School safety is no longer an issue reserved for high-crime urban areas or headline-grabbing tragedies. It's a challenge every district — suburban, rural, and urban alike — must confront head-on.
At last November's K12 Facilities Forum in Bonita Springs, FL, operations leaders from Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia and Bibb County Schools in Georgia sat down for a conversation about what it actually takes to build a culture of safety and communication in today's schools.
Their insights cut through the noise to get to what matters most. Safe schools don't happen by accident, they said, they're the result of intentional culture-building, standardized procedures, layered technology, and clear communication.
One of the most important mindset shifts the panelists stressed is the danger of complacency. Reid Wodicka, COO for Chesterfield County Public Schools, pointed out that suburban districts often fall into the trap of assuming school violence is a "city problem."
That assumption, he warned, couldn't be more wrong. Safety incidents can and do happen anywhere, and districts that aren't actively preparing are leaving their students and staff exposed.
Antonio Simmons, Facilities and Operations leader for Bibb County Schools, echoed that sentiment. When he arrived at the district, each school was operating as its own island — different procedures, cultures, and levels of readiness. Getting everyone aligned around a common safety framework should be the first order of business, he said.
Simmons' approach to building a district-wide safety culture boils down to what he calls the "Three C’s."
"New day, new way" became Simmons' motto as he challenged entrenched habits and pushed his team to stop doing things simply because "that's how we've always done it," he said.
Both panelists emphasized that there's no panacea when it comes to school security. Wodicka described it as a "Swiss cheese model" — every solution plays a critical role, but every solution also has gaps. That's why a layered approach is essential.
Bibb County has deployed weapons detection systems at building entrances, implemented key reduction protocols to limit unauthorized access, and moved to badge-based access control so that entry points are tracked and managed.
Chesterfield County applied safety film to ground-floor windows — a meaningful security upgrade that hardens the building without making it feel like a prison. Both districts stressed that physical security improvements must be paired with cultural and procedural ones to be truly effective.
Uniforms for facilities staff may seem like a small detail, but Simmons fought hard for them — and for good reason. Unidentified workers moving through a building create confusion and potential risk. When staff are clearly recognizable, everyone in the building is safer.
Getting safety information to the right people at the right time is harder than it sounds. Wodicka made a point that resonates across every district: different staff members receive information in fundamentally different ways. Emailing a fleet of school bus drivers and expecting them to read it just doesn't work. Radio announcements do.
Bibb County introduced "safe badges" — wearable IDs with a built-in alert button that can trigger a school-wide lockdown and summon emergency responders in minutes. Whether it's a teacher in a classroom or a maintenance worker on a rooftop, every staff member becomes a potential first responder. That kind of distributed alerting capability can make the difference when seconds count.
Chesterfield has worked to standardize the language around emergency statuses — making sure every staff member, not just administrators, understands what "lockdown" versus "hold" versus "secure" actually means and what actions each requires.
Both districts are dealing with significant deferred maintenance and aging infrastructure. Chesterfield County is roughly a billion dollars behind. Bibb County went years with a flat maintenance budget that didn't account for inflation. Neither district let that stop them from making progress.
Creative use of ESSER funds, state grants, and local funding mechanisms like Georgia's Educational Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) have allowed both districts to move the needle.
The takeaway: identify available avenues of funding, make the case that safety is inseparable from the quality of teaching and learning, and start somewhere — even if you can't do everything at once.
Watch the full discussion here: