One Former Principal’s View on What it Takes to Prevent the Next Parkland

In 1999, I was a junior in college when Columbine happened. I remember thinking it seemed like an anomaly that there had been a shooting at a school. In 2012, my mother called me weeping to tell me about Sandy Hook. At the time, I worked across the street from my son’s preschool. I left my office and crossed the street, where I sat on a bench and sobbed uncontrollably as I watched him play with his classmates.

That was the day school safety became real to me.

As a former elementary school administrator, I saw myself in the Sandy Hook principal who laid down her life to protect her school, her students and her teachers. That sacrifice is not only what we are trained to do as educators, it is also who we are.

Now I work for the bipartisan organization that serves the nation’s governors, where I work with individual states and governors’ offices to help further education policies that make people’s lives better.

As I watched the Parkland shooting unfold last month — no longer a principal but still very much part of the education sphere — my perspective was different.

The school safety puzzle is complex, and it begins with prevention. Addressing building safety is one key piece to the puzzle, but it is not the sole remedy. For example, we know many of these young shooters were isolated and signaled the need for intervention and support well before their rampages. Could our schools and communities be better attuned to their social and emotional development and mental health needs to help prevent these tragedies?

We also need to broaden the discussion beyond just safety at school, which includes active shooter drills, building lockdowns and armed teachers, to a more holistic approach that is embedded in our communities. For example, other considerations include:

· Additional resources, including more full-time school psychologists and guidance counselors who have smaller caseloads and are not split between school sites;

· Increased early screening and intervention, which may include linkages with community health providers and social supports for families;

· Schools and communities designed to attend to students’ mental, social and emotional needs as well as their academic development;

· Creative solutions for increased coordination and data-sharing among social services, health agencies and schools;

· School-based health centers that integrate physical and behavioral health services; and

· High-quality afterschool programs for at-risk students.

In states, departments of education, health, homeland security and public safety must coordinate their school safety preparedness planning. Some governors already have held roundtables with teachers, parents and other members of the community to discuss strategies for keeping kids safer.

This is all just a start to a massively complex issue we will have to work together as a nation to solve. But as someone who works every day with elected officials, agency heads and cabinet members at the state level, I remain hopeful that we will continue to have the important conversations that create policy solutions to better protect America’s teachers, school staff and children.

Aaliyah Samuel is the director of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices Education Division.