Federal School Safety Clearinghouse Taps Diverse Array of Advisers

Educators, civil rights advocates, child well-being experts, and family members of school shooting victims will help advise the federal government on school safety—part of an ongoing effort to help administrators navigate research and guidance on one of their most pressing concerns.

The newly created Federal School Safety Clearinghouse External Advisory Board will provide feedback on the safety recommendations and research on SchoolSafety.gov. That federal information clearinghouse, housed in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was created after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and codified into law as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

“I’ve learned it’s very important to have all of these very different voices at the table,” said Ronn Nozoe, the CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals who will chair the 26-member board. “There’s so many different angles [to school safety]. Each of those respective parties has an expertise and experience to add here.”

Conversations about school safety are often complicated by competing experiences and priorities—some held by various groups represented on the new advisory panel.

School safety experts have said calls for aggressive “school hardening” measures, like arming teachers and beefing up buildings’ physical security features, often overlook the routine, human elements needed to keep children safe. Such elements include regular training in simple lockdown procedures and ensuring children feel comfortable reporting any concerns to a trusted adult.

Educators say it can be difficult to make sense of reams of research to determine how to spend limited resources and what would best fit their specific school needs. They’ve also complained that some mandates, like drills that teach students to “counter” attackers, are impractical or unproven in educational environments.

School police organizations and civil rights advocates are often at odds about whether police should be stationed in schools and how to ensure they don’t get involved in routine disciplinary matters.

The panel includes voices that represent many of those viewpoints:

• Leaders of organizations that represent elementary and secondary school principals, school psychologists, superintendents, teachers’ unions, school resource officers, and private schools;
• Current superintendents from Dekalb County, Ga., Red Lake, Minn., and Seattle;
• Researchers who study violence prevention, healthy school climates;
• Representatives from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the ACLU, and the National Disability Rights Network; and
• Various state and national school safety organizations.

The panel also includes three parents who’ve had a child die in a school shooting.

Michele Gay founded Safe and Sound Schools after her daughter, Josephine, was killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn. Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan died in Newtown, co-founded Sandy Hook Promise, an organization that created a national school safety tip line and training for schools. Tony Montalto, whose daughter, Gina, died in Parkland, is the president of Stand With Parkland, a group of affected families that has lobbied for school safety measures on the state and federal levels.

Nozoe got involved after federal officials contacted him about his organization’s efforts with the Principals Recovery Network, a team of administrators who’ve led schools after school shootings.

“We want to try to do this in the most common sense way, grounded by experts,” Nozoe said. “We want to [make recommendations] on the most salient things that need to be done, but also look at it from a holistic perspective.”

The full list of advisory panel members is available on the DHS website.