What Sandy Hook Taught Me About a Job I Hadn’t Started Yet

Sandy Hook exposed a gap in my first year as superintendent. What I built afterward with local first responders changed how I approach every partnership since.

I had been superintendent in Wilson County for more than a year when the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened in December 2012. Like most people in education that week, that news struck me in a way that went beyond grief. It became a mirror. I had this sinking feeling that we had been lucky not to experience a tragedy like the one that had just occurred in another community, and that we would not be prepared if something like that happened in ours.

I had not made safety a priority in my first year. No incident had forced the issue. No parent group had raised alarms. No board member had pushed me toward it. The absence of pressure let me focus my early energy elsewhere, on curriculum, on staffing, on the dozens of operational questions that fill a new superintendent’s calendar. Sandy Hook made me rethink my priorities. I had run an entry process built on listening, and somehow this had not surfaced as something I needed to hear.

I asked my assistant superintendent to take the lead on building what would become a districtwide safety initiative. What grew out of that decision over the following months changed how I think a superintendent should approach every external partnership, not just those involving safety.

A Different Question to Ask Your Partners

The instinct in district leadership is often to ask partners the same question. What can you do for us? Law enforcement has resources, fire and rescue has expertise, emergency management has equipment and training infrastructure, and a district under pressure to demonstrate progress on safety can easily slide into treating those partners as services to request rather than institutions with their own missions.

I tried a different approach. Law enforcement’s mission is to advance public safety and keep order in the community, and protecting the young people in our schools lives squarely inside that mission. Once I started from that premise, the question changed. Instead of asking what they could do for us, I asked how our collaboration could help them do their job better while also helping us do ours. That shift in framing turned out to matter more than any individual program we built. Partners who feel used eventually withdraw. Partners who feel their own goals are advancing tend to stay engaged for years.

I have applied that same thinking to every external partnership since, with the community college, the chamber of commerce, and county government among others. The mission of the other institution is the starting point, not an afterthought.

Building the Table

Wilson County had roughly 80,000 residents at the time, with about 50,000 living in the city of Wilson, the county's center. Both the city police department and the county sheriff’s office joined the work, along with 911 dispatch, emergency management, the state police, the state highway patrol, and fire, rescue, and EMT services. Getting that many institutions, each with its own chain of command and its own operational priorities, into sustained collaboration took patience and consistent follow-through from my assistant superintendent and the team he assembled.

The work produced visible changes and changes that were not. We gave law enforcement building blueprints and swipe card access so they could move through our schools quickly in an emergency rather than arriving at a building they had never navigated. We improved physical security across the district by implementing better access controls, more cameras, and clearer sightlines at entry points. 2013 became the year Wilson residents went from walking through an always-unlocked school door to having to buzz in for entry. That single change, small as it sounds, represented a real shift in how the community related to its schools.

The less visible change was the relationship itself. Emergency management began joining our inclement-weather calls, bringing expertise we had previously lacked in deciding whether to delay or close schools. We presented at multiple state-level conferences on what we had built. We traveled with the emergency management team and the chairs of our safety committee when they accepted the Emergency Management Director’s Award for the state of North Carolina. A recognition that belonged to the partnership rather than to the district alone.

What the Work Was Actually For

I left Wilson County about three years after that work began. Fortunately, we never had to mobilize the safety team for a major crisis. Regardless, I always viewed the work as time well spent. The relationships and the infrastructure existed precisely so that we would never have to discover, in the middle of an actual emergency, what we should have built years earlier.

I made a private commitment to myself during that period. If I ever became superintendent somewhere else, safety would be a major initiative from the first year, not the second. That commitment held when I arrived in Harford County, Maryland, in 2018. During my entry process, I heard repeatedly about the need for crisis response planning, and within that first year we developed comprehensive training in active assailant incident response. By the end of year one, every school in the district had been trained, more than 38,000 students and over 5,000 staff.

There is much more to that story in Harford, and I will save it for another post. What stayed with me from Wilson County was simpler than any specific program. The question is never whether your district has avoided a crisis so far. The question is whether the people responsible for responding to one have already met each other, already walked your buildings, and already practiced the plan before they ever need it.

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.