HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, Ky. — Northern Kentucky University has wrapped up its first-ever graduate course dedicated entirely to school safety, training both current and future school leaders to address a wide range of threats from social media-fueled bullying to mental health crises and active shooter scenarios.
The seven-week online course, offered through NKU’s College of Education, enrolled 14 students this summer, most of them current or aspiring school principals. The course was an elective, meaning every student chose to take it.
Ginger Blackwell, associate dean of NKU’s College of Education, said the idea for the course grew out of conversations she had with student teachers following several high-profile school shootings in 2018, including one at Marshall County High School in Kentucky.
“I had student teachers who came to my office, and they were really concerned about continuing in the profession because they were afraid,” Blackwell said. “It made me realize that everything they were hearing about school safety was mainly getting that from media coverage of traumatic events and school crises, and school safety involves so much more than that.”
Blackwell said the course is designed to help educators focus on what they can control.
“That includes everything from noticing when kids are struggling, when there’s a behavior change, to ensuring doors are locked and drills are performed. So we’re doing everything we can to keep kids safe,” Blackwell said.
The course covered threat assessment protocols, school culture, student relationships and crisis response and featured interviews with people who have lived through school safety emergencies firsthand, including a high school principal who experienced a school shooting and a school shooting survivor named Missy Jenkins Smith.
Hannah Campbell, an instructional coach at Miles Elementary in the Erlanger-Elsmere School District, was among the 14 students enrolled. She said hearing from those guests made the material feel real.
WATCH: Northern Kentucky University’s new graduate course prepares educators for school safety threats
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“Their firsthand accounts and experiences were great learning for us in the realm of this in making it all real,” Campbell said.
Campbell said the course reshaped how she thinks about safety in her building.
“I think now it’s expanded so much, especially with social media and all the different outlets out there. And I think that because of that, it’s just nice to know all these different things to help us prepare for any type of situation we could face,” Campbell said.
She said the most meaningful lesson was that safety is not just about checklists and protocols.
“Safety starts at the foundation of your school’s culture and the relationship you’re building, the support you get your students, all of those things that you establish proactively reach much further than the plans and stuff that we could ever imagine,” Campbell said.
Jon Akers, executive director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety, said courses like NKU’s are exactly what the education field needs. Akers, who served as a high school principal for 25 years before spending more than two decades in his current role, said the public conversation about school safety is often distorted by media coverage.
Akers said the real, day-to-day concerns he hears from schools across Kentucky include social media, bullying and substance use.
“Social media is probably the biggest issue that impacts so many kids around our state and around the country,” Akers said, adding that vaping products change so quickly that “parents can’t keep up with it and the schools certainly can’t keep up with it.”
He also pointed to bullying as a persistent but underreported problem, citing a Kentucky Department of Education statistic that five incidents of bullying occur every minute during the school day in the state.
Akers said NKU has been ahead of the curve on school safety education, hosting safety consortiums for school districts in the Northern Kentucky and Southern Ohio region. He said he is not aware of other universities offering school safety programming at the same level.
“We can get people to universities to give them current information, current research that’s out there that they’re working on right now. We’re tied in with the U.S. Secret Service on threat assessments and what they see,” Akers said.
He is scheduled to speak to NKU student teachers on Sept. 2.
Blackwell said NKU plans to offer the course every summer, with the possibility of more frequent sessions depending on demand. Educators interested in the course can visit the College of Education page on NKU’s website or email Blackwell directly through NKU.
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