Defending Our Children
with Trained Staff

By Rob Morse. Mar 24, 2023

I met some amazing people and I’m grateful for it. I’m thinking of the people who protect our children at school. I’ve met the teachers who volunteered to be first responders. I’ve met the firearms and medical instructors who teach the school staff. I’ve also met the researchers who study violence in our schools. The more I learn the more grateful I feel for what all of them do. I want to share that with you because we’re facing a new problem together. For all the schools and churches that have trained volunteer staff as first responders, there are also many that don’t. I think I know why.

Each of us has a pretty good map of what we need to know about our world. For example, we know a lot about our friends and the places where we work. Beyond that, we mostly ignore what we don’t need to know. We ignore it so well that it all but disappears. We know the milestones along the way, but between them we have a mental place-holder that might not be real at all. When it comes to safety at school, our mental map has some big holes in it. We’re tempted to fill those holes with our imagination.

Most of us don’t know what school safety really means. Does it mean good counsellors, locked doors and cameras, or armed staff? Each of those is a small part of the entire answer.

At first the idea of protecting our schools sounds easy. How hard could it be? Like a place we’ve never been to before, we will invent something that isn’t really there to fill in the empty place in our mental map.

As you study the problem of protecting our schools and churches, you find that there are a lot of pieces that should fit together. That seems overwhelmingly difficult. It looks impossible until you examine each element one at a time. .....