Two resigned Oxford, Michigan, school board members claim the district failed to implement its threat assessment playbook that they say could've prevented last year's mass shooting at Oxford High School.

Oxford school shooting


"This board had been told over and over that the school had all the policies in place and that our team did everything right," former school board treasurer Korey Bailey said -- but he claims that's not true.

The whistleblowers' Monday news conference came just two days before the one-year anniversary of the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting that was carried out by a student and left four students dead and several injured.

Former school board president Tom Donnelly said, in August, Bailey started looking into the threat assessment policies and guidelines, and he came across a Homeland Security protocol referenced in their policies.

Donnelly said this document "changed everything from my perspective."

The document showed the playbook for preventing school violence, which "clearly defines every step" of identifying and preventing threats, Bailey said at the news conference. The playbook was most recently updated in June 2021, just months before the shooting, he said.

Donnelly said the protocol is to address a threat preemptively, and assumes that trained counselors, resource officers and other staffers collect "markers" to help stop an incident before it happens. "Markers" include: changes in grades, changes in attendance, and students showing violent tendencies, Donnelly said.

The document "clearly states that the threshold for pulling a team together [to investigate] should be low," Donnelly said. "It's the team's job to decide whether you have a low or a medium or a high-risk factor."

"The district certainly didn't use [the playbook] as designed in the months leading up to the shooting," Donnelly said. "There's no evidence that we've ever used it as designed -- even though, since 2011, the policies and guidelines have been in our system."

Bailey said a report completed by Secure Education Consultants "praised our team" for developing and executing comprehensive security protocols. But Bailey said this report "was not based on a complete investigation -- it only focused on if we had the policies. It never touched on if we ever implemented or trained people to carry out these policies."