On May 17, Deputy Chief of Staff for the US Department of Education (DOE), Holly Kuzmich, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee about emergency management and how to keep the nation’s schools safe.

Following the incident at Virginia Tech, President Bush had members of the government meet with educators, mental health experts, and law officials to discuss how to better manage school security. The testimony given by Holly Kuzmich’s (available here) is the summation of this investigation.

School safety is ultimately the responsibility of the State, with the DOE working to supplement the efforts of State and local school systems. School safety is a broad mandate: from critical incidents such as those at Virginia Tech, to drugs, alcohol and bullying. All of these issues compromise the educational experience for students, teachers and staff.

“Schools are generally safe, but all of us - Federal, State and local government organizations, community-based organizations, and parents and students - share the responsibility to work to make them safer.”

The DOE has implemented many guides, studies and efforts under the Safe School Initiative covering threats such as school shootings - how to prevent them, plan for them, and respond to them. There are four phases of emergency management: Prevention-Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. The government provides grants to cover many of these efforts.

The DOE is recommending many changes to the national approach to School Safety including replacing many of the overlapping programs with a single program. This program would be more flexible in terms of responding to school safety issues and would make the grant process more efficient.

For more resources on School Safety, visit the DOE’s National Dialogue on Safe Schools website.

Tags: DOE, department of education, school safety, safe schools, national safety, homeland security