Educating Administrators on Textbook vs Real World Security

Welcome to the secured podcast. I'm Mike Matrenga, and I'm Mike Montsev. We're here to talk about all things security and provide a safe environment for you and your family? I'll talk about, current events, legislation, disinformation in the industry, new products that are coming out and ways to secure your facility. Well, I guess let's just start out by by, you know, being in the, being in the security space for the amount of time that I've been in the security space, and you being in the security space, the amount of time you've been in, we've worked together as client and customer, you know, leaving the the federal government going and breaking in to the K twelve security space, me having been a client of yours, you know, I valued the, level of customer service and customer care, and the vast knowledge that you brought to the table, which is what led me to to hire your, team turnkey service at Texas City ISD. And so, you know, having got out of the space, a couple years ago, three years ago in twenty twenty three, I've thought to myself, who do I wanna partner with that's gonna bring my same level of customer service and passion to the k twelve space because what we see in the k twelve space is that, with more funding being generated from bonds or from legislation, whether it be at the state or the federal level, you're starting to see so called subject matter experts come out of the woodwork that have zero experience from a practical, practical, since, entering the space and kind of clouding judgment of those people who are making these decisions, which is where we kind of get bogged down in the minutiae and in the monotony of, you know, what's the know, we sell in products or we sell in solutions. And what I've seen so far is we have a lot of people selling products but they're not taking into consideration the long term sustainability of these products and if they're even effective or if they've been battle proven and tested. So are your thoughts on that? Yeah. So, I mean, starting back with if you look at, like, the spat grant that came out, right, silent, panic, alarm technology, there was so many people that entered into that space that just started coming out with button solutions, and they don't really do anything. And there's people who wanted to put stuff on of radios, and they wanna put pendants on teachers and tie into, classroom audio systems, or they wanted to do something on phone. And there was no real forethought on what it was. They were just trying to come up with a solution. And so we saw that the industry just get flooded with all of these type of technology. There's no real planning or forethought of, like, how is this going to integrate into, you know, an everyday application. And now with all of this money coming in with more and more grants, we're seeing people that are just throwing out ideas and solutions and are just coming in there in and even more is disinformation, you know, now with window film coming out, you know, is this ballistic rated you have architects and other people running around saying, okay, it's gotta be ballistic glass film. And, you know, some of the things that are being, the sold are not. They're just really nice window film. Right? It's not it doesn't even have any advantages. So, you know, I really feel like, you know, the value that that you bring to the industry is is not only just a voice, but is that, you get it. You get the whole idea. And, and together, we have successfully implemented, you know, solution that was the number one ranked solution for number one Safe School in Texas. Right? And so when you look at all of these other school districts that don't have a cohesive plan of how do I get my school safe? How do I get my facility to where I can protect the occupants, get all of the technology integrated to where you have cameras and access control and intercom all talking to one another at mass communication working and and actually have emergency action plans integrated into technology so that when things happened, the plan is actually executable, and and there was forethought put into that. And so, you know, the the nice part about what you're doing at M6 complements it, our business and vice versa is that you put together, you know, the assessment of Hey, here's all the weaknesses. Here's what we need to do. Where are the vulnerabilities? Let's fix those. And now let's use technology to to fill in those gaps and and and not only detect prevent the proactive. Right? So There's there's just so many people that exactly what you said are selling products instead of solutions. And, it's it's not it's not what's right for these facilities or these schools. Yeah. I think, you know, the biggest, thing that that really irritates me and gets me fired up is, you know, LinkedIn is very active. We're on that pretty often, and and, you know, everything about, LinkedIn is network. And so your network equals your net worth. And it's important to build your network, but you see, you know, it's almost daily. There's a new subject matter expert coming in, and then you look at their credentials and everything that they have, and no, you know, no offense or no knock to those within the academia world, but, you know, it's just like being a police officer or being, a baker a butcher, or you name it, whatever. There are things that you learn on the job. And so you see, you know, constant their subject matter expert after subject matter expert that's popping up on LinkedIn that they've started a new, school consulting company or a company that does film, but they used to be a a vehicle installation of film. It's not the same. Right? And so what I would say to educators is do your due diligence. Look at the team in which you have that is coming in and you know, conducting your assessment, telling you what your solutions are. If their solution is nothing but products and then there's no preventative measures, you really need to reevaluate that. You know, it's like with us at M6 Global, even though we're a young company, I think that we have the most experience in the industry just within a three year time period. You know, we have twenty nine consultants in fifteen states. We have over five hundred years of practical experience at the federal government level military law enforcement. Every single one of us has practical, not academic, even though we are highly, you know, advanced in academics, we have practical experience. We've been in war zones. We've been in active shootings. We've been in mass casualty events where we've had to apply aid to more than one victim And, you know, if you look at some of the competitors in the space, they don't have that. And so, you know, I I would say to educators, be very careful of who you're bringing in to assess your needs and tell you what they, what you need. Well, and, you know, I think Mike Tyson said it best, right, is that has a plan till you get knocked in the face. Right? And so we're seeing a lot of people who who say that they put together a plan, and there really wasn't any forethought. You know, we we recently attended a, seminar with Michelle Gay, and, you know, she was talking about Sandy Hook and how they had this plan to, you know, walk down the road to, the fire and, you know, they're gonna line up in these cones and everything else. And in reality, that wasn't a real plan. Like, that was, that was in the event of an emergency that was never going to work. Right? But that was a perfect example of what you just said. It was put together by, an educator. It was put together somebody who who knows how to handle kids in schools in a controlled environment in a controlled environment. Right. So, you know, it's, like practicing lockdown drills in the middle. Everybody's it's always practiced while kids are in school, but never, you know, while the school's loading in in the morning or you know, whenever they're at lunch or PE or people around the field, what do you do? How are you gonna handle that? And so, you know, I think we've sat down, you know, at this point been in thousands of schools, which I think that alone speaks volumes, right, just on the diversity not only within Texas, but, you know, schools all throughout the country, all kinds of different, socioeconomic backgrounds, down to religious schools, public schools, we bring that experience of of of putting together solutions and plans and integrating technology and making that happen. And think there's anybody else out there that has that level of expertise. I think that's also really important to to point out that, you know, one of the reason that makes us so valuable in the k twelve space our our, history together is that we bring in a perspective that's not just k twelve. Right? We know how to secure facilities. You and I both have done, different levels of protection for some of the most high net worth, high risk individuals in the world. Right? And you talk about layers and putting things in and buying time and being able to put together response plans and, and, being able to effectively communicate and control. And there's so many things today that that's just not done in And, you know, I I hate to say it, but we're just perpetuating this even more, you know, the the new buildings that are being built today even though we know all of this, they're not doing themselves any justice, right, that the schools are being built to be beautiful and bright and airy and light. And that's great in the educational space. It it promotes good educational environments for kids. For learning, but what we know now, and I've said this for years now, is schools and religious institutions and shopping malls used to be you know, kind of no go zones when it came to violence. But now we're starting to see that those things are becoming soft targets. So my quest to these people that are responsible for those areas is what are you doing? And most of the time, what they'll say is, well, we have a law enforcement officer present. Okay? That's great. And I'm an advocate for having law enforcement officers present as we should. If I had it my way, I'd have an officer in every campus, However, what we need to know and where the breakdown is is that law enforcement officers cannot be the shooter that's attack the attacker, they can't be the emergency manager. They can't be the reunification director. They can't be the one who sets the perimeter. They can't be the one that's also shooting and communicating. And so what we've seen here recently, and I've caught myself in hot water talking about this, and I'm okay with it. Is that it's okay to say that law enforcement cannot do all of these things because guess what? Historically speaking and statistically speaking, We don't need to say it. We just need to look at patterns of behavior just like we would with students, patterns of behavior tell where we need to be heading or what we need to be doing. Right? And so if you look at let's just take the big five. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, Yavalde, in that order. Law enforcement themselves did not stop anything. So people say, well, yes, we have to have a better response. It needs to be coordinated. It needs to be orchestrated. That's great. But breaking down that mindset within the law enforcement community that listen, not all of you are gonna be a hero, not all of you are gonna be Robert O'Neil, the guy who pulled the trigger on Osama bin Not all of you are gonna be the Nashville officer who shot that transgender female, a couple weeks ago. You have secondary actions that you're responsible for. Sure. Let's take it a step further. And, let's get to the real meat and potatoes of it. The, the only way that we're truly going to to change this, right, is that we're going to have to work on mental health. That's that's first piece. That's that's where it is. Right? We we know that. Start analyzing intelligence, right, behavior patterns, who who are our people that we need to put on our radar to touch and and and give them the services they need But it's also about changing the narrative of who is a first responder, right, and getting people inside the building trained, so that they know how to help save a life. You know, the human body is gonna bleed out in about six minutes from a gunshot wound. That's that's the clock. Maybe less. Maybe less. Depending on and yeah. Absolutely. So, if the average response time to get EMT out of any of these and the after actions is more than forty minutes, right, to get EMTs in to start actually providing aid. No one's gonna survive. We're not gonna change those numbers. So if we know that what we need to do to help prevent it, and we know what we're going to do to try get better plans, the only way that we reduce the loss of lives is getting the medical supplies in house and training people to change the whole philosophy of who is really the first responders. We need to have a narrative of the the people inside the building your first responders, everybody else is an emergency responders. Right? The most powerful force that we're not leaning on is the staff. And when I say that, I wanna be cautious when I say that, what I'm not advocating for is we mass arm teachers. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you're a hundred percent right. The first responder is the person who's right next to the person who took the shot. Right? And so empowering those people to fill in that gap between the first shot or incident to the time that the first officer arrives is absolutely crucial, and that's where we start minimizing risk. And so having a well trained staff throughout the United States, just imagine this. If we trained every staff member in, you know, throughout the United States, every educator was trained and stopped the bleed, chest seal application. The standard response protocol, the wound packing care. We trained every staff member in that situational awareness knowing what a gunshot sounds like, knowing what a reload sounds like, knowing the difference between time and distance and when you should run, when you should not run, And people will say, we have, you know, acronyms for that. We have run hide fight. We have avoid deny defend. We have alive. We have we have all of this nonsense. Right? And I'm not I'm not discrediting it, but what I'm saying is is that it's like the next group of professionals comes up with another damn acronym and another full philosophy that's also unproven. You know what is proven? Boyd's Utaloupe, observe orient decide act, observe orient decide act. Teaching people to stay in that Utaloo to observe what's going on orient themselves to whatever it is, decide what they're going to do, and then act. Actinging could be fighting, acting could be running, acting could be hiding behind a desk, whatever. Well, you know, that's really why I'm excited about us putting this together and making a podcast to talk about all of these things that, you know, is is just disinformation or, you know, all of these solutions, all of these acronyms, all these things were put together by researchers or by parents, or that was done at the kitchen table, and there was no actual forethought in there. They they really are trying. They're they're coming up with solutions. There's a there absolutely. And, you know, you know, there's a lot of even credit, a bad plan is better than no plan. And we're seeing that there are a lot of no plans out there. More than than there are plans. And and one of the other things that we've also come across quite a bit here recently is the people who have plans that haven't touched them in four or five years. And you open it up and everything in it is irrelevant. Right? It hasn't been updated. Stakeholders who have responsibilities are no longer there. And the people who have taken their places haven't been up there. This is something you have to do every single year. You have to train to practice. It's like after Yvaldi, you know, director McGraw from the Texas Department of Public Safety, Commissioner, TEA, Texas education agency commissioner Mike Murath, Texas School Safety Center director, Doctor. Kathy, Prether Martina's Prether. I'm sorry. I always get her name mixed up, but, Kathy, Martinez Prether, testified, and then I testified, and we talked about the importance of a plan. And I'm not not having a plan, you have to have a plan, but it's not enough to just have it. You know, in that testimony, not even two weeks after you validate, I said before the Senate, yes, an EOP is imperative. You have to have an EOP, but what's more important than an EOP is you have to train to it. You have to understand it. You have to take five minutes a day to flip through it. And so, you know, like I said, we have twenty nine consultants in fifteen states every single one of us. Has practical experience. And so after Yvaldi, one of the individuals from Yvaldi, the the former director of student services reached out to me and said, Hey, listen. I I like what you're saying. It's practical. I'd like to just entertain, you know, talking to you about, you know, working, on a, you know, just a a temporary basis. Any input I can provide, I would I would love to do that. And and I was welcoming of that. And, you know, he and I had long conversations about what went right, what went wrong in Yvalde, You know, there is no trial, so we can talk kind of about that unlike Santa Fe, which is the the really the biggest tragedy because it's become the the the forgotten shooting. Right? And it affected our community, my community, you know, it was in our home home county. And so, you know, this individual from Yovaldi is now on M6 global team. And so I'd had a couple people say, well, why would why would you bring someone from Yavalde over? My my response was, well, why not? Who better to speak about the do's and the don'ts and what went right and what went wrong than someone who's lived it? Well, another of that, I think what's most telling is is that, you know, we've what did we find out from those conversations? They had a plan. Never once ran to it. It no they didn't use it. They never knew it and never used it. So they had a plan. They did the process, they did the forethought. And then when when everything hit the fan, then let's not use it. It it doesn't make any sense. And he'll tell you that. You know, we had a plan. It was actually one of the sixty seven out of the eleven hundred and ninety school districts in that was approved and submitted on time, but he will tell you himself, not one time that anybody decide to go run back and get that plan and flip through and see if they were doing what they needed to do. And so, you know, just putting police officers from a patrol perspective into an educational environment is not the answer. We have seen historically that is not effective. We have to have the write SR. Let's talk about that for just a second. Okay. Because we've seen a bunch of things come out like knee jerk reaction as far as the legislation. Right? So one of the things that came out after you validate the ability was with shields. Right? Like, oh, let's get shields. Fifty million in shields. Right. And now we're talking about, hey, let's give teachers twenty five thousand dollars to carry a gun. Right? And it it it's like we have this huge pendulum sling where, you know, like, we're no. We can't have any guns in schools? No. We wanna give every gun to everybody. And and at some point, common sense has to come in. And I think that that's one of those things why you keep getting invited back to that testimony to testify and to speak and to go and talk to these legislators is is that not only do we have the real world experience in the environment, but there's a common sense here. Right? And someone willing to actually stand up and say, that's a horrible idea. There's a lot of people with a lot of acronyms after their names. That's me. And they don't. They don't take that. They don't have the fortitude to actually stand up and say, yeah, this is this is a terrible idea. I've got to be the guy that stands up and says that thing in an open setting regardless of where it is in front of five or five million and say it loudly and it hurts a lot of feelings, I don't care because we have to look at the greater good and the risk. And the risk is is that this is America's chill This is our future. And if we don't do something, if we don't have men and women like us that are willing to speak when we know something is wrong, then we are going to continue down this path of violence and fear and isolation. And what I'll tell you is that Two weeks after that testimony, you're right. We had just sat between before the Senate and said, this is what you need. The most important component to any school security plan is the foundational piece of behavioral analysis. If we can identify the behaviors of these kids, through the data that we already have, we are going to be about ninety percent better than we were yesterday, but two weeks after that, after I said that, another subject, better experts said that, what does our lieutenant governor do? He allocates fifty million dollars to shields. And so what I'll tell you that that the secret that no one's talking about is the left doesn't want to solve it, the right doesn't want to solve it, and that can be applied to multiple things throughout the United States because it takes away their leverage when they're in a debate with the right or with the left, and it takes away their talking points. But here's the thing, How many senators, how many congressmen, how many elected officials kids have have died in any of these incidents? To my knowledge, none, And so when it starts affecting their kids, that's when they'll start putting their bullshit politics aside and doing what's right for America's kids. Well, and what we've seen from is what's happening right now. Right? The parents want something different. Right? And so you're seeing this overcrowding starting waiting lists for private schools. And you've seen private schools reinforcing their schools at a level that the the public schools aren't. Bright because they are providing a different level of service. It's a paid service. Right? And it's it's sad to think that in America, that we have to pay for education. And, you know, I will highlight that we've met some amazing people. Right? I mean, thousands of schools. We've we've sat down and and talked to some people who are truly passionate about trying to make a difference. And it's it's like they're constantly trying to find throw elbows to get the room to do it. It it's not that they don't want to do it. It's that, you know, the regulation that's being pushed and the money that's being allocated to these different things aren't to things that are going to solve these problems or change this. And that's that's where this is really gotta get to. Is we gotta gotta change that narrative and and and the training piece in the behavioral side. What what's what's disturbing to me is that we have politicians that are continuing to push mandates and laws, and then they don't have follow-up processes, right, for that compliance piece. We saw that with senate bill eleven, we have resolved that. You and I have resolved that. We have created a digital tool that puts the entire process onto a software that provides visibility from TEA to the Texas School Safety Center all the way down to the Educational Service Center the individual district, to the individual school. So never again, can we sit before a Senate and say, we don't know what the compliance rating was of the eleven hundred and ninety schools or only less than two hundred of those eleven hundred ninety were compliant. It took me and you -- We took on -- private industry -- Yeah. -- to do that. Now here's the thing, will they accept that, or will their egos get in the way? I don't know. I hope not. I pray that's not the case. But that we have resolved that. Right? And so sometimes what we see is politicians and educators, we love them, but they gotta just get out of the way and let people do their job. I always say this if you picture a roundtable, and in education, they're getting a little bit better. But five years ago, I was kind of like a trailblazer. You know, people hated me because I came in from a security perspective, and I always asked the question, why would you not want a guy like me. When you sit down, a surround table in an educational setting, you have a specialist for curriculum. You have a specialist in five zero four, special education. You have a specialist in the arts. You have a specialist in athletics. And when it comes to safety and security, you have a superintendent. Or you have someone that they've appointed to a position that has zero experience, and they're just learning on the fly. I'm sorry. I don't want my kids going to a school where the person in charge of their safety and security has no experience, and they're doing it on the job, and they're learning on fly. Or somebody who's just, you know, using that job to go get certifications and and doesn't have any real world knowledge. Right? And and, you know, it's kind of like a know, that you just call it, like a paper degree, you know, paper person. Right? They don't have any any substance to back it up. And those are the people who we see meltdown when any type of thing sense, and you put a camera in their face, and they they don't know they don't know what to happen and what happened. And then that's when you start seeing, like, people not using plans that were there, and, like, let's throw that out in the middle of an emergency. So Well, I mean, you've gotta look at, you know, I've said this I sat before a senator. No need for names and it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. But, you know, he asked me, you know, Mike, what do we do to resolve this? How can we get a hold of this? Why are we continuing to see this happen? I said, well, first of all, we have a degrading moral compass within America. Our family unit is being destroyed, and I'm not gonna get into, you know, what's appropriate not appropriate, what my beliefs are, what they're not, but we do have a degrading American society. Right? Things that used to be off the table are now on the table. There is no more limitations to what's acceptable. But I told him, I said, everything that you need to know about the next shooter, you already have that information. And he asked me how? And I said every school district in America has a student database. Inside that database is data and disciplinary records that will tell us who is more likely to harm themself, you know, through suicide because you're more likely to have a suicide on campus, and that's the thing that people forget. We also have a responsibility to save those kids. Yeah. Absolutely. But those disciplinary records are going to show us who's gonna harm themself, who's gonna harm someone else. We have to get to a point where we're sifting through that data so that we can not punitively, but that's gonna take therapeutically, go talk to this kid, talk to their family, get a resource in their hands. And we gotta keep beating that drum because there's so many people are saying, oh, well, that's data that's protected by, by this statute or that stitched statute, or, I don't wanna give my student data out to anything else at at some point, there's gonna have to be a service. There's gonna have to be an agency created that becomes a resource for districts. Let's face it. They're already short staffed. They don't have enough teachers. They're doing with budget constraints. And the idea of them putting together a team that's gonna sift through that data it's it's probably gonna have to be a service. And it's just one of those things, again, that, I think private industry, you know, guys like you and I are gonna have to actually fight those fights and put it in there. And we're the only ones that are out here doing that. Well, you and I both know that we already have a solution for that, that we're working on. And, you know, as far as legal parameters or boundaries, there's there's certain ways that other companies already do that. And so we'll use that same model to do that so that we can identify these kids who need our help. I mean, we they need our help our kids are exposed to more violent things than ever in American history. Absolutely. Better. So I'm super excited. I mean, we have, you know, lots of, different people, like experts coming in, security people, you know, manufacturers Yeah. And I think more than anything, just pulling back the rug on all of the disinformation or the horrible ideas, pulling back you know, the exposure on things that are going on at the national and state level, as it relates to legislation and funding and what's really in it and how can be a resource for, not just, schools, but parents. Right? There's lots and lots. I mean, think about how many parents have contacted us in the last month, right, a a ton. And a lot of times those parents are reaching out because they've formed a group or a team, and and they've heard of our services or recommended to us, and they wanna they wanna start they wanna make a difference and and so they wanna start with, what do we need to do to secure our school, our kids, the school's not doing enough or we want to help fund, whatever these initiatives are. And so, you know, I really feel like this is a, an information source and a way for us to address a lot of these things that are on not only school's minds and and company's minds, but parents. I mean, just think about parents. Yeah. Absolutely. But even beyond schools, right? You think about the, Atlanta shooting that happened just the other day. Right? Now already businesses reaching out, trying to figure out how to secure that. Same thing happened after the the mass shooting in the doctor's office. Right? It's it's spilling over. It's not just in our in our schools. It's in all aspects of of business and places that we go. Well, I think it's just society in general. This is this is where we are. I don't know if we're gonna be able to turn it back. Right? And so what I tell people when I go to education, you know, go to facilities or you know, whether it be public school, private schools, corporations, whatever. The majority of these people, when I get it, they're waiting on money. And like you said, we've had parents, and we just got off of a phone call today, you and I did with an individual out of a central Texas that said, our kids go to a private school. We're not waiting on our our school to fund it. A group of our parents have gotten together. Collectively, we are gonna fund it yourself, how much is it gonna cost to get our kids safe? And I commend them. And, yes, somebody has to pay for it, but what I tell people all the time, even schools, don't wait on legislation. Don't wait on bonds. Don't wait on funding. Figure it out even if we have to prioritize it and do it over a period of time, do something. Right. The the listen. The the least expensive piece to any of our plans is planning is the comprehensive plan. We can be in and out in a while. That gives you a good baseline foundation. And we've helped we've helped izations with virtually very limited, virtually no budget. I mean, they found the money to to pay for an assessment or planning process. They didn't have any money to, you know, put it in technology or anything else, but we gave them a road map, and we prioritized it and said, here's where where we need to go. Right? It's it's so much of that that we see. And, you know, we we use the words command, control, and communication, and compliance without compromise, right? And there's a lot to that. And and when you start breaking that down, you know, I think it accomplishes both of what you and I do and putting it all together in one one sentence. Right? And so I just I'm excited to be that that resource for people in to figure it out, right, for them to reach out to us and say, hey, here's my problem. Here's my concern. How do I do this? You know, how do you eat an elephant? It's one bite at a where do you start, right, break you down into manageable pieces? I'm happy that we've decided to collectively begin the secured podcast because you and I both know that with both of us, parents are gonna get the truth. We're not gonna sugarcoat. We're gonna be professional, we're gonna be direct, and we're gonna tell you what's gonna be effective, what's not gonna be effective. We're gonna keep your budget in mind. If we have to prolong, you know, in order for you to get to where you need to be, that's what we're gonna do. We're not gonna let money get in the way of providing a safe environment for America's kids. So I appreciate it. Yeah. Super exciting.