One of our core values as a School District is Safety. We believe that schools and work sites must be safe and secure environments for students, parents, and employees--emotionally as well as physically. Our schools should be safe for everyone who comes into them--kids, our staff, and all our families and other visitors. If you’re really looking, you can see some of the outward safety elements, like staff greeting our kids when they get to school, or helping them safely cross the street--these are nice things, they also help keep our kids safe. Sometimes when we pick-up our children during the day, we buzz the secure door and have to show who we are, and if we’re staying to visit, get a badge. Perhaps you’ve seen numbers on windows, or badges on your kid’s teachers--maybe you had to have a background check to go along on a field trip. Maybe your child is involved in some kind of positive group with their school counselor, or maybe they serve as a cadet, or on some sort of council. Perhaps they had a slip-up and experienced some restorative discipline where they righted a wrong, or made amends. All these experiences are part of a broader plan, with dozens of moving parts, each designed to make school as safe as we can. In this brief blog, I’ll share a few important, but not always visible behaviors we practice to support safety as one of our core values.
Our teachers and support staff work hard every day, not just to ensure that we comply with our state’s rules regarding safety, but that we take the additional practical and logical steps that exceed those requirements. One example: our state’s statutes tell us that under safe conditions we need to perform a certain number of fire and tornado drills, but we care about safety preparedness in areas other than fire and tornado situations. What about a situation where someone may not want to comply with our credential exchange practice when entering a District building, or when our friends in local law enforcement notify us that there is something potentially dangerous happening in the community--like a gas leak, or a messy traffic stop near our schools. We should have plans for these inevitable events as well, so we plan and practice for situations where we may need to lock-out (entrances secure, inside Physical Education and recess), lock-down (classroom doors), or even potentially evacuate to another classroom, location in the school, or even to an alternative site. Each of our schools plans and prepares for these types of events.
This year, and in prior years, we’ve dedicated significant amounts of our staff development time to helping train our staff in the most current forms of safety preparedness. For example, Oak Creek Police and Fire and Rescue annually provide three really unique and important services to our schools. New teachers, as part of their orientation to the District, receive initial workshops in verbal de-escalation and school safety preparedness. Each school is equipped with cutting-edge safety kits--similar to what you’d find in tactical response situations--for which the staff is trained annually. And most notably, our friends in the police department, often aided by our school resources officers Kelly Romel and Tim Zwicke, work with our staff throughout the year on best practices in school safety. You’ll find Officer Zwicke at the high school every day; officer Romel spends time in all our schools.
Our Workforce Excellence Committee reviews our District and school safety plans, and revises them to reflect most current best practices. Each year, our school board invests time and energy to review our plans. We also voluntarily participate in the Wisconsin School Safety Coordinators Association (WSSCA) school safety review process. This is when inspectors with decades of experience review our practices and make recommendations for improvement. Again, completely voluntary, but something we see as worth the extra effort.
Here in Oak Creek-Franklin you’ll find a few things that you might not see in other Districts, like secure entrances at all the buildings, safety drills that exceed statutory requirements, teachers and administrators dedicated to restorative disciplinary practices, and a robust relationship with our police and fire and rescue departments. Some of the scarier things we plan for, we hope we never need. However, we feel the investment in time, energy, and those moments of being uncomfortable or stretched in our thinking about being ready for hard things that may never come are worth our time and efforts.
If you’re interested in more information, I’d invite you to attend a fourth quarter Board meeting where we’ll take a closer look at our site’s safety plans. I hope you’re proud to send your kids to schools where we take seriously the charge to put safety first--I know I’m proud to work for one.
