11-15-2006MENTONE – A crisis can happen any time at any school.
Tippecanoe Valley School Corp. wants to be as prepared as it can be.
Each school in the corporation has a functioning crisis team. In an attempt to review and refine each building’s emergency plans, Warsaw Police Department Chief Steve Foster met with each team this week to conduct tabletop exercises. The purpose of the exercises was for the crisis teams to think how to handle different crisis situations and different variables that could occur. Another purpose of the exercises was to evaluate and refine current plans.
Tuesday morning, Foster met with the Mentone Elementary School crisis team, which includes Principal Katie Miller, a counselor, a custodian and several teachers.
Foster told the team that he’s been holding such meetings since 1999. “The state takes school safety seriously,” he said. What has happened through the years, he said, is that events that used to happen outside of school buildings have moved into schools.
He talked about the importance of I.D. badges and why it’s important for those who wear them not to make a habit of forgetting them. At Valley, school personnel have to wear their badges at all times, while students at the middle and high schools have to carry it with them. The badges give staff a sense of empowerment, Foster said, because if someone enters the building and sees an adult wearing a badge they know that person has the authority to question their presence in the building.
But despite all the bad things that happen at schools reported in the news, Foster said the safest place for a school-aged child is in the school. “There is no safer environment,” he said.
When asked if Mentone locks their doors, Miller said they are locked from about 8:15 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. The only access during school hours is the front door. Once in the foyer, the only access through to the school is the front office.
Foster told the crisis team they should let all Mentone staff know who is on the team. They also discussed the importance of letting not only the staff know what happened in a crisis, but also parents and the community. Miller said while they need to notify parents of what’s going on in schools, they also must respect student confidentiality.
One way to prepare for a crisis, Foster said, is to critique how other schools respond to a crisis. “It’s better to critique someone else’s incident rather than your own,” said Foster.
One of the challenges at Mentone, Tippecanoe Valley Middle School Assistant Principal Jeff France said, is that the school is in town. The middle and high schools are surrounded by corn fields, but that’s not true for the elementary schools. Mentone addresses school access issues with locked doors, I.D. badges and a keypad for certain doors. They also try not to allow doors to be propped open.
“The hard part for us is each situation is unique,” said Miller.
Foster said the important part is no one stands alone in these situations. Schools have much more resources now.
Foster gave the crisis teams two “what if” exercises. In the first one, the team reported what they would do if they were notified about an unidentified male sitting in a vehicle in front of the school for a longer-than-normal period. The second scenario had them say what they would do if two unknown individuals parked across from the school, entered the school through a door that was normally locked and then they couldn’t be found.
Foster told the team it was better to error on the side of caution, and that Valley is on the right track.