Improving School Safety in the E-Learning Era
Abstract: This paper presents a framework for addressing the challenges that arise when implementing technologies intended to improve school safety during the current e-learning era. The general consensus arising from the professional security community is that school administrators should invest in sophisticated technologies that help school staff to decrease violence via a multi-staged approach to safety. Specifically, the recommended framework for implementing technologies that improve school safety has four stages of protection, which in a crisis serve as phases for action: (1) deter violence before it occurs, (2) detect violence when it does occur, (3) delay the severity of any violence that is occurring, so that security officers can (4) respond to the violence with force until it is stopped. By employing an integrated suite of technologies that are collectively designed to decrease school violence, the four-stage framework can help to improve school safety in the contemporary e-learning era, both in terms of the number of school violence cases and the severity of those cases.