Security Training for Great Hearts Campus Security Officers

During spring break, our Campus Security Officers (CSOs) took advantage of an empty school to participate in critical training they conduct several times each year. Our officers approached the training with focus and seriousness, all to ensure our campuses remain safe.

School safety is of the utmost importance to all of us at Great Hearts Academies. We have invested in safety throughout our buildings and campuses and partnered with the security professionals at Wasson Protection over the past five years to continue to strengthen and train our school personnel in safety procedures throughout the campuses.

“We’ve built a bunch of different scenarios where the guards are going through what they’re going to interact with and usually see in their day-to-day lives working on a Great Hearts campus,” explained Daniel Urman, owner and CEO of Wasson Protection. “So, everything from disgruntled parents, some confusion, false positives, just loud noises and bangs throughout the property. And then building and culminating in an active shooter situation, medical situations, communicating with dispatch, and providing medical aid. So, everything from a guard interacting between two bickering parents over custody or road-rage incident in the pickup line up into multiple shooters with multiple downed innocent people, or we have to provide medical aid, communicate with the ambulance crew, write up a report… being able to articulate what we did.”

Vice President of Operations at Great Hearts, Lyn Music, says she appreciates the partnership with Wasson. “We have Wasson Protection officers on every one of our campuses,” she shared, adding that our security director, Frank Sorrentino, is also a Wasson employee. “That’s a little bit different as opposed to having our own security director. The reason that we find it advantageous is that we not only get a security director, we get everyone at the Wasson leadership team that supports us and helps us in our training and making sure that our campuses are safe.”

The primary focus for our CSOs is campus safety, but being a main fixture on the campus, they are very much a part of the school community. Many of them volunteer after work hours to coach athletic teams or help with clubs and events. “You develop a lot of relationships with the kids, and parents,” shared Great Hearts Scottsdale’s Security Officer Matthew Sloan, who joked that while he is a identifiable figure on his campus that he has worked at over the past four years, once he removes his hat, no one recognizes him.

“This partnership that we have and the officers that we have on our campuses is one piece of a multi-layered security plan. Security needs to be multiple layers, different approaches, and this is one of them, and it’s a key one. But we also believe in building relationships with the students, training our staff,” said Music. “There’s a multitude of things that go into actually keeping the campuses safe.

In addition to our CSOs, each campus practices emergency procedures and trains regularly on the variety of safety procedures covered in our Emergency Operations Manuals. From lock in and out procedures, to fire drills, to power outages. We have emergency action teams at each campus which are responsible for running all emergency drills and training all staff in our emergency procedures.

Should you have specific questions regarding a school’s safety training and protocols, please contact the school’s headmaster. If you would like to discuss safety from a network perspective, please contact Lyn Music at lyn.music@greathearts.org.

Keep in mind, neither the Great Hearts network nor school safety personnel will discuss particular procedures related to active shooter situations or the like. It is imperative that we keep certain safety information private as to ensure the greatest effectiveness of those procedures.

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Submit a student application to a Great Hearts Academy by visiting: https://www.greatheartsamerica.org/enroll/.