The School Board of Highlands County is located in Sebring, Florida and serves 12,000 students across 20 schools, including one virtual campus.
“What stands out the most about Raptor’s Reunification is the ease of use. It really does make the whole process of this potentially chaotic event go smoothly. We’re extremely happy with what we’ve seen so far, and we’re looking forward to—hopefully never needing the use of this—but having the comfort behind us that this is going to be an easier process for us with our partnership with Raptor.
Part of minimizing trauma is directly correlated to a safe, efficient reunification— but in the high-stress moments of an emergency, the reunification process can easily become chaotic as emotions run high and unexpected situations arise.
At the School Board of Highlands County (SBHC), planning a process that took their unique needs into account was particularly important. Their available reunification sites could not easily accommodate the parking needs of parents reunifying with students at the site, so they elected to utilize a drive-through reunification approach—but this presented unique challenges of its own.
As part of the Raptor Compliance and Success Program, we helped SBHC conduct a full-scale reunification exercise, including consultation on the reunification site. And as part of CSP, the Raptor team came on-site to conduct a full-scale reunification exercise. This included planning and preparing in advance of the event as well as guiding the reunification process that day until the SBHC team felt ready and confident.
Troubleshooting the Drive-Through Method
Accounting for Students
Using spreadsheets to check in students—and then bouncing back and forth between that spreadsheet and their student database to confirm guardianship during reunification—was cumbersome. The administrators were not confident in how smoothly that process would go in a real event.
Enhanced and optimized drive-through reunification flow
By working through their planned reunification process with a Raptor team, SBHC was able to develop a clear picture of how their reunification event would go—and were able to identify key areas that they needed to address to keep that process running smoothly.
Keeping students with special needs in mind
The reunification site’s layout meant SBHC’s students with special needs who are in self-contained classrooms would be in an annex building for the event. This caused logistical problems with the traffic flow rerouting guardians to the second building caused significant delays in the reunification process. Together with Raptor, SBHC has been able to plan accordingly, resulting in a faster and smoother reunification process for their students.
Instituted a process for accounting for students they arrived at the reunification site
To better support their drive-through only reunification, Raptor adapted their reunifier roles to implement a new “Accountant” role, who would be responsible for accounting for all students as they arrived. As the Reunification event progressed, staff fulfilling the Accountant role would perform the following responsibilities:
Raptor’s Reunification program really helped us work through the thought process, looking at what it would all entail, and made this whole system run a whole lot smoother. Our Raptor Professional Services Engineer identified some pieces that really allowed our team to dig in a little differently with how to roll through this. The communication she had with asking important questions that we hadn’t really considered made it a good transition.
The School Board of Highlands County is located in Sebring, Florida and serves 12,000 students across 20 schools, including one virtual campus.
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