Training, Resources Provided to School Districts
By Theresa Kelly GegenJournal | May/June 2024
With an emphasis on cross-collaboration between state and federal public safety departments, school districts, and communities, the Illinois School and Campus Safety Program offers resources for education, prevention, and management of school safety concerns.
The Program provides awareness and preparedness training to enhance organizational capacity to plan for, respond to, and recover from an emergency or disaster, and runs the Illinois School and Campus Safety Resource Center website, https://ilschoolsafety.org/, which has an abundance of resources related to school safety and security.
“One discipline can’t do it all,” said Eric Arnold, Illinois School and Campus Safety Program Director for the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board Executive Institute at Western Illinois University. Arnold and David Saitta, NIMS/ICS Program Manager for the Illinois Fire Service Institute at the University of Illinois, team up to bring information on the Illinois School and Campus Safety Program to the education community. Saitta and Arnold speak at the Joint Annual Conference and other IASB events.
“We realize we can’t respond to events in our silos,” Saitta said. “The program and its concepts apply to all hazards that can affect your schools.”
The array of collaborators, partners, and resource providers include the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA); the Illinois Association of School Boards and Illinois Principals Association; the Illinois Fire Service Institute; Illinois State Police; the Illinois School Resource Officers’ Association (ILSROA); the Illinois School Psychologists Association (ISPA); the Louisiana State University NCBRT/Academy Of Counter-Terrorist Education; the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium; REMS Emergency Readiness and Management for Schools; Safe 2 Help Illinois; and the Schools/Campus — School Safety Information Sharing Program of the Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center (STIC).
How do school officials fit into the structure with the first responders during an incident? What needs to be in place before an incident happens — and it can happen anywhere — to prevent, support, and recover?
Focusing during one recent talk on the issues of reunification in the wake of a violent incident, Saitta and Arnold shared how school districts can work with their community first responders in training programs offered to school districts and other educational entities by the Illinois School and Campus Safety Program. The School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management course is designed to improve incident management and response integration of school personnel and emergency responders (law enforcement, fire, EMS) to violent events in schools. The course provides a validated framework to manage violent event response to improve time to threat neutralization, medical intervention, survivability of victims, and reunification of students with parents.
The K-12 course offerings include Developing Emergency Operations Plans K-12 101 Train-the-Trainer; Behavioral Threat Assessment; Digital Threat Assessment and Advanced Digital Threat Assessment; Railroad Safety for First Responders, Educators, and School Bus Drivers; Understanding and Planning for School Bombing Incidents; Incident Response to Terrorist Bombings; Preparing for the Unimaginable: An In-Depth Look at Wellness, Trauma Recovery, and Resilience; and Site Safety Security Assessment.
The Illinois School and Campus Safety Program encourages those concerned with school and campus safety, including administrators, faculty, staff, police, fire, emergency managers, EMS, and others, are encouraged to schedule and participate in the trainings with their communities. The courses and webinars are tuition free to Illinois public and private schools, colleges, and universities.
Theresa Kelly Gegen is the Editor of the Illinois School Board Journal. Resources associated with this article can be accessed via isab.com/Journal.