies and disasters.