Amy Rock (0:56): Hi everyone. My name is Amy Rock. I'm Campus Safety's executive editor, and thank you for joining us for an other episode of the Campus Safety Voices podcast. Joining me today is Rich Payne, safety director at Academy District 20 in Colorado, and also a 2024 Campus Safety Director of the Year finalist. And now, Rich, you and I chatted briefly yesterday, and you mentioned to me you have a particular overall philosophy on school safety. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Richard Payne (01:22): Yeah. I think the philosophy should be for everybody in school safety is just to make sure that it's a collaborative effort, that you are working collaboratively with not only everyone within the district -- your principals, your administration, your school board -- but then also with your local partners, our law enforcement partners, whether it's on the state or federal level. District 20 has a unique system as we have two schools on the United States Air Force Academy grounds. So we have a secondary partnership that we have with military security forces because they're our first responders on the base since they can close that base down. So it's working to make sure that you have collaborative efforts with everybody, making sure that we're all on the same page, we're talking the same language, and then that our communication is tied together as well as our policies and procedures, and that we also train together with everyone.

Those are some key facts that I think are very important to making sure that it's a successful system, and it's just layers and layers on the different types of security, starting out with physical security, and then just layers and layers of security that goes all the way up to our psychological security to make sure that everything's working together.

Amy Rock (2:45): Now, you mentioned security cameras, surveillance cameras, which kind of brings me to my next question. Target hardening is something you've really focused on in recent years, including security cameras. Can you share a little bit more on that endeavor?

Richard Payne (2:59): Yeah, so I like to start off with safety and security and physical target hardening from the basics. You have to lock your doors. You have to make sure that all your doors are locked in this day and age. With some of the best practices, lessons learned, we've seen things where interior doors of schools aren't even locked. And so now every teacher should have that opportunity to lock the door so that if an intruder does get in, that each kid is safe. Also, making sure if you have pass-through doors from classroom to classroom, that those are locked as well, so that an individual couldn't get into one classroom and then just continue through multiple classrooms. And so that part, just the basics of locking your door, I think is very important. We lock our homes, we lock our cars. Those are all tangible items that insurance can replace, but we can't replace lives if some were to get into an unlocked door, which takes a couple seconds to make sure that the door is locked.

And so with that, having secure buildings, secured interiors, we use cameras as a secondary tool. It's just another layer added on. The schools have close up to a hundred cameras, so what you have is you have systems in place that if you need them for evidence, you're looking at them back, you’re always going back to evidence or having a system in place that actually is live. From lessons learned, we saw that there was officers being sent in Parkland to where they thought the individual was, and I think there was a 12 to 15-minute delay. So the officers were getting there and the individual wasn't there, and that was on an auto playback system. But to add some AI technology into your cameras, to have the ability to just put a box around a person. A lot of people like to say, “Well, do facial recognition.” Well, facial recognition only works if everybody's picture is put into the system. It's not going to pick up somebody who's not. So that's why you can get systems to where you can actually just put a box around that individual and then that maps that individual wherever they walk in the building, it actually follows them on the cameras. Traditionally in schools, your camera systems were set and done by your IT system, your IT support system in the district, but they were built off of data ports. And so making sure that your data ports, it's very hard to navigate that. You're constantly having to drag and pull cameras. And so there's newer systems out there that -- I was able to do this in Douglas County School District in 80 traditional schools in 20 charter schools – put a system in place that you could put a box on a person and that box will follow that individual through the whole building.

A lot of the camera companies will try to tell you, “Hey, we can share this with law enforcement.” Well, we all know that if an officer is responding at 50, 60 miles an hour trying to get to the school for a shooting, they don't have time to look at their laptop. And then from that little screen to determine where the bad person is in the building. So having a system that speaks the same language as law enforcement, such as having the building and all your cameras numbered into a law enforcement tactical response. Your number one side is always your front of the building. Then it goes clockwise, and you'll have your two, your three, four side, and then your interiors, your five cameras. That way, if an officer is dispatched to a certain location, they know that if the bad guy is sitting at the front door waiting for the officers to come in and trying to snipe them -- which didn't happen in a school, but it actually happened in the Planned Parenthood shooting here in Colorado Springs several years ago. The bad guy was sitting behind some mirrored glass and they couldn't see where the guy was at, and he was just shooting at the officers as they were approaching.

Well, with the camera systems, you can now tell your officers, “Approach on the three side.” They know that language. Instead of saying, “Well, go to the back east door,” they're going to know where the front is in the back is. And so having those connections with your law enforcement, the training.

And having SROs in school. The SROs are a huge advantage for our high schools to have that extra partnership with law enforcement, knowing that we're all talking the same language. It's also easier if that SROs on his radio, calling in to the officers responding, “Hey, come in on the three side or coming on the two side,” or giving that information to your officers. So it's just looking out. And there's other companies that are out there that are building great systems, but it's looking at some different ones. And then also part of that system, you have a map of the school off to the side, and it's showing you live time in real time where the actual individual is actually moving through.

Amy Rock (7:51): Yeah, that's also why it's critical to have officers train in your schools, or at the very least, visit the sites so that they get to know the layout, so the first time that they're inside the school isn't for a crisis incident. I mean, that's why mapping comes in handy. If they have to call in bigger forces that aren't familiar with the school layout, they have that map to go by.

Richard Payne (8:14): Exactly. And so what we do, and I did this when I was up in Douglas County, I currently do an Academy District 20, is all the training comes from the security department. It's a non-negotiable within the district -- all security training, all lockdown drills, all that's handled by my security team. So when we do the lockdown drills, we actually call and we let our law enforcement officers, our SROs know, and any officer that's in the area that can take 20 minutes out of that day, they can come in and go through the lockdown drill with us so that they also get familiar with the buildings. So if they're in patrol and they respond, they know exactly where they're going, they kind of have a good familiarity of the interior of the buildings as well. So once again, it's having those great partnerships working in collaboration to make sure that you're just setting everything up for success.

We even have gone so far to provide access control cards to other agencies that aren't within our area, but they're on a boundary, and there's more officers in the city area in the county on a boundary that we have a school on. And so we provide those officers with access control cards as well as we're able to electronically from any location from offsite pulse and let people in the doors. So if you have officers who get there and it say it's a state patrol officer that doesn't have access, and he's one of the first ones there, we can actually post the door so that they can get in the door and they're not having to try to figure out how to get in the building since all of our buildings in our districts are secure throughout the day.

Amy Rock (9:54): Right. And you had mentioned earlier door safety, but there's also the vulnerability of glass. And your district has invested in protective window film. Why and how has that been prioritized in your schools?

Richard Payne (10:06): So if you go back to lessons learned, bad guys have gotten in either from prop doors or by breaking glass. And so after Sandy Hook, the big push across the country was everybody to put some type of protective window film. You'll hear it called different things such as hurricane film, ballistic film. And then you'll have experts come out and say, “Well, there's no such thing as ballistic film.” And really what it is, it's a film that protects the glass that basically is a time barrier. So if the film is on the facility and some guy's trying to get in, if it's going to take that person 12, 13, 14 minutes, law enforcement's going to be there pretty quick. That's going to be able to stop that individual from getting inside the building. And we had a shooting in Tennessee not too long last year, which the person shot and got through the broken glass. So that's kind of back to the basics of 101 is you secure your buildings with locks, and then from there you should have that protective film put on your buildings.

And it's just, like I said, it's all layers and it's just time barriers to slow that person down so they don't get into your building. But then if they do get into your building, we also learn from Parkland, to see if you can have the funding to make sure all your classroom windows have the protective film on there so the bad guy cannot get through like what happened or just shoot through the glass, like what happened in Parkland. So there's a lot of different things.

There's some great companies out there that you can look to. My advice, I've been doing this now as a, I'm retired law enforcement 25 years, and I've been doing school safety now for 12 years. I did two years up in Jeffco School District where Columbine was at, where all I did was active gunman training and went to 153 schools doing training after training with law enforcement officers and stuff. So having that knowledge and seeing what happens with lessons learned, we can look back and say, “If this would've been in place, it would've stopped that individual from getting into that room or shooting into that room.” So it's just sometimes thinking outside the box, and yeah, it is expensive, but for the amount of money that it costs to put on there, if you end up paying out on a civil lawsuit, millions and millions, I would say it's probably worth it. There's no life that's worth any payout. But the thing is to make sure that if you have the money, put that money into certain areas that are going to benefit you and make sure, like I said, you go with a reputable company.

There are so many reputable companies that are out there, but last summer, there's a school safety expert, his name is Jason Dorm. He was putting some stuff on social media last year on LinkedIn actually, about window film and what products to use. And he had some great advice. The advice was make sure you're looking at that product and you're checking to make sure that whoever's doing it, don't go with the lowest bidder. Go with a company that has the reputation, who maybe has what's called a cage code, a federal cage code, which means that their product has been vetted through the federal government. Things like that. I'm a firm believer you go with a product that is put on by the company that owns it, not something you can buy off of Amazon. So there are lots of products you can buy off Amazon and put it on yourself, but it's better to have a product where it's the actual company that owns it, has patents, and that's the company that you go with that you focus on. And I can tell you, I've done several million worth of protective film with Clear Armor Company. We use Clear Armor and Clear Armor. They also do a lot of work with the United States Secret Service, their vehicles, and they have a very well vetted product. And the thing is that I know that they're good, and I sat there and I've watched every single demonstration in that being in the room when they're doing the demonstrations, and then being there when they're installing it and actually touching that product. Not where a company comes in and sells you this and then puts something different on there because it makes a big difference if it comes down to having to defend those type of things when you have a lawsuit or anything that happens, if you have an incident within your schools.

Amy Rock (14:49) And you use Sandy Hook as an example of easily broken glass, and these people are looking for the path of least resistance and the biggest loss of life. We know in, I believe it was Parkland, one classroom door, he tried to open and it was locked, so he just moved on to the next one because their intention is to harm as many people as possible. If there's something like a door or glass, protective glass that's standing in their way, that's almost guaranteed less loss of life.

Richard Payne (15:20): Correct. Now, and the thing is, is that we don't want any loss of life in any school. And by putting some of these simple things in place and investing in them upfront, that could definitely help so that you don't have any loss of life in any one of your situations. And I can tell you, speaking from experience, I've had a school shooting, I was a director up in Douglas County when I had the STEM school shooting, and there was loss of life. There was other children that were injured. And you never want that. You never want that to happen. And so anything we can do from looking at best practices and using research-based programs and things like that, that we can talk and network and say, “Hey, have you used this? Did you try this?” Get those things in place because you don't want to live through that. There's many years of litigation that happened after that just to show that we did what we could do, what we had, the capability from the school side, and that we're always trying to. It’s continous process improvement. How can we improve? What can we do better? Because nobody wants to live through any of those type of situations.