Officials at the Oklahoma State Department of Education and Department of Public Safety announced on Wednesday that the two agencies will pool their resources to bolster the Oklahoma School Safety Institute or OSSI, a DPS division that directs school violence prevention, response and recovery efforts.
The partnership will help equip more police officers to respond to active shooter scenarios, conduct vulnerability assessments at more Oklahoma schools and expedite threat-response training for teachers and students across the state, Public Safety Commissioner Tim Tipton said at a press conference.
“We know public safety. We know security. We know response to emergencies. We’ll take care of that side of the training,” Tipton said. “They’ll take care of the professional educators that we want to support and make them feel comfortable that every day at work, they can focus on education, but they also know they have the training of, if something bad happens, they know what immediate action to take until law enforcement and our first responders get there.”
The partnership will make OSSI the primary resource for school districts looking to boost their school safety measures. The department helps conduct training for school resource officers, guides students and teachers in threat-response strategies through its “Run. Hide. Fight.” training and operates the Protect OK app, a resource for students and teachers to report threats to their schools.
“We’re hoping that the schools will now realize they have a central place they can go to to get security and safety training to answer those questions,” Mike Fike, Director of the OSSI’s Threat Response Preparedness Division, said after Wednesday’s press conference. “Before, it was sometimes they went to OSDE, sometimes they went to us. Now they’ll come to one place and we’ll keep the training pure that way. It’ll be the same taught throughout the state.”
OSSI also facilitates Risk and Vulnerability Assessments, in which law enforcement officers evaluate a school building’s preparedness to withstand a threat. According to Tipton, those assessments are required for districts to receive designated school safety funding appropriated by the legislature. Tipton said the partnership will expedite a new round of assessments at every school in the state.
State Superintendent Lindel Fields said the partnership would help to reduce “duplication” across government departments.
“The State Department of Education, while it’s important for us to help keep schools safe, that’s not what we do,” Fields said. “That’s not what we’re good at. These folks are the experts. So in partnering with the experts, I think we have a real chance to ensure our schools, our children and our parents are safe each and every day.”
At the press conference, Fields said the partnership would help to “safeguard Oklahoma schools from the very real threats that exist in today’s world.”
The state’s focus on school safety reflects mounting national and state alarm over the threat of school shootings throughout the past decade. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in the 2021-2022 school year, there were 327 school shootings at elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., more than double the previous year’s number.
After the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order mandating active shooter training for state troopers and directing OSSI to make its risk assessments available to all public and private secondary schools. At the start of his speech at the press conference, Tipton described his department’s “big push to coordinate and consolidate” their training and preparedness efforts under Stitt’s leadership.
