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With the coming of the new year, it’s time to revisit your school safety resolutions! As you develop detailed policies to define your school safety ecosystem, here are five recommendations to help your school district prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from emergencies.
1. Go all-in with your technology—and your time
Making sure you are fully investing both time and technology into your district’s school safety message will greatly strengthen your culture of school safety. Here are a few tips:
- Allow for in-person time. Especially now in this post-Covid world, it’s tempting to stream district messaging remotely—but having at least some of your safety conversations in-person with your schools will help drive home the message that the safety and security message is a priority.
- Get your IT department on board. Having IT buy-in to the district safety and security plan will help streamline implementation of related technology. Have IT attend drills on a rotation so each school has support onsite during drills each year to provide troubleshooting during the event.
2. Strengthen your visitor screening procedure
Knowing exactly who is on your campus is critical to school safety and security and using pen-and-paper sign in/out sheets exposes your school to risk. Being unable to screen visitors—or even, perhaps, to read their handwritten entry—leaves your staff unable to keep potential threats out or accurately track permitted visitors during emergencies.
With automated software like Raptor Visitor Management, you have the power to:
- Decide exactly who is allowed to enter your buildings with instant screening against the sex offender registries in all 50 states as well as an unlimited number of custom databases;
- Ensure you release students to approved guardians when you sync our software with your student information system (SIS); and
- Track visitor location during emergency evacuations when you pair Visitor Management with Raptor Emergency Management.
3. Get the tools you need to better document, support, and manage the wellbeing of each student
Early identification and intervention empower schools to provide their students with support when they need help facing a challenge. Review your school’s ability to document and track the low-level concerns that indicate student’s earliest signs of distress—and how efficiently your staff can report those concerns.
Raptor’s patented StudentSafe technology emphasizes cataloging low-level concerns in a single, secure platform—creating a full, holistic picture of the student’s wellbeing for your counselors and trained staff to act upon.
4. Prioritize expediting your response time and emergency communication
In the high-stress moments of an emergency response, precious time is lost initiating lockdowns or evacuations and calling 911—not to mention the risk of staff missing part of a multi-step emergency response plan during the panic.
Improve your school’s response time and eliminate that risk by implementing an emergency management system that automatically calls 911 when an emergency alert is initiated.
Raptor Emergency Management software includes the capability to:
- Expedite the call for help with a mobile panic alert;
- Communicate with all users with group chats within the app, easing stress and directing resources efficiently; and
- Connect directly to 911 via the mobile application, voice call, or, where available, text-to-911—allowing the initiator to answer questions so 911 operators can better inform first responders.
5. Streamline your reunification plan
Recovery starts when the crisis begins, so having a solid—and practiced—reunification plan in place will help you quickly and safely reunite students and their guardians. But using pen-and-paper accountability creates opportunities for miscommunication and uncertainty, so having the capability to know the precise location and status of each student, staff member, and visitor in real time is critical.
Raptor’s patented reunification workflow—which is 100% aligned with and licensed by The “I Love U Guys” Foundation—is connected to your SIS, empowering you to confidently release students to approved guardians up to four times faster than the old pen-and-paper methodology.
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We look forward to our continued partnership in school safety in 2023. So that you don’t miss any of our new content, consider following us on the following social platforms:
Related Resources
Guide to K-12 Student Wellbeing
Strategies to Recognize, Document, and Support Students in Distress
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