In the last decade, more than 300 violent deaths have occurred in or near school campuses. The killers, their motivations and backgrounds, and levels of damage inflicted vary, but our response and our goal remains singular: to protect our schools and keep those within them safe. This handbook seeks to help administrators, school boards, contractors, teachers—anyone connected with the design, construction, or administration of schools—achieve this goal by providing easy-to-follow guidelines for building safer school environments.

Drawing from various government resources, including the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Education, Department of Defense, and Department of Health and Human Services, this one-of-a-kind handbook takes a two-part approach to protecting schools from threats.

The first part addresses how to design and build a safe school. It provides a basic security overview and discusses how to identify critical assets and conduct risk-threat assessments.

The second part of the book shifts from infrastructure to inhabitants. Here, you'll learn how to produce a detailed crisis management plan to help your facility prevent incidents from happening and to deal with them swiftly and effectively should one occur. You'll also learn various "people" policies and practices you can implement to reduce drug and alcohol abuse, bullying, vandalism, and other violence and crime.