Mason Wooldridge
To date, Mason has worked in every facet of the school safety and security world for both public and private K-12 educational environments. Currently, he is a registered provider through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency in the facet of providing physical safety and security assessments. He is also an active subject matter expert for Pennsylvania Act 55 related topics and requirements through state-based grant allocations, as well as working privately within the world of school safety throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and abroad. Mason is a member of his county’s Safe Schools Committee and is currently working to bring brain health programming into the lives of Pennsylvania’s youth through diversionary and prevention programming. He has also held the position as Director of Safety and Security for a Public K-12 School District.
He has been interviewed nationally for stories and articles pertaining to school safety, written a book on the topic of school safety, trained thousands of teachers and school faculty on the threats that face schools, performed assessments on hundreds of schools across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and has been a national trainer on the topic of school safety throughout the United States, as well as a respected in-person trainer for school districts and educational leadership across Pennsylvania and throughout the country.
Starting in 2012, Mason took part in launching a project for the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association to build the safest school in America. Once the “Safest School in America” was complete and shown to the world on September 11th, 2014, Mason became the first school safety consultant for the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association. In this role, he worked to build support statewide in Indiana for the passage of a first-of-its-kind safe schools’ legislation which passed unanimously in 2016. This bill gained statewide support from the IN Teachers’ Association, the IN Superintendents’ Association, the IN Principals’ Association, the IN Chiefs of Police Association, the IN Tactical Officers’ Association, and the IN School Resource Officers’ Association.
After the legislation passed and went into effect, Mason traveled around the country providing in-person training to law enforcement and educational leadership on how to better protect their school environments. During this time of traveling nationally, he was invited by the Luzerne County Intermediate Unit’s countywide Safe Schools Committee to come and speak to a conference of attendees, and it was at this event that a connection was made with LIU18, where he would eventually be brought back post the Parkland School Shooting to facilitate a roundtable discussion with school Superintendents and local legislators for the purpose of putting a plan into action for better protecting the county’s schools. From this meeting, Mason started a full-time consulting focus on helping the schools within Pennsylvania be as safe and secure as possible.
Mason is currently working on a project with the School District of Philadelphia, designed to highlight past mistakes made in the events where mass violence was brought to American schools, for the purpose of creating standards of safety to be adopted within the new construction of schools.
Mason is also part of a team of subject matter expert’s tasked with creating and providing training pertaining to school safety mandates and code across the state of Pennsylvania. He has worked with thousands of classroom participants and hundreds of school districts during this time. He has trained on topics such as situational awareness, physical safety and security, emergency preparedness, coordination and communication with first responders, amongst a myriad of other topics.
His most recent pilot project in Pennsylvania, across 10 counties, is in building Emergency Operations Plans for schools. He is also working on providing reunification training and advanced crisis communications/ICS/Emergency Response training as well. Upon the completion of these pilot projects, he and his team of SME’s will provide these trainings free to educational settings throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania, with a total state provision ending in the summer of 2027.