Jewish educators are examining already heightened security procedures in the wake of a series of recent classroom killings around the country.

While local schools say they already have strong policies in place, school shootings in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, as well as an aborted shooting in a Joplin, Mo., middle school, have encouraged educators to seek ways of becoming more protective.

Such local efforts are being matched by state and national initiatives, as well as by at least one Jewish agency’s emphasis on bullying as a factor in school violence.

President George Bush convened a daylong school safety conference Oct. 10, while New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine created a School Security Task Force four days earlier.

“The first thing that goes through your mind is ‘What a terrible tragedy,’” said Joyce Raynor, head of school at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange. “Then the second thing is ‘This can happen anywhere.’”

Raynor has conferred with the security consultant retained by SSDS to ensure adequate physical safety precautions are in place, “but you never really know,” she confided.

Moshe Vaknin, head of school at the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County in Randolph, spoke with NJJN after emerging from a half day of staff meetings on the issue. “We are reinforcing rules that already exist involving door closings, who is buzzed into the schools, and holding intruder drills modeled after fire drills,” he said. “We can’t have 50-foot walls and machine guns here. I think it is the vigilance in the following of the rules that can diminish any terrible things that can happen.”

Etzion Neuer, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s NJ region, said he believes “it is not just infrastructure” that needs to be addressed.

He urged the schools to “address the character education — the emotional factors that might be present which could turn a student into a ticking time bomb.”

In recent years, many of the adolescents who have taken armed revenge against classmates have been the victims of bullies, and Neuer’s organization is one of several that offer anti-bullying programs to public and private school systems.

“Dealing with bullying is now seen as a natural component in character education, and we need to give teachers the tools of awareness,” he said. “When we have the conversation about what we can do to make our schools safer, I would urge our lawmakers and our educators that character education has to be part of the conversation.”

Neuer said, “We are seeing some bullying in Jewish schools, and the schools are doing some anti-bullying work there.”

But, he noted, “the biggest obstacle to anti-bullying programs is the parents’ attitudes. The most frequent refrain that we hear is from parents who roll their eyes and say, ‘We didn’t have that when we grew up and we turned out fine.’”

At the Bohrer-Kaufman Hebrew Academy, which runs from kindergarten through eighth grade, administrator Vaknin said bullying “is not an issue.”

But he recalled that after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, “one of our kids drew a picture of something and was suspended. The parents were invited to school. I guess everyone was panicking. Our guidance counselor is on top of all the kids who have needs, emotional and otherwise. You can try to pick up signs, but you cannot guarantee everything. Our kids are exposed to much less than the kids in public schools. We deal with issues as they come up. We have a very different environment here. But everybody is aware of everything.”

From what she has observed as a veteran administrator at Solomon Schechter, Raynor said, “some years all the kids get along, and some years there is a bullying issue….”

With class sizes smaller than those in most public schools, she said, she believes her teachers and staff keep close watch on potentially troubled students.

“There are a lot of people watching these kids. They know them pretty well. When we see something that looks troubling, we’ll call the parents,” she said.

But Dr. Stuart Green, founder and director of the NJ Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention in Summit, said he believes “most schools in New Jersey and in the United States do not have adequate programs in place to address childhood bullying.”

“Kids bully because they get a very clear message that bullying is an acceptable way to behave,” said Green, a clinical psychologist who formed his organization after the Columbine shootings.

He sees pragmatic reasons beyond safety for clamping down on school bullies.

“A school with an effective anti-bullying program will see test scores rise as if they are attached to rockets. When bullying takes place in a school where it is addressed inadequately, what happens is all kids — not only the kids that are bullied — are in a state where they have to watch their backs, they have to look out, they have to be really worried about whether they are going to be targeted or not.”