Florida House Bill 1421
After an emergency, quickly and safely reunify students with their guardians
What is Florida House Bill 1421?
There are many updates to the 2018 bill, including new safety drill, family reunification and mental health considerations.
- Emergency Drills: Previously, the school board’s emergency policies and procedures defined how the school conducted emergency drills. With the updated law, the State Board of Education (SBE) will now be responsible for setting the timing and frequency of these drills.
- Reunification Policies and Procedures: The updated law now requires the Office of Safe Schools (OSS) to create a model family reunification plan for childcare facilities, K-12 schools, and postsecondary institutions. The OSS will also confirm that each district has adopted a plan for their schools.
- Incident Reporting: One reporting method is school environmental safety incident reporting (SESIR). updates to the bill require that the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) publish the most recently available SESIR, accountability, and performance data in a format that can be easily understood.
- Safe-school Officers: The updates to the bill require that all safe-school officers must complete mental health crisis intervention training, not just School Resource Officers (SROs).
- Mental Health: The DOE partners with a national organization to provide training to school personnel. The updated bill requires that school districts annually certify, beginning July 1, 2023, that at least 80% of school staff received the training.
To see a detailed summary and learn how to comply with each update, download your free copy of Raptor’s Florida House Bill 1421 (HB 1421) analysis.
How to be Compliant with Florida House Bill 1421?
Part of the compliance requirements in the Florida House Bill 1421 mandates Florida schools to develop reunification processes that integrate with technology and thereby eliminate the chaos caused by the old pencil/paper or spreadsheet processes. Another mandate requires Florida schools to create more structure around how they practice and conduct school safety drills.
- Raptor® Reunification: The MSD Commission described Seminole County Public Schools as a model district for other Florida schools to emulate—partially due to their use of Raptor Reunification in their reunification plan. With our Raptor Reunification, school staff can quickly confirm if the student is accounted for on-site, still at the school, or marked missing or injured—all in the Raptor mobile app.
- Raptor® Drill Manager: Enables schools to schedule drills and track compliance, quickly verify each building’s drill activity, and analyze reports to see what is working and where they need to improve performance.
Benefits of Raptor Reunification Software
Connected to your student information system, Raptor helps ensure students are only reunified with approved guardians.
- Enables scanning of the guardian’s ID to check for status or custodial restrictions
- Records and stores approved guardian signature
- Software automatically sends alerts to the student’s other guardians upon successful reunification
- Raptor dashboards update in real time during reunifications and automatically creates summary reports
- Raptor is 100% aligned with the Standard Reunification Method from The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Benefits of Raptor Drill Manager
Automates scheduling, conducting, and reporting on drills. This is key to analyzing drill performance, maintaining compliance, and creating muscle memory for a real-life emergency.
- Allows schools to schedule, conduct, and track drills in compliance with school safety drill requirements
- Helps create muscle memory to prepare for any emergency by practicing and learning from the drills
- Automatically sends reminder notifications to schools so they’ll never miss another drill
- The ability to initiate and run school drills directly from any mobile or web-enabled device
- Create reports that can easily be customized and scheduled for analytical and investigative purposes
- Quickly know status for every building, drill type, and compliance status
What Our Customers Are Saying
Raptor provides technology that meets and exceeds the requirements of the new law. Enabling schools to reunite families four times faster than traditional processes, Raptor Reunification software gives school districts the power to streamline and manage reunification in one easy-to-use application that works on any device.
The Raptor Difference
Effective K-12 emergency management is not just about software features. Schools need a partner that understands them and is a proven ally to keep students safe.
Raptor is a trusted and credible K-12 safety software provider for 73% of Florida districts, totaling over 2,500 individual schools. Reduce complexity with a partner already in your schools.
Raptor has innovative, streamlined implementation based on over 18 years of experience. This means we will have you up and running by the deadline.
You will not be just another client. Raptor will provide you with ongoing expertise and relentless innovation to help you better protect your students, staff, and buildings from any threat. Raptor is a partner to over 35,000 K-12 U.S. schools and maintains an annual client retention rate of 98%.
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