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Keeping Children Safe By Royal Van Horn Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

IT WAS 11:35 a.m., Monday, 27 January 1998. "Will whoever has the Little Red Riding Hood film please bring it to the office" came the message over the intercom from Barbara Langley, the principal of Fort Caroline Elementary School, in Jacksonville.1 Like clockwork, teachers immediately checked to be sure that all their students were present. Then they subtly, but quickly, locked the windows and doors to their classrooms. The halls, rest rooms, and other commons areas were cleared by any adults who happened to be near. Teachers on the playground ended recess abruptly and briskly ushered their students back to the classroom. Cafeteria workers, teachers, and aides "locked down" the lunchroom and stationed themselves near the doors. No one panicked, but the staff knew that a sexual predator was on campus.

On Wednesday of the week before the incident at Fort Caroline, a man had approached a 9-year-old girl and other children at the Les Chateaux Condominiums, a short distance from the school. On Thursday, a man tried to lure two girls -- 7 and 9 years old -- into his car. On Friday, a man grabbed a 9-year-old boy at a newspaper recycling bin in the school parking lot, but the boy kicked him in the shin and ran. On Monday, a man grabbed an 11-year-old boy as he was walking from the main school building to a portable classroom. The boy kicked him and escaped.

Unfortunately, no one at the school was informed that a sexual predator was on the prowl in the neighborhood until after the incident on Friday. Once the 11-year-old reported his narrow escape from the predator late Monday morning, faculty and staff at the school responded with remarkable speed. A 911 call to the Duval County sheriff's office brought more than a dozen police officers to campus; a helicopter patrolled overhead, searching for the predator; and a police dog was brought in to track the suspect. As I write this column (February 9), the suspect still has not been apprehended, but, just yesterday, after two weeks of classroom "lock down," the school returned to a normal -- albeit watchful -- status.

Sometimes we take technology for granted, believing that it's in schools only for academic reasons. But there are a lot of other uses for technology. In the rest of this column, I'd like to discuss the technology that was actually used to help keep the children safe during the two weeks following the incident, as well as the technology that could -- and perhaps should -- have been used.

Immediately after the coded Little Red Riding Hood message, the principal sent an e-mail message to everyone in the school. This is an ideal way to inform teachers of the emergency without alarming the children. But there's more here than meets the eye. Since the teachers were naturally alarmed and curious, I suspect that the e-mail server was bombarded by 40 or 50 nearly simultaneous requests to read the principal's message. Luckily the server held up fine: it was the proper size.

Now consider the teacher workstations. If "notifier" software is not installed properly and functioning correctly, no one knows that an urgent message is waiting. When the "notifier" works as designed, the teacher workstations chime when they receive any incoming message, and they have an instantly recognizable "alert chime" when an e-mail is marked "urgent." If your school has e-mail software, double-check the e-mail set-up menu to be sure that appropriate users, such as the principal, have the "mark urgent" and "return receipt requested" options enabled. Check also that the faculty and staff mailing lists are up to date and contain everyone's name and that the notifier function is enabled. In other words, tweak your e-mail software; it can be indispensable in a crisis.

At 2 p.m. on the day of the incident, once the school was "locked down" properly and after conferring with police officers, the principal went to the school's inexpensive, but effective, television studio. After flipping a few switches and focusing the television camera (really a common camcorder), the principal delivered a short 10-minute message to all students over the school's closed-circuit television system. The message was a refresher course for the children on what to do if approached by a stranger and on the importance of walking in groups. That evening, school administrators sent a "Stranger Alert" newsletter home with every child: high-speed duplicating equipment can be very useful in a crisis. It might even be wise to have a script for a TV program and the text for a newsletter prepared in advance.

In times of emergency, we often overlook the value of closed-circuit television. Several years ago I witnessed the principal of a large high school defuse a potential race riot by calmly addressing 1,200 students via closed-circuit television. The incident had begun a day or so before, when a fight broke out between a group of black students and a group of white students. Afterward, the tension in the school was palpable. Without the closed-circuit television system, the principal would have had to risk assembling 1,200 students in the gymnasium -- not a good plan under the circumstances. Since I had persuaded school officials to build the studio and closed-circuit television system and had helped set it up, I felt a certain amount of pride when the principal used it so effectively.

The idea of using technology to help keep children safe brings up the problem of portable classrooms. Unfortunately, many schools with portables don't have the central computer network or the closed-circuit television network running to the portables. Some don't even have telephones. I've usually been told by principals that they just couldn't get the money to wire the portables. Maybe this column will help justify the expense to the budget makers.

A similar problem arises with regard to the physical education teachers and coaches who, like the teachers in portables, are some distance away from the main building. Pagers, 900-MHz portable phones that work reliably up to about 700 feet, cellular phones, and two-way radios are potential solutions. For about $5 a month, every remote teacher can have a pager, and most paging companies can arrange it so that dialing a single number alerts everyone at once.

Many schools have primitive telephone systems. I mean the phone switch that is the hub of the system, not the handsets you pick up to talk with. Lots of schools have systems so old that they don't even have touch-tone dialing. If you do have an old phone switch, it might be impossible to use the long-range 900-MHz portable phone mentioned above. Fortunately, Fort Caroline has an up-to-date system with a phone in every classroom, even the portables, and every phone can dial out of the school easily.

Fort Caroline Elementary School also has a "Parent Link" system (http://www.parlant.com). An elaborate, computer-based telephone, voice mail, and messaging system such as this one could be mighty useful in an emergency. In place of the standard greeting and phone menu, such a system can send an alert message to all parents. Incidentally, such systems are frequently used in high schools and are programmed to call the parents of every child who is absent; it helps cut down truancy. With the right software and an up-to-date file of parent phone numbers (tough to maintain), it's even possible to use a system like this to automatically call all parents and suggest that they meet their child at the bus stop or try to walk their child home from school. The message here is simple: use all the technology you can to help ease parents' minds and to control the rumor mill.

Many elementary school students attend private day-care centers and come to school on day-care buses. Thus the day-case centers need to be informed quickly in a crisis. But it is nearly impossible to get through to a school or a day-care center any time near the beginning or ending of the school day. In cases like this, try the fax machine. Typically, schools have a dedicated fax line that's not always busy. It's even possible to preprogram many modern fax machines to broadcast a fax message automatically to a dozen or so stored phone numbers. You might be able to program your fax machine to call the feeder day-care centers or the neighboring public and private schools. In an incident like this one, as soon as the police artist completes a composite sketch of the suspect, the sketch can be quickly distributed via fax. (By the way, many police departments use computer-based software to help make composite sketches of suspects. You can even make people look younger or older with such software.)

If we really want to keep children safe, we have to consider bus stops. When all the children are in school, surrounded by caring adults, it's a lot easier to protect them than it is when they are at hundreds of bus stops all over town. This point was driven home recently when I discovered that a "convicted sexual offender" had moved into a house in my neighborhood on the same corner as a local school bus stop.2 In Florida, state law mandates that the residences of all convicted sexual offenders be a matter of public record. Thus the state's sexual offender database is public information and is even available on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Web site. In fact, I learned of the convicted sexual offender in my neighborhood because a neighbor got the information from the Web site and distributed it to everyone.

Geographic information software, such as Arc/Info, is widely used by city planners, school districts, real estate developers, and urban sociologists (http://www. esri.ca/products/index.shtmll). School district transportation office employees, for example, often use such software to plot and change school attendance zones and to plan, modify, and optimize school bus routes. It wouldn't be difficult to correlate the database on school bus stops with the "convicted sexual offender" database. With the same kind of software, you could even create a computerized mailing list and send warnings to all the parents of children who use bus stops near the offender's residence. Perhaps forewarned really is forearmed.

Speaking of being forewarned, why not use state-of-the-art computer software to help teach children how to respond when approached by a stranger or how to handle other threatening situations? I have not seen such software. If anyone has, please let me know, and I'll inform Kappan readers.

My purpose in writing this column was not to alarm you or to overstate the importance of technology in keeping children safe. Adults protect children; technology doesn't. However, adults using technology wisely just might give the "good guys" the advantage.

2. The person mentioned here is labeled a "convicted sexual offender" by the state of Florida, not by me. I have no personal knowledge of the individual whatsoever.

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Last updated 22 April 1998
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