AMHERST, NY - School safety was the major focus of a seminar at UB North Tuesday.
Police officers, mental health experts, and teachers alike were at UB's Safe Schools Initiative Seminar - the fifteenth year the seminar has been held.
Many in attendance were thinking about the victims of the shooting in Maryland. The seminar provided information like how to de-escalate crisis situations, or how to recognize signs that someone is disturbed. One speaker was the Executive Director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
He pointed out that the development of a school resource officer responding to the Maryland shooting is further proof that school resource officers are needed.
"We are calling on federal, state, and local governments to find a way to fund and properly select and specifically train a school resource officer in every school in America - at least one," said Mo Canady, Executive Director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
He also talked about the idea of arming teachers, and said if there was an SRO in every school, you might not need to arm teachers. His organization is meeting with lawmakers in Washington next week to push for national training standards for SRO's.
Another speaker was Michelle Gay, who lost her daughter in the Sandy Hook shooting six years ago. She spoke of her personal experience of loss, and was saddened to hear about the shooting in Maryland.
"It is always devastating and somehow, each tragedy is uniquely devastating. This morning, to walk off the stage after pouring my heart and soul out to the group...to receive the news that there had been a shooting a high school shooting in my home state, where I have two high schoolers in particular, will rattle you," she said.
After the shooting in Newtown, Gay founded a group called Safe and Sound Schools. Her group is calling for more support and funding for schools that want to improve safety. Gay says she's thankful that that school resource officer in Maryland took action.
"The fact that there was a trained sworn school resource officer there to intervene and stop the incident from getting much much worse - that is evidence that we are moving in the right direction," Gay said. "We're not going to be able to prevent every single tragedy or crisis in a school community, but that doesn't mean we're not going to stop trying."
She says she's encouraged by the actions of the students from Parkland, Florida who are fighting for change.
"We can't stop this effort, we have to continue, we have to work harder, we have to dig deeper and I think the more attention that school safety gets the more attention that we're paying to those underlying causes to intervention to prevention measures," Gay said.