Safety in Our Schools

By:  Daniel Unertl, J.D., Assistant Superintendent 

Last year, I wrote and shared a blog with the following introduction:

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.

It’s hard not to think of the dangers, or even to use words to express the horror and sadness we feel for the victims and community in places like Parkland, Florida. Schools take care, for a few brief hours every day, of the most important people in our worlds.  In Oak Creek we have strong partnerships: our parents care, our staff is prepared and committed, and our children come to school wanting to do their best. Although we may think something like what happened in Parkland could never happen here, we must stand prepared to mitigate risk and protect students.

Our primary focus will always be the safety of our learners--just like I wrote in a prior blog, however, given current events, today I’m writing a little deeper to share an overview of some of the plans and protocols we have in place to prepare our schools for various types of situations and to keep our students safe. 

Entry

Visibly, upon entering our schools, you’ll notice all of our Oak Creek-Franklin public schools have locked, secure entrances--external doors are locked during the school day--essentially putting our schools in what’s commonly called “soft-lockdown” all the time.  Classrooms are equipped with aftermarket locking panels, which allow for a speed-locking of sorts.  Visitors must be buzzed-in the secure entry door before entering the building. And, if a visitor plans on staying in the school building for any length of time, they do what’s called a “credential exchange,” basically signing-in and getting a badge, and also creating a historical record of who is in the building and when.  Upon close inspection, you’d notice we even landscape in a way that prioritizes visibility over esthetics.  

Safety Plans

All adults in our schools are committed to safety.  A select group of those committed individuals serve on each school’s Safety and Crisis Team.  These teams convene multiple times a year and are committed to regularly refining and improving their site plans; site plans comply with best practices we’ve learned from FEMA, among others.  It’s not uncommon for the teams to convene after a drill, severe weather incident, or other real/practical concern.  The teams do a debrief and focus on identifying process improvements.  The same way we ask for each classroom to continuously improve, so too do we approach safety planning.  Procedures are discussed and practiced at each of the buildings. We also meet regularly as a District-Wide Crisis Team, pulling in our community partners in the local fire and police departments.

School Resource Officers

The school district and the schools have a close relationship with the Oak Creek Police Department.  We have two dedicated school liaison officers that are exceptional partners in the day-to-day safety of our schools. They advise us regularly and are integral to our training and preparation.  You’ll find Officer Tim Zwicke at the high school every day; Officer Kelly Romel spends time in all our schools.  We also support and encourage other day-shift officers to visit our schools for lunch, or just to check in; these are informal visits and promote community partnership as well as visibility.  It is extremely common to see a squad parked in front of our schools for non-emergency reasons.  In addition to providing a pure law enforcement based safety measure, our SROs advise and counsel in ways at times similar to a school counselor.  The SROs also share what we call “five minute Friday,” messages that invite discussion and call for considering scenarios in a table-top format; these activities help us create the mental maps that save seconds in a crisis.       

Safety Drills

All schools perform evacuation drills and lockdowns on a regular basis. Our schools conduct safety drills that exceed statutory requirements. In addition to fire and tornado drills, our staff and students plan and practice for situations where we may need to “lock-out” (entrances secure, inside Physical Education and recess), “lock-down” (classroom doors), or potentially evacuate to another classroom, location in the school, or even to an alternative site.  Fire and tornado drills are required by law every month, and twice a year, respectively.  Crisis or safety drills are not required, but we perform a minimum of two safety related drills a year at every school in the District.  Your student might not notice, as we use age-appropriate terminology, like ‘buddy-room drill” in an elementary school to move quickly from a home classroom to a partner classroom--for something like a health emergency or a quick evacuation--or your student might practice coming in from recess really fast (a “reverse-lockdown”).  Each of our schools plan and prepare for these types of events and the Oak Creek Police Department tests and/or advises us on these protocols.  We don’t, however, just discuss and train for shelter-in-place situations, our training teaches us that we must consider situations in advance in order to create the preparation in our minds to exercise judgement--if a situation should require our staff to run, hide, or fight--we’ve considered that possibility in advance.  For example, our staff are empowered to evacuate if safety permits and danger is close.  We have also worked with FEMA and the Wisconsin School Safety Coordinators Association (WSSCA) to audit our protocols.  None of these actions are required, but we dedicate time and energy to these practices because we wholeheartedly believe in the values of preparation, resource gathering, and planning.     

Staff Training

Active Shooter Training 2018

Our District has dedicated a significant amount of professional development time to educating our staff about high-level safety and security measures and practices--this year alone, nearly half our inservice time has been dedicated to safety training. Our teaching staff has successfully completed what the Oak Creek Police Department calls tier 1 and/or tier 2 active shooter training.  Some of this training is hands-on, resembling a self-defense, or martial arts class.   New teachers, as part of their orientation to the District, receive initial workshops in verbal de-escalation and school safety preparedness, and the police design custom training for people like front-office administrative assistants--these are emotional and challenging meetings--very few teachers or office workers thought this would be a part of the job when we set out down this road many years ago.  Additionally, law enforcement regularly trains in our schools during off-hours, and had early access to our newest buildings in furtherance of this goal.  
   

Safety Kits

In 2012 we started equipping our schools with cutting-edge safety kits--similar to what you’d find in tactical response vehicles.  These kits are not widely available, nor often observed elsewhere.  You might hear about requiring similar kits through legislation in the wake of a traumatic event, as they contain supplies necessary to render life-saving aide.  The Oak Creek Fire Department builds, updates, inventories, and trains our staff on the use of these kits.  PTOs commonly fundraise for replacement materials for these kits, as the contents expire and are costly. 

Handling Threats

You may hear on television after a traumatic event that there should have been what’s called a “Threat Assessment”.  This is a meeting of sorts where a team from within and beyond a school come together to gather information and create what looks like a treatment/care/communication plan.  This process often brings law enforcement together with a school’s team to share information.  Our District has engaged in this practice for a number of years--which is uncommon and to our credit as a community. 

School Counseling/Emotional Support

Please know our staff is ready and available to help students who are fearful or uncomfortable.  Please do not hesitate to encourage them to reach out to us so we may help your children through this time. High school and middle school students and their families also have access to the Aurora Student and Family Assistance Program, a unique program that gives families access to free, confidential counseling services.  This is similar to employee assistance programs you may be familiar with from work.  Aurora works with three or four southeastern Wisconsin schools to provide this unique and valuable service at no cost to our secondary students and families.   

STOPit posters are displayed each school.

STOPit

At the beginning of the 17-18 school year, all Oak Creek-Franklin students were given access to a tool called STOPit.  STOPit is an app that gives students the ability to anonymously report any inappropriate behavior directly to a school administrator. It can also be used to engage in anonymous two-way communication with school officials.

Last, but not least, 3 important things you can do as a parent or guardian:

1. Please discuss with your student the expectation to tell a trusted adult (in person, through email, or with STOPit) as soon as possible if he or she EVER hears or sees anything that is inappropriate in any way.  As our partners the police always stress, “If you see or hear something, say something.”  Please help us by reinforcing this important message. In addition, it’s important to talk with your children about safety at school and the importance of following instructions in the event of an emergency.
2. We encourage you not to be afraid to talk to your children about incidents of violence, but caution you not to let your children be overexposed and consumed by either the news or social media coverage.  The National Association of School Psychologists has created a document titled “Talking to Children About Violence:  Tips for Parents andTeachers.”  This document provides practical tips for families when discussing such incidents with their children.  The National Association of School Psychologists’ website www.nasponline.org provides links to this document and other documents families may find helpful.
3. Be sure your contact information in Infinite Campus is up to date. In the event of an emergency, Infinite Campus will be used to contact parents and guardians. At the beginning of each school year, we conduct a test of the emergency notification system for parents and staff.  If you have Infinite Campus account questions, please email: helpdesk@ocfsd.org. 

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. 

We are deeply committed to examining the steps we need to take for student safety.  We have worked together to build strong practices, and we remain committed to looking at the areas we have not yet addressed. Please reach out to us if you have questions or concerns so we can keep an open line of dialogue around school safety.  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.