Guest column by Joe Cowan
Owner/Principal Consultant, Sundown Global Solutions, LLC
Observe almost any Catholic school in Nebraska on a school day morning and you’re likely to see parents doing morning drop-off under the watchful eye of a teacher, someone pressing the intercom at the front door and waiting for the door to release, and a secretary sliding a sign-in sheet and visitor badge across the desk without missing a beat, even as she’s signing for a delivery and waving at a line of students headed to daily Mass. It is warm, it is familial, and it’s also – whether anyone notices or not – already good security, quietly at work.
Readers of the Register may remember a story last August about my work with Father Lawrence Stoley and the Diocesan Education Office. My family’s roots in Lincoln’s Catholic schools run four generations deep, starting with my grandmother’s graduation from Cathedral High School in 1929. I’m a graduate of Blessed Sacrament Elementary and Pius X High School, my children graduated from Cathedral of the Risen Christ School and Pius X, and my wife Jude is on the staff at Pius X today. Professionally, I spent more than three decades in the Marine Corps and FBI, protecting the Constitution and the American people at home and abroad. That career taught me how to protect people, operations, and facilities. My current work with our schools has taught me that security shouldn’t take away from what makes a school Catholic – rather, done right, it should enhance it.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve visited more than 20 schools across the Diocese of Lincoln and the Archdiocese of Omaha, conducting formal security assessments and training staff how to protect their school communities. I’ve come to realize that most current school security best practices assume a standalone campus, one that doesn’t share a building, staff, or daily operations with anything beyond the school itself. It’s a fool’s errand to apply cookie-cutter school security measures to Catholic schools, because those measures were built to isolate a campus, rather than securely integrate one into a parish. Good security should do just that: let a Catholic school be fully, beautifully Catholic, part and parcel of the parish community that supports it. That takes thoughtfully applied measures and real commitment from the whole parish-school community to keep it that way.
Take the connected parish-school campus, and the entire community that comes with it. Many of our diocesan schools share a building, or a property line, with their parish church, and the school day reflects it. Students walk through a connected corridor for daily Mass, where they sit with parents and parishioners. Lunch moves to the gym or a classroom because the cafeteria is hosting a funeral luncheon. The parish preschool eats in that same cafeteria alongside the older kids. Parents volunteer to drive kids on a field trip or serve as mentors in the Encounter program. On many campuses, the parish office is quietly folded into how the school runs, responsible for key control, managing video surveillance, or handling visitor check-in for shared spaces, sometimes connected to the school by a handheld radio. Add a parish hall or common space the school uses for class “specials,” or legacy parish meeting space attached to the building itself, and a generic security checklist might flag all of these as access-control vulnerabilities. I see a community organized, quite deliberately, around relationship rather than isolation, one that good security should enable rather than suppress.
The Education pillar of Bishop James Conley’s pastoral plan One Heart in Christ quotes Pope Benedict XVI’s description of a good Catholic school’s ultimate aim: helping its students become saints. That’s an extraordinary calling! It’s why I believe security work in a Catholic school matters so much: teachers can’t inspire and students can’t learn “virtue, service, and a thirst to know Jesus” in a place that doesn’t feel safe. It matters to parents too, since the same pastoral plan calls for filling empty seats in our Catholic schools, and safety factors into that decision. Thoughtful security isn’t a detour from the Education pillar. It’s quietly, structurally, in service of it.
There’s a saying I’ve adopted: if you’ve been to one Catholic school, you’ve been to one Catholic school. A small, rural parish school with 40 students and a large, urban parish school with 400 students have very different floor plans, budgets, and staffing levels. Each campus has its own history, its own uniqueness, its own particular identity. And yet there is one thing every single one holds in common: a shared mission.
Bishop Conley writes in One Heart in Christ that the word “one” doesn’t mean singular in number, but united in focus and purpose – that we were made for community rather than isolation, because we can’t accomplish our mission on our own. That’s the most encouraging description I know of what good Catholic school security looks like, and it’s the thread running through our seemingly different schools. The strongest schools don’t rely on a single measure, process, or member of the staff to maintain security. The most secure schools are the ones where staff, teachers, students, parents, alumni and parishioners have each taken ownership of their role in school security, so the whole community together is genuinely stronger and safer than any one of its parts.
There’s a direct, security-related reason all of this matters as well. In security work, we stress situational awareness, staying attuned to anomalies in our environment, things inconsistent with the circumstance, not because they’re automatically dangerous, but because they’re worth a second look. What I’ve found in Catholic schools across our state is that the best security doesn’t come down to budget, technology, or staffing levels. These help, but security is best where everyone in the school community knows their role and adheres to established procedures, so that anomalies stand out. It’s the staff member who greets every visitor by name and still checks for a visitor badge, because an unbadged adult in the hallway is instantly noticeable. It’s the teacher who locks her classroom door out of habit, so an unlocked one is the exception. It’s the parent who checks into the office instead of slipping in a side door and pulling a secretary’s attention from where it’s needed. It’s the parishioner who arrives for daily Mass a few minutes early, rather than needing a staff member to let them in after the doors are locked. None of these require funding, a donor, or a capital campaign. It can start today, with nothing more than a shared commitment from this community to own its part. Most of us wouldn’t consider ourselves security professionals, but we’re all doing security’s most important work: following community norms, so anomalies are easy to spot.
This shared mission doesn’t ask our Catholic schools to become fortresses. It asks for something harder and better: a whole community, staff to students, parents to parishioners, united in purpose and sharing quiet, ordinary vigilance the way one body shares a single heartbeat. When we get that balance right, we protect everything that makes our Catholic schools special. We do it together, so the next generation of students can keep encountering Him there, safely, for a long time to come.
