Kelechi M. Ikegwu – Evelyn Sowells – Howard Hardiman
Department of Computer Systems Technology, North Carolina A&T State University
ABSTRACT. The horrific and tragic deaths that have resulted from infamous school shootings have deprived Americans of the sense of security in what has traditionally been a nurturing and safe environment. This paper will discuss different preventive methods for school shootings. The most current preventive methods are examined for fitness based on a variety of school shootings that have occurred in the past. Then a framework for a new school shooting protection device is proposed and evaluated. Concepts from computer vision, anomaly detection, and electromagnetic propulsion are discussed with respect to the proposed framework. Ideally, the goal of the framework presented in this paper is to prevent deaths and injuries from occurring during a school shooting. With the framework, an efficient and comparatively affordable preventive method could be released in the near future.
“Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”
“At any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.”
“Fire at Full Moon” 1933 | Paul Klee
Hard upon conclusion of the fall semester, educational settlements ebb in population as students return to their home fires.
Today we pull together best practice in the systems — the people and the technologies — that sustain campus safety and stability during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays.
Join us at 16:00 UTC with login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
“Center Grove Schools enters the 2022/2023 school year with a new high-tech safety partner — Centegix CrisisAlert — purchased in part with school safety grant money that pairs with their Emergency Operations Center that opened in January 2022. The CrisisAlert program puts security at the fingertips of all teachers and staff.
Both systems address what the district learned it had to work on from a school safety assessment back in 2018 – live monitoring and faster response times in an emergency. Seven-hundred cameras will scan every school in real-time from the district’s Emergency Operations Center. — More”
Today is an “off-year” federal election but there are many appeals to voters for more money to build new, or expand or maintain educational settlements. We may have to pick through a few bond offerings. We maintain an ongoing concern for the security of polling places; many which are located in schools, colleges and universities.
In the United States, polling places can be located in a variety of public and private facilities, not just in public schools. While public schools are commonly used as polling places due to their widespread distribution and accessibility, they are not necessarily the largest proportion of polling places nationwide. The specific locations of polling places can vary by jurisdiction and are determined by local election officials. Other common polling place locations include community centers, churches, libraries, government buildings, and private residences.
The selection of polling places is based on factors like accessibility, convenience, and the need to accommodate a specific number of voters within a given precinct or district. The goal is to ensure that voters have reasonable access to cast their ballots on election day. The use of public schools as polling places is widespread but not universal, and the distribution of polling places across various types of facilities can vary from one region to another.
The political party that claims that “democracy is at stake” today’s election is the same political party that seeks to federalize state election laws, pack the Supreme Court, remove the Electoral College, remove US national borders and abolish voter identification will be voting in today’s off-year elections. In other words: it wants to abolish democracy. Its partisans have long since metastasized in education communities where polling places for students, faculty, staff and nearby residents are hosted.
Join us in post-irony America today when we focus only on the safety and environmental condition of these polling places. Where there is closer agreement. Catalogs, titles, chapters, sections and passages that inform best practice on this topic:
“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow,
yet we forget that he is someone today.”
– Stacia Tauscher
Today we run a status check on the stream of technical and management standards evolving to assure the highest possible level of security in education communities. The literature expands significantly from an assortment of national standards-setting bodies, trade associations, ad hoc consortia and open source standards developers. CLICK HERE for a sample of our work in this domain.
School security is big business in the United States. According to a report by Markets and Markets, the global school and campus security market size was valued at USD 14.0 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 21.7 billion by 2025, at a combined annual growth rate of 7.2% during the forecast period.
Another report by Research And Markets estimates that the US school security market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 8% between 2020 and 2025, driven by factors such as increasing incidents of school violence, rising demand for access control and surveillance systems, and increasing government funding for school safety initiatives.
Because the pace of the combined annual growth rate of the school and campus security market is greater than the growth rate of the education “industry” itself, we’ve necessarily had to break down our approach to this topic into modules:
Security 100. A survey of all the technical and management codes and standards for all educational settings — day care, K-12, higher education and university affiliated healthcare occupancies.
Security 200. Queries into the most recent public consultations on the components and interoperability* of supporting technologies
Video surveillance: indoor and outdoor cameras, cameras with night vision and motion detection capabilities and cameras that can be integrated with other security systems for enhanced monitoring and control.
Access control:doors, remote locking, privacy and considerations for persons with disabilities.
Panic alarms: These devices allow staff and students to quickly and discreetly alert authorities in case of an emergency.
Metal detectors: These devices scan for weapons and other prohibited items as people enter the school.
Mass notification systems: These systems allow school administrators to quickly send emergency alerts and notifications to students, staff, and parents.
Intrusion detection systems: These systems use sensors to detect unauthorized entry and trigger an alarm.
GPS tracking systems: These systems allow school officials to monitor the location of school buses and track the movements of students during field trips and other off-campus activities.
Security 300. Regulatory and management codes and standards; a great deal of which are self-referencing.
As always, we reckon first cost and long-term maintenance cost, including software maintenance for the information and communication technologies (i.e. anything with wires) installed in the United States. Cybersecurity is outside our wheelhouse and beyond our expertise. In order to do any of the foregoing reasonably well, we have to leave cybersecurity standards to others.
Bob Hope Primary School Kadena Air Base
When your students love the school security guard- he gets flowers! Thanks, Steve! You are the BEST and we appreciate your hard work keeping us safe and building relationships! pic.twitter.com/VCJQ6y9S44
Education Community Safety catalog is one of the fast-growing catalogs of best practice literature. In developing district security plans, K-12 school leaders stress that school safety is a cross-functional responsibility and every individual’s participation drives the success of overall safety protocols. We link a small sample below and update ahead of every Security colloquium.
* Interoperability refers to the ability of different technologies or systems to communicate and work together seamlessly. In the context of school security technologies, interoperability can help improve the effectiveness of security systems and make it easier for school personnel to manage and respond to potential security threats. Here’s what we look for:
Standardization: By standardizing communication protocols and data formats, school security technologies can be made more compatible with each other, making it easier for different systems to communicate and share information.
Integration: School security technologies can be integrated with each other to provide a more comprehensive security solution. For example, access control systems can be integrated with video surveillance systems to automatically trigger alerts when an unauthorized person enters a restricted area.
Open Architecture: Open architecture solutions enable different security systems to be connected and communicate with each other regardless of their manufacturer or supplier. This approach makes it easier to integrate different technologies and avoid vendor lock-in.
Cloud-based Solutions: Cloud-based security solutions can enable interoperability by providing a centralized platform for managing and monitoring different security systems. This approach can also simplify the deployment of security technologies across multiple locations.
Collaboration: School security technology providers can work together to develop interoperability standards and best practices that can be adopted across the industry. Collaboration can help drive innovation and improve the effectiveness of security systems.
The original University of Michigan standards advocacy enterprise (see ABOUT) began following the evolution of NFPA 730 and NFPA 731 since the 2008 Edition. That enterprise began a collaboration with trade associations and subject matter experts from other universities (notably Georgetown University and Evergreen State University) to advocate user-interest concepts in the 2011 edition. A summary of advocacy action is summarized in the links below:
in the appeared in a trade association journal Facilities Manager:
An online presentation by Michael C. Peele (Georgetown University) — one of the voting members of NFPA 730 and NFPA 731 technical committees– was recorded and is linked below.
Public comment on the First Draft of the 2026 Edition will be received until January 3, 2025. You may key in your own ideas by clicking in to our user-interest Public Consultation Meeting Point or by communicating directly with the NFPA.
This title remains on the standing agenda of our Security colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
The National Floor Safety Institute is steward to a comprehensive bibliography of best practice literature. Floor safety is a risk that receives heightened consideration in education facilities in the snowy parts of the world this time of year. Its complete suite is listed in the link below:
Application: The requirements of this standard pertain to the safe usage and applications, design, construction, and quality criteria of floor mats and runners.
Purpose: This standard is directed to eliminating slip, trip and fall hazards including but not limited to soil, moisture, contaminant removal, edge treatments and the improper use of floor mats and runners.
Education communities have a larger-than-average openings to the exterior — and they are large targets for lawsuits — so we keep an eye on this title.
At the moment, an examination of the technical committee roster for this title indicates that there are no voting members from the education industry; the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States. While Murray State University has subject matter experts recognized by NFSI (See YouTube link below) there is no user/owner/final fiduciary on the committee. Keep in mind that that in many education organizations — particularly large research universities — the compliance and insurance (risk management) interest is the only stakeholder that has the funding to participate. Compliance and risk management interests may be at odds with the interest of the user/owner/final fiduciary in individual units (explained in more detail in our ABOUT)
NSFI alerts the public to live consultation opportunities on the link to its standards landing page above. Today we find only closed consultations on its News & Events page. You are encouraged to collaborate directly with NFSI. Contact Laura Cooper for more information at laurac@nfsi.org.
We keep the NFSI standards suite on the standing agenda of our Interiors colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next meeting; open to everyone.
Note 40 school-related entrance and egress concepts (Search term: “School”)
Doors have long since been a simple “opening” or “fenestration”. Doors are “portals”; nodes on the geometry of the Internet of Small Things. There are 100’s of thousands of these nodes on any single college, university or school district. First costs run from $1000 per door in a classroom to $100,000 per door in hospitals with maintenance and operation costs commensurate with complexity of the hardware and software needed to maintain integration of the door with building security and energy systems.
We find the bulk of best practice identified in the catalogs of the following accredited standards developers for the United States construction markets:
The US federal government and all 50-states adapt safety and sustainability concepts from the foregoing publishers; either partially or whole cloth.
Today at the usual hour we examine the moment in the standard of care for doors in education communities in the United States. Join the colloquium with the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
Standards Michigan Office Ann Arbor Michigan | 2723 South State Street Suite 150
It's all about those little details, folks! How cool is this hand-finished brass hinge??! It's one of our favorites.
You can find at House of Antique Hardware in their antique-by-hand finish. You can thank us later 🙂 pic.twitter.com/7C0kxGe31N
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
