At Jefferson County Public Schools, administrators and teachers are preparing for the upcoming school year.

“This is the school response protocol that we use,” said Jeff Pierson, the interim executive director for the Department of School Safety at Jefferson County Public Schools.

Like many school districts, they are preparing to keep kids safe this fall. The recent events in Uvalde added to the burden many safety experts face.

“This year, some of our big points of emphasis are really around logical thinking around your building. What types of things do you need to be knowledgeable around locked doors? What type of doors are accessible to people?” Pierson said.

For security consulting companies, it’s been a busy summer.

“We’ve been pretty busy getting contacted by schools from the elementary school level through high school and even colleges. They’ve contacted us to come in and do security assessments,” Joe Lawless, a security consultant and Senior Security and Transportation Specialist at The Edward David Company, said.

Lawless looks at what technologies and systems schools have in place, the training and drills they practice, and their relationship with local law enforcement.

“The first thing we do is go into these schools and we do a physical security assessment. We look at locks, closed circuit television, buzzers, buzz people in and out, access control,” he explained.

There’s a lot of focus on the basics. But they also look at what’s being discussed industry-wide.

“I think at the national level, you're always going to hear about the latest and greatest,” Pierson said.

“There’s a lot of fad issues that come on and some of those are very good. Some of those items are very useful in the case of a shooting,” Lawless said.

From bulletproof backpacks and whiteboards to new safety systems, new products pop up frequently with the purpose of helping protect schools.

“The inquiries have increased greatly since the last shooting, just based off what our product is and does,” Peter Facchini, the co-founder and CEO of ProtectED Rooms, said.

Protected rooms, which was started a couple years ago, designed a mobile piece of furniture that fits into classrooms. These bookcases are built with bullet resistant panels and a latch system.

“It’s designed to be rolled in front of an opening or a door from inside the room and latched to the wall,” Facchini explained.

Another company, National Safety Shelters, took an existing tornado shelter already in production and turned it into a multipurpose safety pod or room, depending on the size.

“It’s best not to let somebody in the school in the first place, but as we’ve seen throughout the last 20 year or so, even when some schools have those things in place, they don't always prevent the person from getting in,” Dennis Corrado, the president and co-founder of National Safety Shelters, said. “What we’re offering is a safety net should those things fail.”

Lawless said these are great tools, but they should supplement what is already in place.

“You can't lose sight of your training, what the protocols are,” he said.

“It’s about making sure you keep it what we call safety 101. Locking doors, ensuring that the things that you do every single day, muscle memory, drills with kids, those things are very important to us,” Pierson said.

CINCINNATI —

There was no school Thursday in Reading because of alleged threats of violence by a 13-year-old student.

Police arrested the teen Wednesday night. A classmate said the suspect indicated he would "shoot up the school" after arguing with some girls who made him mad, police said.

The decision to cancel classes came despite the fact Reading's new school building features state-of-the-art security measures that WLWT investigator Todd Dykes saw first-hand during a tour two years ago.

"Schools have done a very, very good job learning what to do, learning how to manage risk," John Paul Wright said.

Wright is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. He said families impacted by school threats need to remember educators are not trained detectives.

"They're not always going to be correct," Wright said. "We're asking them to make predictions about the future based off limited information that's very difficult, sometimes, to ascertain whether it's real, true, what have you."

Determining if a student's threatening statement is real is a priority for juvenile justice experts like Judge Melissa Powers and former judge John Williams. Under Williams, Hamilton County's Juvenile Court began using data and analysis to understand better a child's motive.

"That does go into the social media for the child," Williams said. "It goes into the psychological, substance abuse, family dealings — all these things that we want to look at."

"It could be they just want attention. They do something, say something stupid out of anger but didn't have any meaning behind it," Powers said. "Or it could be, 'No. There's really some serious issues, psychological issues that we need to be addressing.'"

"You have to be dealing with this. You have to be out front," Williams said. "You have to lean forward into the school so we can help kids not have this sort of thing happen."

Recent threats have not been limited to the Reading Community City School District. Police investigated troubling social media comments in Colerain and Hamilton Thursday. WLWT has also learned that a threat against Fairfield Freshman School, a cause for concern Wednesday, came from somewhere outside the state of Ohio.