What if the most important school-safety questions are not only about what happened during a crisis, but about the conditions that allowed the crisis to progress?

Every major school shooting generates investigations, after-action reports, and recommendations intended to answer two important questions: What happened, and how can it be prevented from happening again? Those investigations provide valuable lessons and have led to meaningful improvements in school safety.

The Principled Safety® framework begins with a different question. Rather than concentrating only on decisions made during an attack, it examines the conditions that existed long before the attack began.

The objective is not to determine whether people responded perfectly under extraordinary circumstances. It is to understand whether the school’s safety system was designed, evaluated, and maintained to prevent the attack from progressing in the first place.

That systems-focused mindset comes from high-reliability industries such as nuclear operations and defense. Investigators examine individual decisions, but they also ask why the larger system allowed those decisions or failures to produce significant consequences.

Look Beyond Individual Decisions

Public discussion after a school shooting often centers on visible moments: Why wasn’t a door secured? Why wasn’t information communicated sooner? Why did responders make certain decisions? Those questions matter, but they are only part of the picture.

Every decision occurs within a larger system that includes building design, operating procedures, communications, staffing, training, maintenance, and organizational expectations. What looks like an isolated failure may actually be the result of multiple vulnerabilities interacting over time.

High-reliability organizations recognize that systems relying on perfect human performance are inherently fragile.

If people repeatedly bypass procedures, develop workarounds, or struggle to maintain safeguards during normal operations, those behaviors should be treated as signals that the system itself deserves closer examination.

Parkland: Evaluate Safety Functions, Not Just Safety Measures

The investigation of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting identified findings involving communications, emergency procedures, facility design, and security systems. A Principled Safety analysis asks a broader question: What do those findings reveal about the performance of the safety system as a whole?

Surveillance should be measured against its intended function

Investigators found that smoke and ceiling dust generated during the attack interfered with motion-activated recording in parts of the building. Rather than stopping at the conclusion that cameras failed, a systems analysis asks whether the surveillance system’s safety function had been clearly defined before installation.

If its intended purpose was continuous situational awareness during an active attack, environmental conditions, network performance, power interruptions, and visibility limitations should be part of the design and evaluation criteria.

Safety systems can conflict with one another

During the attack, fire-alarm activation contributed to students entering hallways where they were exposed to danger. Fire evacuation and active-shooter procedures are based on different assumptions, yet both may be triggered under rapidly changing conditions. Those interactions should be evaluated during planning—not discovered during an emergency.

Communication is a safety function

Many students on the third floor remained unaware that an attack was underway below them. Their physical distance from the shooter initially provided a safety advantage, but delayed awareness reduced their opportunity to take protective action.

A Principled Safety approach would define timely notification as a safety function and verify it through communication-coverage testing, speech-intelligibility checks, equipment-reliability testing, and realistic exercises.

Uvalde: When Operational Reality Exposes System Vulnerabilities

The Robb Elementary School investigation documented exterior and interior doors that were routinely left unlocked or propped open, along with challenges involving key access during the response. These conditions are often discussed as procedural failures, but they also raise important questions about the design of the safety system.

Repeated workarounds are warning signs

In high-reliability industries, repeated workarounds are rarely viewed as isolated compliance problems. If people consistently bypass a safeguard to perform their jobs, the procedure, equipment, or operating practice should be evaluated before assuming that additional training is the answer.

Emergency access must work in practice

If rapid entry by authorized responders is an essential safety function, then key management, access hardware, communications, and emergency procedures should be designed, tested, and routinely validated under realistic operating conditions.

Safeguards cannot remain theoretical. They must support day-to-day operations while remaining reliable under the conditions for which they were designed.

Move From Lessons Learned to Lessons Applied

Parkland and Uvalde unfolded differently, but from a Principled Safety perspective they reveal a common challenge: individual safeguards must function together as an integrated safety system.

Post-incident recommendations often focus on individual improvements—access control, communications, training, and emergency procedures. Each may be appropriate, but no single improvement should be evaluated in isolation.

• Does the safeguard address a clearly identified vulnerability?
• Was that vulnerability identified through a credible threat scenario rather than assumption?
• Does the safeguard support a defined safety function?
• Has its performance been evaluated under realistic conditions?

If those questions cannot be answered, it becomes difficult to determine whether an investment meaningfully reduces risk or simply adds another layer of protection whose effectiveness has never been validated.

Continuous Evaluation Is Part of Prevention

This way of thinking also changes how schools approach continuous improvement. In high-reliability industries, safety systems are not considered complete once they are installed or documented. They are routinely evaluated because facilities change, operations evolve, equipment ages, and new vulnerabilities emerge over time.

The same principle applies to schools. A safety plan that performed well several years ago should not be assumed to provide the same level of protection today without deliberate reassessment. This becomes especially important as assault scenarios become more sophisticated and harmful.

The Final Report of the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, through its Safe School Design and Operation initiative, acknowledges that safety standards and strategies must evolve as new threats emerge and as technologies and response strategies change over time.

A mature safety program does not wait for an incident to reveal a weakness. It continually asks where the next vulnerability may be developing.

To achieve exceptionally high levels of safety performance, the Department of Energy and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations associate continuous improvement with an organizational learning mentality. Their safety cultures encourage inquisitive, questioning attitudes that help identify vulnerabilities even when no incident has occurred.

That is an important distinction for schools. Continuous evaluation is not evidence that a safety program is failing. It is a hallmark of a mature safety program—one that recognizes that protection must evolve as conditions, technologies, operations, and threats change.

The Principled Safety Takeaway

The value of studying Parkland and Uvalde is not found in assigning blame or creating longer lists of recommendations. Their greatest contribution is the opportunity to improve how schools think about prevention.

The Principled Safety framework provides a structured process for defining safety functions, identifying vulnerabilities through scenario-based analysis, and evaluating whether safeguards perform as intended. That approach helps leaders move beyond isolated best practices and toward safety systems that are intentionally designed, continuously evaluated, and capable of preventing harm.

Every school will make different decisions because every school faces different conditions. What should not vary is the process used to evaluate those decisions.

Identify vulnerabilities before tragedy exposes them.
Visit PrincipledSafety.com to participate in a free scenario-based gap assessment.

For a deeper exploration of the framework, Before the Next Tragedy: Preventing Harm in School Shooting Scenarios presents a practical approach to identifying vulnerabilities and evaluating safety-system performance.

References

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, Initial Report (Florida Department of Law Enforcement, 2019).

U.S. Department of Justice, Critical Incident Review: Active Shooter at Robb Elementary School (2024).

Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, Final Report (2015).

EFCOG/DOE ISMS Safety Culture Task Team Final Report (2010).

Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Principles for a Strong Nuclear Safety Culture (2004).

If you’d like to explore more of the thinking behind the Principled Safety® approach, these related articles examine several challenges school leaders face when evaluating and improving safety:

Why School Safety Needs a Framework, Not Another Checklist

Five Common Mistakes Schools Make When Evaluating Safety Solutions

Prevention by Design: Building School Safety Systems That Work

Building Safer Schools Through Principled Thinking

Explore these and other school safety articles.

Take the Free School Safety Assessment. It is designed to help school leaders begin examining that question—identifying potential gaps in existing safety plans and considering whether individual safeguards function together as an integrated system.

For readers who want to go deeper into the methodology, Before the Next Tragedy: Preventing Harm in School Shooting Scenarios provides a more comprehensive examination of applying principled, systems-based thinking to school safety—including the defense-in-depth concepts discussed in this article.