Intro

The recent Boulder, Colorado shooting once again has America considering what if anything can be done to improve gun safety.  Over 20 years since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, there are more than 248,000 children at 258 schools that have experienced these unspeakable acts of violence, according to a Washington Post database.

Mass shootings shake our sense of safety and our immediate reaction is to erect fences, barriers, metal detectors and video cameras.  This has spawned a $2.7 billion school security industry, and it drives calls for see-through backpacks, bulletproof vests, armored whiteboards and armed teachers.

Back in the 1950s, students went through “duck and cover” drills in anticipation of a nuclear bomb blast. Today, students in K-12 classrooms go through regular school lockdown drills. Lockdown drills, required in most states in the US and in Canada, are a response to school shooting events.  Tizzie Nuss asks “Why are kids and teachers not being protected at schools as part of lockdown drills rolled out across the country?

Tizzie struggled to process this question.   In 2017, Tizzie lost her eyesight for a few days, and during this dark time figured out that her mission had to be to help protect kids.  Fueled by faith, the topic of school shootings ignited Tizze and she created the Spark Project in 2018.  Over the next 2 years she would develop her patent pending SPARK™ Shield – a lightweight, bullet resistant, usable school folder that easily transports in and out of backpacks.

In this episode, we talk to Tizzie about the subject of schools shootings and what schools could be doing to protect children more.  Tizzie started her career in education working for the YMCA of Central Ohio.  Her love for people eventually drew her to Human Resources where she worked alongside brilliant minds at innovative companies like Honda, Battelle, and IGS Energy.

Resources

The Spark Project
https://www.sparkproject.us/