Post-Master’s Certificate
in Leadership in School
Safety, Security, and
Emergency Management

In this course, you’ll learn about risk analysis through the lens of threat and hazard identification and risk assessment. You’ll examine the relationships between assessment, planning, and training, as well as prepare risk-benefit analyses for K-12 safety, security, and emergency management. Further, you’ll evaluate physical risks and review the ways in which diverse settings can impact the realization of threats—all while exploring how diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice relate to evolving threats. Finally, you’ll critique all-hazards emergency plans that consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in K-12 schools across diverse settings.

This course explores how communicating, collaborating, and planning of school safety, security, and emergency management come together and operate. You’ll determine ways in which Incident Command Systems can be modified and communicated for use in K-12 schools during crisis incidents. You’ll also examine ways for administrators to collaborate and communicate with community partners and first responders to help prepare for, manage, and recover from crisis events. Critical to this course is explaining the ways in which diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice impact communication throughout a crisis incident. As a final exercise, you’ll construct an Incident Command System using everything you’ve learned and evaluated during the course.

This course takes a deep dive into the leadership paradigms in school safety, security, and emergency management for K-12 schools. As you develop leadership support strategies for staff and students and advocate for team approaches to crisis planning, you’ll also assess the current legal and political issues affecting school safety and security. You’ll also evaluate leadership responses to ethical issues and create risk assessment plans for evaluating physical risks within schools. Finally, you’ll determine emergency manager responsibilities in planning systems to prevent and mitigate crisis incidents in diverse K-12 settings.

A practitioner’s perspective on violence prevention and response in K-12 schools. This course examines violent acts, the impetus behind them, the responses to them, and behavioral assessment plans that can evaluate behavioral risks that may lead to them. Additionally, you’ll explore the roles of restorative justice systems, trauma-informed educational practices, and social-emotional learning in preventing school violence. As a final exercise, you’ll apply everything you’ve learned to create a violence response plan that considers diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice within a diverse school setting.

This course focuses on the response to and recovery from school safety, security, or emergency management events at K-12 schools. You’ll assess the roles of administrators before, during, and after crisis incidents and evaluate school-family reunification plans. You’ll also learn to compose continuity-of-operations, and physical-recovery plans following a crisis incident, and recommend ways in which school administrators should consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice when creating such procedures. Finally, you’ll exercise your learning by designing and developing your own academic and psychological recovery plans.

This course is the certificate capstone to your school safety, security, and emergency management studies. You’ll use the foundational principles and approaches to create a capstone project that reviews crisis response and recovery policies for K-12 schools across diverse settings. You’ll justify the use of threat and hazard identification and risk assessment (THIRA) prior to developing school emergency plans, and you’ll demonstrate your ability to create crisis communication and collaboration strategies. Finally, you’ll advocate for safety and security prevention strategies that consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice when preparing emergency operations plans.