New Exercise Starter Kits Available for Active Shooter Incidents

Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Academic Engagement (OAE) released new exercise starter kits (ESK) for the K-12 academic community as part of the Campus Resilience Program. OAE previously released ESKs for the higher education community in June 2018. The ESKs are self-conducted tabletop exercises (TTX) that include a set of scalable tools to help K-12 schools and institutions of higher education (IHEs) test existing emergency plans, protocols, and procedures while also strengthening preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities.

 

Each ESK includes the following customizable templates:

 

 

Three ESKs are currently available: active shooter (for K-12 and IHEs); cyberbreaches (IHEs only); and hurricanes (IHEs only). The active shooter ESK is broken down into three levels for K-12 - elementary school, middle/junior high school, and high school. The materials within each ESK have been designed in a modular format and can be completed over a single session or completed in individual modules based on each school's or IHE's availability.

 

All ESKs are available at no charge to members of the academic community. If you would like to request one or more of the K-12 ESKs, please use this request form. Members of any IHE are asked to fill out this request form and indicate which ESKs they are interested in receiving. For additional information or questions, please contact the OAE.

January 2019 Webinar Registration Now Open

 

 

Frank and Jeff will provide an overview of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office)-funded Averted School Violence (ASV) database and its application to higher education. The database is a free resource for those who play a role in school safety across the country at both the K-12 and higher education levels. The ASV database is used to collect, analyze, and share information on both averted and completed acts of violence in schools that have occurred post-Columbine. Frank will share key findings from the ASV database and from an NPF study that compared averted incidents of school violence to completed incidents. Kristina, a Virginia Tech shooting survivor, will share lessons learned from the Virginia Tech shooting. Her powerful story, including insight about threat assessment and other key areas of violence prevention, are valuable for anyone involved in campus safety.

 

This webinar is appropriate for those working in senior campus administration, campus safety and security, emergency management, law enforcement, threat assessment, residential life, student conduct & affairs, international education, victim/advocacy services, and mental health and counseling services as well as Title IX coordinators and legal counsel.

 

For more information and to register, please visit our website.

Terrorism Prevention and Countering Violent Extremism Research Library

 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)  Science and Technology Directorate's (S&T) mission is to enable effective, efficient, and secure operations across all homeland security missions by applying scientific, engineering, analytic, and innovative approaches to deliver timely solutions and support departmental acquisitions. Created by Congress in 2003, S&T conducts basic and applied research, development, demonstration, testing, and evaluation activities relevant to DHS. To counter the continually growing and changing threat of violent extremism, S&T developed a free and publicly accessible research findings dashboard that hosts more than 1,500 catalogued terrorism prevention and countering violent extremism (CVE) research documents.

 

"The information available in the dashboard will be particularly useful for our state and local stakeholders working on local terrorism prevention initiatives," said S&T Program Manager Kathleen Deloughery. "It streamlines access to peer-reviewed and methodologically sound research, so government partners, academics and interested members of the public can develop a sound evidence base in the field of terrorism prevention for what works, what doesn't and why."

 

To develop this capability, S&T reviewed CVE articles published in peer-reviewed journals on CVE research and evaluations of CVE programs. Queries focused on major CVE concepts such as diversion, mitigation, resilience, program evaluations, transferrable programs, and international programs.

 

The research findings dashboard is hosted on Mendeley, a free and publicly accessible application that allows you to store, share, publish, and find research data. S&T created instructions  for creating a Mendeley account and accessing the dashboard. Mendeley offers both a downloadable desktop application and a web-based mode. Articles in the dashboard are searchable by title, author, abstract, keywords, and themes and may be coded under multiple topics. For example, an article about a diversion program in the United Kingdom would be coded under diversion programs and international programs.

 

For additional information on terrorism prevention, visit S&T's webpage .

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