Getting Schools into the Mindset of Safety Preparedness

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's event titled “Getting Schools into the Mindset of Safety Preparedness.” I'm Greg Peterson content manager for CrisisGo. Today's presentation will focus on how schools can improve school safety with preparedness mindset. Dr. Steve Webb of Goreville Community Unit School District is our guest speaker and his presentation draws on his experience and expertise as both a school superintendent, a school resource officr, and a member of law enforcement.

If you have any questions throughout the presentation, I welcome you to submit those through the questions panel. Will be conducting a short Q&A session at the end of today's presentation. Without further delay, I'll let Dr. Webb take it from here.

Thank you so much Greg. I appreciate it. Hello everybody. My name is Steve Webb, and I'll be conducting this webinar. I've been speaking at quite a few conferences and I'm doing a couple of administrator academies for the only principals Association regarding this topic, but I look forward to the questions at the end. So what we're doing today is we're discussing the mindset of safety preparedness.

One of the things that has interested me greatly as a school administrator and also a member of law enforcement is the fact that we do a lot of drills where we're starting to come up with some laws now that I'm on the terrorism task force school safety commission where we're making recommendations and legislators are taking up those recommendations.

But at the same time we do this type of thing post some type of event. So it motivates us to do something and then if there's no event we tend to start getting back into our complacency. So that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book “Education in a Violent World” to talk about our mindset of safety preparedness particularly as educators in a school system.

I founded Safe School Systems, LLC to separate myself as a school superintendent and law enforcement officer for my speaking, but at the same time I'm also an ALICE active threat response instructor and a writer instructor for law enforcement and I do that for area schools through the Regional Offices. So I'm also a professor and I'm a law enforcement officer for our local village. We're located in the southern tip of Illinois in the middle of the Shawnee National Forest. So extremely rural area which of course for our rural schools has its own situations in terms of school safety. And that's another chapter of my book talking about the one size doesn't fit all it's not just size. But every school has its own unique dynamics to deal with and we're discussing school safety.

So I travel all over the nation to different events. I was in Parkland, Florida this summer and I visited the memorial I visited the parking lot they were able to cross and building 12 where the event took place and I was just starting to promote my book and there's no better incident to really talk about the mindset of what we do as schools to try to possibly even circumvent the lack of resources that we have in order to maintain safety for our children.

So I also travel to Columbine. This is my wife Angie. We were at the column I memorial this was a few years back. Actually Dave Sanders, his brother Don is a friend of mine. Dave was the teacher that was killed that day from Ridgeway, Illinois, actually, but one of the things that I discussed in every one of my sessions every time I do a keynote that event and that memorial has an area on it that says “It brought the nation to its knees, but now that we’ve gotten back up how have things change; what have we learned?” We learned a ton from Columbine and we're still hearing about Columbine and that was 1999. And you still seeing some of these schools that are having these events making some of the same mistakes.

We've gotten much better over time but still yet you hear people asking why and it's not just the why but it's the how and that's what we're going to discuss a little bit today to try to get you in the mindset of safety preparedness.

So in order to be prepared, I discussed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas event and this article was in the paper and unprepared in overwhelmed, but actually their preparedness was quite good. They actually have people outside they have inside and all their hallways. They had a plan for if the situation were to occur, but let me take you through that event just a little bit. So the perpetrator Nicholas Cruz was let out of an Uber across the parking lot. Now. I walked across that parking lot and it's quite large.

As you can see by the number of cars by this this picture, there's two four-lane roads surrounding the East and the north. I'm sorry the west of the north on the East there's a moat. So even if somebody want to do to penetrate that direction, they couldn't come so they had a pretty decent situation in terms of their campus at fencing but Nicholas Cruz got out of the car and he was seen immediately. He was seen immediately by a century on a golf cart out in the parking lot checking the parking lot making sure everything was okay. Saw him recognized him as somebody that shouldn't be there recognized him knew his name still didn't call. It still did not call that lockdown at that point contacted the other Century the other security or whatever you want to call them in the hallway of building 12 and says the boy's name Nicholas Cruz appears to have a rifle bag and it was an obvious rifle bag. So he saw the boy knew you wasn't supposed to be there saw the bag knew that was a rifle bag. So his brain was telling him all the time information that he brought back data from his memories.

But the alarms going off in his head did not cause him to act appropriately so as Nicholas Cruz advanced to building 12 he followed and the inside security coach Taylor walked towards him and actually was within 50 feet of Nicholas Cruz when he entered saw him saw the bag rifle is still not outside of the bag and instead of confronting at that point turns around and goes back to the other set of stairs when Crews entered the first stairwell.

And told the outside Century I'll meet him on the second floor. But we all know that was too late Nicholas Cruz went into the stairway took the rifle outside of the bag and began murdering kids and adults in that school.

So if you count how many times that their brains told them something's not right here and they still. They still as part of their plan. They had great plans. They had security outside and inside to alert everybody of when something's not right. They didn't do it.

So it wasn't the fact that their safety plans were faulty. It was a fact that their brains did not allow them. They did not have the mindset to act to respond on what they were seeing. Their brain was rationalizing everything that they were seeing and never got those kids alerted or anyone else alerted prior to the shooting. So if you really want to talk about prepared you can't just talk about your building having somebody having a police officer with a gun inside though. It is certainly recommended. It's not the plan.

When I do presentations, I prepare the mind.

Where are you at in terms of your backups your what if this doesn't work are you prepared are your people prepared for when today is not like yesterday. So in preparing our brains in my book, I talked about how we prepare our brains on a daily basis. Not just the days following an incident or not just the days following the trauma or another school safety talk much like todays.

So obviously the first part of this is preparedness not just facilities not just classrooms, but preparing your mind to be ready for the unexpected and then awareness, awareness of your surroundings awareness of the kids awareness of the world that kids are living in. I will speak more to that later and then your responsiveness the days of boys will be boys or girls will be girls Johnny's just being Johnny is over.

Those days are over. We're starting to analyze some of these behaviors now and we've come to find out there is no profile for that certain school shooter or that certain bully. It's a responsiveness to when we find a breach of that norm, but the last part of this and I'm calling this the para mindset because of the para mindset if you don't advocate for school safety on a daily basis, we do get complacent.

We do get complacent because we're humans. And that's not our priority any longer.

So if everyone that's on this webinar where to leave today, you go back to your school's go back to your communities go back to your agencies and start this.

Then just think how many places are now filtering out in order to be able to come up with a better plan, a better situation. So the advocacy component is probably the most important because if you leave this webinar today, and you do nothing then we've done really nothing to improve the safety of our children. So the first part of the pair is the mindset the three steps very simple.

Use your mind and this plan that we have on our wall the plan that's on our wall is not the plan.

Right. It's not the plan. It's how we conduct ourselves when the day is different when things are different and you have to go to why we don't and here are some certain reasons. I'm sure this list is not exhaustive. But complacency is the number one we procrastinate will get to it. I hear this a lot is it would never happen in a rural school? And you know, that's not true unaware overwhelmed. Especially in our rural areas where there were being tasked with so many different duties so many different hats costs are a huge factor in why we don't why we don't prepare and certainly fear of the unknown fear of losing our jobs if we take things to our boards that they don't agree with so those things we've got to get through and I set it up into three different systems to discuss with our boards and discuss with people into the Macro and the Exosystem in the Microsystem before we actually get to get to the Target because if you don't talk about the macro the outside looking in you're not going to discuss getting your brains and you didn't your mindset prepared. You're only going to look at the facility. You're going to look at the cafeteria. You're going to look at the restrooms. You're going to look at whether you have a school resource officer in the vicinity counseling.

Our brains are probably the most important part of this the systems analysis only because it doesn't matter what plan you have if you don't act.

And you don't act decisively we have found out through a lot of these situations. This plan is no longer viable and no longer works and now you're in recovery.

So obviously as we discuss our plans we have to look at the new law that we have in Illinois on drills and doing it within the first 90 days. You would think why would we have to have a law that says we have to do it at the beginning of the school year well because we had a lot of schools that didn't they wait until the very end of the school year to meet compliance or they did whatever they had to meet compliance and didn't prepare that school at the very beginning of the year. Like you would think it would be common sense.

So I'm going to discuss a lot about common sense. And what we do in schools because we learned a long time ago. The communication is key. And this is an area school that we had that didn't communicate very well with a responding officers on an active shooter. That wasn't it was a stray bullet that had been shot from a long way away and lodged in one of the staff members shirts outside.

So the word that this dispatch got was that there was a school shooting and so, you know what happens when law enforcement comes and they don't have any other information they had to gain entry but the facility was locked down.

They were locked out so they ended up breaking a baton on the window trying to get through and then ended up having to drive their unit through the door to get in but the scariest part about that was they came in with guns ready with weapons ready weapons hot looking for this active shooter because they had no other information. No other information other than active shooter at this school.

So very well whenever they open the door and I saw a teacher's aide with a bat trying to protect herself could have very well ended in tragedy. It didn't, thank goodness. But just think about what could have happened because we just did not communicate with them or the people will then we all locked down and stayed quiet and that could have actually been the worst thing that could have happened in this school district because there was not an active shooter.

So that's where we come in with what we do in terms of our drills and our practice. This is actually a workshop that I was hosting and you'll see that bag on the on the chair. This is a mindset drill, I laid the bag there, this was a January meeting and it has three handguns in it. And I sit it there just a test what we do whenever we see something that's out of the ordinary.

And certainly when I asked them if they all saw it they did why did you look in it? Because it's not my business. Well, actually it is our business if it's in our facility, it's not normal here. We're going to talk about normal then it is your business and it was a very powerful message. Once we took the handguns out of the bag and said this is what was sitting next to you. And because you didn't want to get into somebody else's business at our school. It could have ended in tragedy.

Same thing with some of the drills. We do inside the facility. You'll see by this picture. This is an individually happens to be a state policeman who is wearing a hoodie and knocking on doors trying to get kids to open the doors very simple. They do it for free my favorite flavor and they will come to your school district in plain clothes and see if they can penetrate your perimeter. He does have his weapon on him and once he did gain access because we had one of these kids open the door allowed him in. I take this snapshot with the nice red arrow and is ominous the pictures I can find and I sent it to all teachers. We have a homeroom and I tell them to discuss this we were kids because we just let a person with a weapon in the building. He did happen to be a police officer, but nobody knew that.

Same here, I used a female. And had her come in some different doors. This child thought she was a substitute and her weapons were in her bag. We took pictures of the weapons and of course her through surveillance and sent it to the teachers and let them know. I mean this is what entered our building she was able to able to make it through our door centuries as well because they as well thought she was a substitute.

So it's a very powerful message when you send this to your staff and let them know you know these things we're doing all the time just to try to keep our minds sharp of what happens the day that we actually encounter someone that's trying to get in here that has bad intentions.

So that's where the communication comes in the CrisisGo people that have put this on we've been a longtime CrisisGo user and one of the largest reasons why we chose them was they have a desktop feature. You see a lot of other companies that will allow you to put it on an app on our phone or app on your iPad. Well what happens when you have substitutes and typically, of course when it gets warm weather and April we start having more substitutes now it’s the flu season we have more substitutes. So I needed something specifically that classroom and because we have so much technology in our classrooms including Smart Boards where they're up at the Smartboard.

This allows that Smartboard to be actually a panic button, a very large very expensive but it is a panic button that they can access immediately while they're at the board and they don't have to go find her phone. They don't have to go find anything else. So there's your commercial for why we chose CrisisGo but also in that communication just think they had CrisisGo in the dispatch at that area school where they called an active shooter and they were able to communicate by text message to let them know. We're okay. We don't right now if there's an active shooter outside, but there's not one currently walking around the school building that we know of and give them pertinent real-life information.

So that brings us to the awareness side of what we do in our schools. And of course we look at the pathway to violence and where we can actually stop violence and there are a lot of areas if we can just see what was happening in a child's world the maybe we can get a better grasp at it. This is my 26th year as a school administrator. I did not grow up in the social media world. I'm always playing catch-up and I'm always looking things up Googling different platforms anytime I see a story where it's used in a criminal way. I try to give myself some better understanding of the world they're living in but I mean kids don't want you in their world. That's the whole point of their own little social media world, but at the same time we have to be able to identify when that is also in some way or form different and something that it could be traumatic to a child to the point where it's affecting them.

We probably know of every single school shooting from last year 26 school shootings. We probably heard all of them, but there were over 5,000 suicides of kids young adults last year that we rarely heard of any of them.

So if you want to just talk about simple statistics kids mental health and being suicidal is directly connected to our major school violence that is shown all over national news. So I think when we address all of this ALICE response, which I do but that's a response. We're looking at run hide fight as a response.

We're not spending enough time determining what is the preventative nature of what we can do in schools to make sure that we understand when there are kids that need some type of mental guidance largely because we're in a world of do more with less.

Funding, resources, manpower a major teacher shortage. There's a third less teachers in our teacher universities and colleges these days. This is all going to affect us. So in what is normal? What is a normal school?

I mean you can start there, but obviously if you take a look at normal and I use the picture of a very angry Dylan Klebold one of the murderers from Columbine they were making videos saying they were going to kill the bully. They were going to kill the bad guy. They ended up being the murderers.

You look at his face. You look at his demeanor. He's angry one could typically determine that that is not normal and based off of what type of criteria I think we could easily go to something, something is different there from what we consider the norm, but if you take a look to the right this young lady, she's an honor student. She's gonna graduate and in less than two months.

Has a mom and dad at the house has a good family. They have a good income. She's well supported. Her name is Nicole Cevario, Nicole Cevario had quite an elite plan to become the first school shooter, the first female school shooter in Catoctin High School in Frederick County, Maryland.

Nicole was an honor student and because of that she was able to interview the school resource officer and asked him. You know, what would you do if somebody brought a shotgun in the school? And what would your response be? How do you prevent that and he told her because she was considered a great kid an honor student never was in trouble. He told her and all of that information was found in her journal along with references to Columbine that she wanted to be the first female school shooter.

And this is going to take place in April of 2017. She even wrote it in there that she knew it was meant to be me. That's what I'm supposed to do. I interviewed the arresting officer last year and he said she had no remorse. The only remorse was she was afraid that she was going to go to prison and would not be the first female school shooter.

So if you want to look at normal the making of a killer.

Who would have placed? She'd already bought the shotgun and the only people that she said in her journal she wasn't going to shoot where the Pre-K kids. Now truly when you look at normal and you're looking at these individuals and we try to look at behavior. Does this look like something that would be considered normal and our schools a band member he's connected to the school and certainly he's unassuming as an individual.

And this young man is Gabe Parker and Marshall County is very near and dear to me. I have some friends in Marshall County and it's pretty close to where I live. But Gabe started posting some things after Christmas vacation that were that we're different even for Gabe who was kind of a jokester, but he put this out there and nobody thought he significance of it. It was just Gabe being Gabe, but Gabe was having some trauma over the Christmas break and he was experiencing some things that was causing to move into that suicidal side and he posted this and he posted United Church of bacon with sounds funny.

I mean they when I went to their website and I haven't even tried to travel to Las Vegas to find them and they have no actual building that I could find but in the United Church of bacon if people would have delve into that to find out exactly why he was posting that he was a member of this if you look at their website, you'll find very clearly that they are the anti-god that they're hated and Ostracize that and matter of fact even mentioned on there. Are you tired of people ostracizing you because you don't believe in their God.

And that's what he was trying to tell people as he separating himself because Marshall County is one of the most religious areas you will find in the Midwest and he wanted to make sure that people knew that he was not a part of that he was separating himself, which is one of the main indicators of the Salem Kaiser behavioral threat assessment list of kids who are having a mental breakdown issues when they start separating themselves from those issues.

So that takes us to normal and separating yourself. This increase, this 11 percent increase in ADHD diagnosis is an epidemic because with ADHD as we all know, they're provided some type of drug to try to control behavior in as young as three year old children, they would give them some type of drug Ritalin, Adderall, Dexedrine.

Very young age and what happens is they grow and they exhibit some type of behavior. They believe that they have to increase the dosage or even give more powerful anti-anxiety or anti-psychotic meds, and these kids are in our school. So they're reliant upon some type of behavior modification and it's growing.

I interviewed a female in Miami last year at a conference and she indicated to me that she used to be a prostitute used to be a heroin addict. She had clear nystagmus in her eyes where her eyes shook so she was on something and she said she was on some antipsychotics prescription and she told me that at the age of 14 she was suicide and her kids told her how And so she was going to memorize all of the symptoms that she needed to have to be diagnosed with ADHD all 15 symptoms. She said and I didn't think much of about it until I looked it up and sure enough the very first place that I Googled symptoms of ADHD. There were 15. She was 14 years old. She's now 35. She remember that 20 years later. That should be disturbing to all of us. All of these meds all of the anti anxiety can cause psychosis which is you're separating from reality a clear indicator that there are there are mental issues going on with you and what you consider as your social norms.

So the trauma that kids are seeing and not being aware of what they are seeing and what the world that they're living in, I’m a part of the child death review team for the southern part of Illinois, and we review autopsies and things that DCFS does to see if there's anything we could have done to prevent this and something we need to do in terms of policy.

I see a lot of squander a lot of a lot of houses that you can't believe the kids are growing up in but even in today's society kids can be in an in the nicest of homes like the Nicole Cevario in the nicest of families with mom and a dad at the house, but still be susceptible by the technology to social areas that are absolutely traumatic to them and the way their brains are developing how it can actually change the way their behaviorist is exerted and I think we've all seen that if you've been in education long enough to change and how kids come to school and when they leave, I mean when we left schools in the seventies and eighties, we left school and the bullying stopped because we didn't have the 24-hour social media that can could contact us directly. That's no longer the case.

And so what they see in technology what they see online is quite unique these days what you're seeing now is a game called Super Columbine RPG and in this Super Columbine RPG you can download it and you download it for free for free and you do everything that the Columbine killers did making bombs listening to Marilyn Manson music and then you kill people for points.

So this is 2020, this is the social norm it's not against the law to have these games out there but the unique thing about it is it's free and anybody can download it all you have to do is say you're 18 or over So these are the things that are out there that kids know that they're out there and they're playing and are downloading. There's millions of downloads of this game and then this particular game and this particular segment that I'm showing you their killing a girl and she's praying and every time she prays her power goes up. And so it takes more bullets to kill her and with the teacher they were trying to kill they decided they wanted to punch him to death and see how many punches it took to do that disturbing things.

But hey, if you don't want this one, all you need to do is go to Virginia Tech because they have a game for them as well. Where are you go around and you dodge police because there was actually two armed SWAT teams within the vicinity of the building before he chained the doors and committed his murders. But in this particular game, you have to avoid the police go into the building and as you can see here goes into the classrooms and you just get points by killing people.

This is called the VTech Rampage and again 2020 this game is free much like the most widely used game in America right now. If not the world. This is Fortnite. It's free and you continually see how kids are drawn into pedophiles and different people that are trying to make contact them through some of these online gaming situations particularly Fortnite to the point where we had a child that became into one of our fire stations and said he had been abducted they were trying to contact him through Fortnite and his parents told him he couldn't use it. So they use Discord another app. So I looked up Discord and it's just a way to get around parents and be able to talk to people out on the web and they talked this kid into coming out of the house and going with them or they were going to kill themselves and they abducted him and he was from Mississippi and they brought him all the way to Southern Illinois.

That's the experience kids are having before they come to school and we have to understand in these kids lives making people shocking people and being the one to make all eyes on me, which is what cynosure effect in my book this all eyes on me is what can I do for a shock factor to get people to look at me. Now does that make them that more susceptible to coming in? No, but it is a disruption to our school and knowing that these types of things are that are out. That’s not what we're not very good at as adults because it changes so rapidly.

So the brings us into responsiveness once we're aware of things that are going on. How do we respond to it? How do we change the way we conduct ourselves as a school as an education institution as a community and it comes back to this. I mean, there are two types of responsiveness two types of response and that's preparing your facility preparing your organization and then identifying behaviors identifying for prevention.

So in responding we also talked about post-event how we respond to that event. So let's talk about that first again with the CrisisGo. CrisisGo is a platform that you can use. But with CrisisGo it's instant communication, instant response. Had that security person that was on the golf cart in Parkland, Florida had CrisisGo at his fingertips. He saw the young man get out of the Uber car and all he had to do was press one button and he could have locked down the facility. The question is would his mind of allowed him to do that?

He wasn't prepared for that. But if it did. How many people would be dead right now?

And I'm telling you once this thing goes off and it locks it lets everybody know and alerts them to where they can make a great decision. I think there would have been no casualties because they would have all stayed in their classroom and conducted their actual plan that they had been practicing.

So I wasn't their plan that was a problem. It was alerting and making sure that they could get into their plan. So as part of CrisisGo we also utilized one of the areas that they have in it, which is 3D mapping. You can actually have a map of your district. You can have your surveillance camera so they can go to the map as law enforcement is responding as fire is responding and use this 3D mapping to understand what happens whenever they walk through the door in case they're not familiar with your facility, of course, we do walkthroughs and bring in a law enforcement and fire personnel as they as they come into our area. So they are familiar with the facility. But everybody is amped up whatever you're coming in for a response. So certainly anything that's there that can be of use and our Sheriff's Department are local state police. Everybody has our CrisisGo app ready to go. So if it goes off they are already signaled that there is an event going on at our school.

So they're responding before we can even call 9-1-1 they're responding at the very touch of that button. So if he'd had that at Parkland he pressed that they would already been in route to assess that if you have that relationship with your local law enforcement as I said, I'm ALICE trainer. ALICE is recommended on the report to the Illinois governor general assembly several years ago. And so I've been doing ALICE not just for schools but now for churches in light of some of the more recent events run hide fight ALICE, these are all mindsets of how to respond to things. But if you're not prepared and you're not ready to respond a lot of those things are just not going to help you. Behaviourize. This is one of the things that we're working with the behavioral threat assessment and the terrorism task force School Safety Commission.

This Handle With Care. It was a Michigan in initiative and simply it's we know that we have difficulty in communicating with our law enforcement agencies and our mental health agencies and schools. This is just simply giving schools a heads-up. Hey, we had something happen with this. This child's family last night. Do you have this child there? And of course as registry information we can we could say yes, and they can say Handle With Care and we know that there was an incident that occurred.

It was traumatic for that child and we might need to might need to take a little closer look onto that child. Again. It's communication. It's something happened just for your info and that's why we're working with CrisisGo to work on our behavioral threat assessment teams.

Now that we have that as a law here in Illinois that we have to start setting up if there's a behavior we're working on our own behavioral threat assessment team area where they can go in and meet through the CrisisGo app and if teacher see something and they can contact this team directly and indicate exactly what is going on with some of the their behaviors. Nobody knows a breach the norm like a teacher that’s with them every single day.

So in bringing it back to how we can get this information how we can be alerted when there is trauma going on in the kid's life. We and many small rural schools use the safe School helpline because they've got counselors on the other end. We in rural Illinois. We don't have a great deal of Mental Health Services or the resources for these kids and in rural areas. It was found in research long ago that people tend to not seek help.

Because the rural area everybody's in your business and they don't want the stigma of having mental issues in their social arena because it's so small. So this anonymous tip line which were working on one for the state should be unveiled any time through I eema but this one this particular Safe School helpline has suicide counselors on the other end 24/7. So we chose that as a service. I'm sure there's many of them out there and you may use another one. So this one was per student. So for small schools, it was something that we did several years ago to try to give our kids another option and an advocacy very simply.

This is Mason. When I was a basketball coach my cheerleading sponsor, Crystal Costner who lives in Marshall County this is her child. So I had particular interest in the Marshall County shooting because Mason has a bullet in the back of his neck from the shooting that day and this is him receiving his award because he came back and became a great cross-country runner for Marshall County and Mason still has that bullet.

And this is him getting his awarded at the UK basketball game Mason still got his bullet in his neck in that and what I talked to Chris. That's what do you want me to tell people and one of the things she said is it was a quarter inch difference. A quarter inch difference and we would have to be burying him and that's a great message because right now everybody that's on this webinar is that quarter inch difference what you do with this information right. Now when you leave this meeting when you leave this webinar is that quarter inch difference sometimes between life and death of a child and I'm not just talking about school shootings.

I'm talking about the much more prevalent much more serious issue of teen suicide So as you move down this road, my name is Steve Webb. You certainly are welcome to call me anytime. You can get a copy of my book anywhere. It's called “Education in a Violent World.” You can reach me at this at this email web at safe school systems dot-org that's web at safe school systems dot org the book you can find that Amazon Barnes & Noble everywhere that books are sold.

Questions?

Thank you so much Steve and just a reminder to everyone you could submit any questions you might have in the questions panel.

I think we have one here, since different staff members have different roles in safety. How do you approach the different levels of staff from admins to teachers and so forth?

When we make it very clear that utilizing the CrisisGo everybody is in charge of calling a lockdown. We practice everyone doing it at some point in time and I use the example of my band teacher Any teacher that leaves our facility or anybody leaves our facility with kids. Must take one of our two-way radios or two-way radios also have direct contact dispatch. But with those radios they can call a lockdown immediately before they even get to their CrisisGo if they need to well, however, they need to do it. But our marching band instructor is one that is walking around this facility many times all morning long. There's nobody better to call a lockdown than her. And so we reiterate that may be the perfect security for us because she's always watching the parking lot. She's always watching the roads near the school and we give them the autonomy to make that decision. It's very much a An atmosphere of “We Are All in This Together,” there is no such thing as just the administrator even bus drivers can call it they drive up and they see something even a bus driver can call a lockdown for us.

And then we have another question. Do you have any examples of how you've expanded the mindset for parents that your District?

Yes. Well, one of the things that we're doing particularly in Illinois is trying to figure out resources to hire more counselors and higher SROs hiring of SRO is extremely difficult because you have to deal with the local police department. We can't allow the SROs. Many times they're hired by the police department. Then you do a memorandum of understanding that they're placed here and sometimes schools don't have a choice of who that is so resources for that. We're trying to get into but one of the things that we did specifically as we hired a an extra social worker just to head up this behavioral assessment and you notice I didn't call it behavioral threat assessment because of what I want her looking at is this social world that kids are living in and she specifically picked her team members. I didn't, no administrator picked this team. It was all done by my social worker pick this team in order to be able to look at all behaviors that are outside of the norm traumatic behaviors things that that just may not be clicking right at the time and at least addressing those to see if there's something we can do to help that child that is a brand-new concept that we're doing and there's just no right or wrong with it. It's what's best for your district and your kids and what you can what you can come up.

Great, we have another question here, does CrisisGo stored all the school building maps, safety protocols, etc? You can have safety protocols all those stored as a checklist, an actionable checklists as well as any maps you want to include as well.

And we have another question, thoughts on reunification drills. Do you do them with students or without?

We do them without now there are districts that even do videos that I have seen their videos where they send to show students and show even parents and they practiced them with students and parents. We do not only for the fact that we are such a such a small community are reunification is possibly a little less complex and in this avenue and it is going to be extremely traumatic for the children to do one of those we're at we are a K-12 district if I were just a high school that might be a little different but pre-k through 12. I'm a little hesitant to do that.

And then how do you prepare this top-of-mind initiatives can kind of make an impression and fade. How do you keep the preparedness mindset going?

How do you keep it going? Yes.

Very simply the drills that I do whenever I bring in somebody from the outside and try to penetrate the building. I do those all year long. I'll do something all year long. I'll use a parent. I'll do it, you know many times we maintain our facility where all of our classrooms are locked. So I'll have kids walk through and knock on a door and then hide and see if they open the door to look. And then we go into the classroom and say hey once you open that door, your classroom is breached. How about we just look out the window if you don't see anybody, they'll come back if they really need in this room and administrators have a key. So we don't we shouldn't need to knock so those simple things and then you put it out to everybody and you can put it out through your CrisisGo app just a simple message. Hey, we did this today. Here's what happened. Talk to your kids about this. They'll simple messages start that Triune mine of okay. Well, I've got a survival side of my mindset here is a practical side of it and I don't want to make that same mistake that they made or whatever and this gets them back into that mode of thinking about what they would do in that situation. So and again, this is not a fine science. I try any gimmick that I can come up with to try to throw something out there. Our to say hey, this is what happened. Check out your preparedness plan.

Wonderful I don't see any more questions. So thank you very much Steve. We really appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise on school safety. And once again, thank you to everyone for attending and participating. If you'd like to learn more about CrisisGo and how we can help make your district and school safer. Please visit us online and follow us on social media. We’ll be sending out a follow-up email soon with a link of the recording in case you want to share this with any of your colleagues and friends. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

Thank you.