SECURITY
Three Strategies to School
Emergency Response Preparedness
By Tom Strasburger
As schools around the nation, and the
people within their walls, continue to be
the target of violence, school districts are
increasing spending on school safety and
security. For example, Baltimore County
(MD) Public Schools plans to spend $9.8M
over the next three years to make school
buildings more secure, including outfitting
each school with surveillance cameras and
secure door systems and eight metro-Atlanta
school districts spent $28M in 2012 on
physical school security such as armed school
resource officers, classroom panic buttons,
cameras and metal detectors. Additionally, the
U.S. Department of Education is providing
102 Spring 2015 SouthEast Education Network
25 states with a total of $13 million in School
Emergency Management grants to expand
their capacities to assist districts in developing
and implementing high-quality school
emergency operations plans.
While physical security tactics are
important, they do not help staff and students
understand how to act in an emergency,
regardless of whether it’s a violent act, weather
situation, bullying incident, chemical spill,
bomb threat, or other crisis. A complete and
effective school safety program should consist
of plans that address emergency, crisis and
non-crisis situations and should include three
key strategies:
• Physical security technology
• Accessible and easy-to-follow plans
of action
• Consistent district-wide training,
well-practiced drills and other compliance
tasks
Planning School Safety Programs:
Best Practice Example
A comprehensive school safety program —
like the one at Great Oaks Career Campuses
— can be modeled by any career center or
K-12 schoolto maximize their preparedness
and increase the culture of safety to keep
students safe and focused on learning. Great
Oaks, in Cincinnati, Ohio, consists of four
physical campuses and has satellite programs
that serve an additional 36 Southwestern
Ohio districts. Great Oaks provides career
and technical education (CTE) programs
and services, as well as English/language arts,
mathematics and science to approximately
3,500 high school students at its campuses,and
also deploys educators to its satellite districts to
teach an additional 11,000 students.
Al Gille, Great Oaks’ Coordinator of
Health, Safety and Security, was recruited
seven years ago to overhaul Great Oaks’
approach to school safety. Gille followed three
key steps to create a multifaceted school safety
and emergency response plan using the above
three strategies.
Physical Security Technology
Since hiring Gille, Great Oaks has installed
many physical security technologies. In
addition to adding more than 480 security
cameras across the campuses, each building
now has an electronic door locking system, a
visitor management system, and an electronic
key card entry system for staff. These security
measures are becoming increasingly standard
across school districts.
With access points better secured, Gille
selected a mapping program to house detailed
facility information. In addition to showing
the location of each building’s cameras, AEDs,
and exits, this system contains a map of all
shut-off valves which is accompanied by video
clips to explain how to turn each on and off in
case of an emergency. The system also includes
360-degree photographs of all classrooms,
hallways, and doors, and aerial photographs of
all facilities so that emergency responders can
quickly familiarize themselves with any site
during an emergency.
In January 2015,Great Oaks completed
construction on an Emergency Operations
Center in the district’s central building. This
center includes access to security cameras and
radio communications in all buildings, and
the ability to override all PA systems. This
Emergency Operations Center was located
strategically to provide ready access to the
superintendent, communications team, and
vice president of grounds and maintenance, in
addition to Gille’s Safety and Security team,
so key decision makers have quick access to
individual building resources from one
central location.
Accessible and Easy-to-Follow
Plans of Action
Great Oaks worked with local authorities,
as well as national security experts, to create
emergency action plans. All staffs are trained
to take action in the event of an active shooter
situation using the ALICE (Alert, Lockdown,
Inform, Counter, Evacuate) training
technique. The campuses then work with
local authorities to host on-site simulations
to practice executing what they learned in the
ALICE training.
Being prepared in the event that a crisis
occurs is important, but many districts fail to
plan what to do after a crisis. A two-minute
crisis event can create years of follow-up
actions. Great Oaks appointed a Continuity
Group consisting of FBI officials, members
of the local fire and police departments,
Great Oaks IT and communications staff,
school counselors and administrators to create
a Reunification Plan that addresses what to

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www.seenmagazine.us SouthEast Education Network Spring 2015 103

 through all the potential components of any
Baltimore County crisis, and then plan for those components in
advance so campuses can reopen and students
(MD) Public Schools can return to learning as quickly as possible.
plans to spend Consistent District-Wide Training, Well-
$9.8M over the next Practiced Drills, and Other Compliance
Tasks Without automation, keeping track
three years to make of training deadlines and completion progress
and the many drills and compliance tasks
school buildings districts are required to complete creates the
opportunity for things to slip through the
more secure, cracks. By switching to an automated and
online system, Great Oaks has both sped up
including outfitting the pace of these processes and eliminated
each school with potential for human error.
The assignment, notification and tracking
surveillance of staff training, compliance tasks — such
as drills, inspections, building maintenance,
cameras and secure and mandated reporting and staff accident
management, now all occur online. As a
door systems. result, Gille and staff supervisors are auto-
emailed non-compliance reports so they
do after a crisis event occurs. The detailed know what tasks still need to be completed.
plan includes situation-specific phone trees, Further, these reports give Gille insight
instructions on when staff and students into recurring or potential safety issues based
should return to school, or when they should on frequency, location, time, or employee
relocate to different campuses, and more. The roles. This data enables Gille to identify
goal of the Continuity Group was to think opportunities to implement preventive
104 Spring 2015 SouthEast Education Network
measures such as new or additional training,
changing processes or policies, or requesting
maintenance to prevent reoccurrence of
accidents —all to improve safety throughout
its campuses.
A Sustainable Plan
What makes Great Oaks’ comprehensive
safety plan a success is that it builds a culture
of safety for the district so students and staff
can feel safe at school while being prepared to
act in case a crisis occurs.
Districts, no matter how large or small,
can create this same culture of safety
by focusing on the three key strategies
included within the Great Oaks safety plan
—security technologies, accessible plans
of action that include reunification, and
automated, consistent training, compliance
and reporting.
Because of this program introduced by
Al Gille along with other initiatives, Al Gille
was named a finalist for Campus Safety 2015
Director of the Year.
Tom Strasburger is vice president
of PublicSchoolWORKS. For more
information,emailtstrasburger@
publicschoolworks.com or call 877-77-WORKS