In A Split Second

Erik D. Endress
Jul 28, 2017 · 9 min read

It’s Monday morning at your high school. The school day has just started and the cafeteria kitchen staff is hard at work beginning to prepare lunch for 1,200 students. The loading dock bell rings signaling the first delivery of the day, one of many that happen like clockwork every Monday.

Mary, who is prepping the ingredients for the salad bar, hears the bell and heads down the long hallway leading to the back door. Milk is first delivery every Monday and Harry has been delivering milk to the district on Monday for years. He is always on time. The bell rings a second time.

Mary pops the loading dock door open and is surprised to find her ex-husband standing there. With a single gunshot, he kills Mary, then nonchalantly walks back to his car and drives away.

In the second-floor media center above the cafeteria, a staff members pauses after hearing the gunshot. She looks out the window and sees Mary laying bleeding on the loading dock. She calls 911 from her cell phone reporting a person has been shot at the school.

Over the next few minutes, the police, fire/rescue and EMS units will scream through town and towards the school. The school is placed in lockdown as it is unclear if the shooter is in the building. Students, hearing the sirens and seeing heavily armed tactical entry teams moving through the building realize this is not a drill and start texting their parents that they love them.

Parents immediately panic. Many will get in their car and start racing to the school. 911 lines light up as parents call to confirm the news and ask what they should do. In the district office and the high school office, parents’ calls are going unanswered. The district and high school website is unchanged, there are no new Facebook posts, no tweets.

What began as a normal school day just 60 minutes ago is now an entire community in crisis even though there is just a single victim.

Back at the school, law enforcement officers begin to methodically evacuate employees and students from the school, which was become a crime scene.

1,200 students must be moved to a secure, offsite reunification zone, which requires immense coordination, collaboration and communication between school officials, emergency management and parents.

Does your district have a family reunification plan? Do you have a team identified who will manage the process? Have they practiced it? Do your families know what they should do or expect in the wake of a serious incident? Are you prepared to communicate with family members via text message and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter?

While many districts conduct monthly emergency drills, it’s very uncommon for them to practice the post incident communication and reunification process and, as a direct result, ill-prepared to communicate with the hundreds or thousands of family members who simply want to know if their child is safe.

Likewise, families have no idea what they should do or where they should go to be reunited with their child. Most will assume it is the same school where emergency is happening, unless you can quickly direct them as to where they should go.

At the Ramapo-Indian Hills High School District in New Jersey, School Safety Director Charles Wolff believes that advance communication is the key to improving the outcome of these incidents.

“We distribute as much information about potential emergencies as we can to our families, making that information available on our website, we send it via email at the start of the year and include it in the student handbook” says Wolff. “It is also mentioned at freshman orientation each August and at PTSO meetings.”

In the chaos and confusion in the moments after the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT parents descended on the school building itself while desperately trying to find out if their child was safe or not. It would take hours for 26 families to learn that they had suffered a tremendous loss.

When any emergency is happening at your school, family members only want one question answered “Is my child okay”. Once they know that answer, they will likely be more willing to wait calmly for reunification to happen.

Family members also want to feel that the district or school leadership knows what it is doing during this time of crisis. If it appears like nobody has a clue what should be happening and can’t answer any questions, family members will not have confidence in the process they are enduring.

“We have been planning and exercising for several years on the topic of school emergencies and, more specifically lately, on reunification” says Chief Christopher Wagner of the Denville, NJ Police Department. “I think that one of the things to first consider is preplanning your emergency communications and making the school population (students, teachers, parents and relatives) aware of what tools you are going to use in advance. By preplanning, you guarantee the greatest amount of effective notification in a very short amount of time. We are going to do our best to try and minimize the response of parents to the actual emergency location” says Wagner.

Denville recently took the unusual step to move its reunification site to a location outside of its borders, selecting a county college in neighboring township, a change that Wagner hopes will cause parents to travel there more likely than to the school.

Most school administrators are cautious to communicate with parents in the immediate aftermath of the incident, citing a desire to provide only highly accurate information.

In today’s technology-rich environment, districts should accept the fact that family members will become aware of an incident almost immediately, from other sources, such as their child or other parents texting them, as well as Facebook posts and tweets about it. Unfortunately, much of the information being shared can be erroneous, which only adds to the chaos and confusion onsite.

The faster your team can communicate information to families about what has and is happening, the better the outcome of your incident will be. That communication should not supersede managing the incident, but it needs to be part of your process and be someone’s responsibility, especially if you will be going to a reunification location.

“One way we have taken the lessons learned from emergency incidents across the country is to prioritize our response and make choices that put the safety of the students and staff as the number one priority” says Joseph Pangaro of Pangaro Training & Management. “To that end we have decided to set the process in motion before we make notification to anyone; meaning we choose our evacuation/ reunification location and get the kids moving first. This gives our staff and the police a chance to secure the location we are going to and set up the appropriate crowd control measures to ensure that when people show up they are managed safely and efficiently allowing the school to control the process and maintain security.

Pangaro states that this concept of moving the kids first, before any notifications are made, has been met with some initial reluctance, but is centered on the belief that as the people responsible for the safety of the students and staff we must act on their behalf first and make sure they are secure before we do anything else.

“Once we have them in safe environment we can then make the notifications to parents and guardians so they can make their way to the evacuation/ reunification site. This process considers the historical response we can expect when notifications are made, that being a rush to the location, and the disorganization that can result” says Pangaro.

Dr. Scott Rocco, Superintendent of Hamilton Township, NJ Schools shares Pangaro’s “safety and security first” philosophy while encouraging district leaders to be in constant contact with their public safety incident commanders and counterparts.

“It’s critical that everyone in the command post is comfortable with the information you are preparing for release. Coordinating your message with that of your public safety partners signals to your community that there is a collaborative effort in dealing with the emergency.”

Rocco reminds district leaders that they should provide students, staff, parents, and community members with information that informs them of the situation but does not compromise emergency practices, evacuation locations, or investigations.

What’s clear from speaking with district and school administrators nationwide is that there is room from improvement in post incident communication as it relates to the reunification of students with their parents.

“After experiencing a critical incident requiring the mandatory evacuation at one of our elementary schools, and conducting a follow-up debrief on how it went, we determined that our reunification procedures could be improved” says Paula Valenti, Superintendent of Schools in Glen Rock, NJ. “We set out to find a single tool that would serve the district well to provide timely communication to our staff, BOE and parents during incidents. For Glen Rock, Share911.com was that tool we were looking for and we have implemented it throughout our school district.”

I’ve been both a school board trustee for six years and served my community as a volunteer fire/rescue responder since I was in high school. Much of my career has been spent solving problems with technology and helping school districts leverage technology for both learning and communication.

This combined experience led me to create Share911.com in 2013 because I saw, first-hand, the inefficiency of communication and information sharing during and in the wake of incidents in our schools.

Share911 provides district administrators and their public safety counterparts with a single-source-of-truth for managing an emergency collaboratively from start to finish. Today, four-years into the business, our software is deployed in K-12 districts from coast-to-coast and is used 25–50 times each school day during lockdowns and evacuations.

We set out to reduce the time it takes for district administrators, school employees and first responders to be notified that an emergency is happening. Next we enabled employees to share real-time information with each other and with first responders, revealing where the danger is or where people have been trapped or injured. We dramatically reduce the time it takes to locate missing students, which is a huge problem during emergencies. And now, we are tackling the last piece of the puzzle, which is communication with family members and reunification.

Districts should have a “districtwide communication and reunification team” that is spun up the moment you know you have a major incident happening. Everyone on this team should know what their responsibility is and be ready to respond. You cannot expect that the superintendent or building principal will be able to do everything that needs to be done, especially when a major incident has occurred.

With Share911.com district administrators can activate their reunification team, communicate with parents, account for students and document the chain of custody through to release.

The reunification is a process that can takes hours, under perfect conditions. Emotions will be running high and families just want to know their child is safe. In most instances, most your staff and students will be okay, so being able to communicate that information quickly will help. As family members arrive at reunification, your team can see if their student is in reunification and what their status is.

District administrators and school board members need to recognize that the same methods for communicating normal school business or information may not be very effective during a crisis.

If your district is going to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate post incident and during reunification, be sure you have a social media manager role in your team who will be responsible for sharing information, monitoring comments and reply to them, not ignoring them. These are the platforms upon which people get their information and interact with each other, if you plan to use them, expect to engage with your constituents.

Any school can have a serious emergency that will require reunification. It doesn’t have to be an active shooter, it can be a chemical spill, gas leak, power outage or another situation in which nobody has been injured. Being prepared to communicate and reunify your students with their families is key to the successful outcome of these incidents. If you aren’t prepared, if families are left in the dark and they sense that you have no idea what you are doing, you should expect them to ask questions and demand answers of your leadership team.

Erik Endress is the CEO and Co-Founder of OnScene Technologies, Inc based in Ramsey, NJ. He has been a volunteer fire/rescue responder and incident commander since 1985 and spent six years serving as trustee on his local board of education where he advocated for school safety initiatives.

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