The Marshall County Safety Commission held the first of its two regular yearly meetings Tuesday morning.
Representatives from the area schools of Argos, John Glenn, Union North, Culver Military Academy, Bremen, Triton and Plymouth were all on hand and discussed issues regarding bussing. All schools reported no problems thus far with travel this winter. Positive feedback was given and appreciation for good road conditions was voiced by all school districts to the Marshall County Highway Department and INDOT.
Troy Heckaman of Culver Military Academy and Jim Phillips of Plymouth Community School Corporation have been working in conjunction with Clyde Avery of Marshall County Emergency Management and Matt Pitney of the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department to create workshops which will train and better prepare emergency workers from the community and school corporations on how to respond during crisis situations within the schools.
“We’re looking at trying to develop a crisis communications plan with the school. Ideally what we would like it to have is representatives from each of the schools to come in and be a part of this subcommittee,” said Clyde Avery of Marshall County Emergency Management. “A lot of folks think that they’re going to be able to dial 911 and talk to a dispatcher right away and that’s not realistic in crisis situations, especially involving schools. They’re going to be inundated with other calls so you may get a busy signal.” Avery continued on to explain that in other incidences where emergency action has been necessary in schools that the biggest problems are with the instant management and communications. Avery stated that they would like to develop a plan and then test it and see what works and what doesn’t.
Now that school safety contacts for each of the corporations have been identified, a communications survey will be sent out to corporation superintendents and safety contacts to get input on what each of the schools feel are important and their views on select topics Heckaman explained.
Jim Phillips, PCSC, spoke about the implementation of a reunification policy program which he has created a template for.
“When we’ve had significant events at schools, have we given as much attention to after the incident as we have to preparing and preventing the incident?” Phillips says in regards to situations that have occurred in other schools. PCSC has been looking into plans that are already being used in other communities and has been working to develop its out set of instructions and chain of command to use as a resource during emergency situations. This plan will be presented within the next couple of weeks and the template for it was available at the meeting for other school corporations to use as a reference in developing their own.
“We’re creating a ‘go-bag’ for each of the schools that will just have these in it with some flip charts, a lot of documentation for parent sign-out and a hierarchy or chain of command of who is responsible for what at each of the buildings,” explained Phillips.
Heckaman said that CMA’s plan was formally adopted last week and is also available to use as a reference. “Ours was tested pretty well last year. We had 140 students stuck in hotels coming back that first week in January last year,” said Heckaman.
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