Highlands County Schools Learned First-Hand The Efficiency and Ease of Raptor Reunification
The School Board of Highlands County is located in Sebring, Florida and serves 12,000 students across 20 schools, including one virtual campus.
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.
The Challenge
Troubleshooting the Drive-Through Method
While they knew a drive-through reunification was the best approach for their needs, creating a clear plan—and a clear image of what implementing that plan would look like—was difficult. This, in turn, made troubleshooting and improving their process a real challenge.
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.
How Raptor Helped
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:
- ✓ Update locations to reflect specific rooms of the Reunification site to practice their workflow—particularly important for troubleshooting the reunification process for their special needs students.
- ✓ Signal to the Greeters that they could start checking in guardians at their cars to initiate the Reunification process.
- ✓ Transition into the Runner Role once all students were checked in.
- Customer
- Challenge
- Troubleshooting the Drive-Through Method
- Accounting for Students
- Product
- Solution
- Enhanced and optimized drivethrough reunification flow
- Instituted a process for accounting for students
as they arrived at the reunification site