Effective school safety is not just about responding to a crisis; it is about building capacity among school leaders to prepare and plan.
Administrators and safety specialists from Alpine School District joined leaders from across the state in December at the Adobe campus in Lehi for a specialized safety training hosted by the Utah School Safety Center.
Each school in Alpine has a dedicated safety specialist. They participate in regular training and serve as safety experts in their community.
“In the rare occurrence that there is an incident that requires emergency action, the preparation and planning are critical so that things can run as smoothly as possible,” said Colin Gill, assistant principal and safety specialist at Pleasant Grove High School.
The event in Lehi was one of four workshops scheduled this school year for safety specialists throughout the state. The training focused on the PREPaRE curriculum, a comprehensive framework developed by the National Association of School Psychologists.
“The PREPaRE workshop equips school leaders statewide with a common framework, language, and set of best practices, ensuring consistency across districts while allowing for local context,” said Michelle Knight, Threat & Crisis Response Support Specialist at Utah School Safety Center.
PREPaRE stands for:
Prevent and prepare for psychological trauma
Reaffirm physical health and perceptions of security and safety
Evaluate psychological trauma risk
Provide interventions, and
Respond to psychological needs
Examine the effectiveness of crisis prevention and intervention
PREPaRE Workshop 1 is the designated curriculum for all district and school safety specialists. The goal is to have standardized protocols statewide, which is vital during multi-agency emergency responses.
It is great to get common language around all things school safety,” said Gill. “There is also a lot of value in collaborating with and learning from other schools and their experiences with safety plans and procedures,” he said.
In the workshop, safety specialists learn:
How to build flexible teams to respond to various types of crisis
How to create plans to facilitate crisis response
A common language to facilitate rapid response
Tools to provide for the many needs to students and staff during a crisis
Dan Melville is a school administrator assigned as safety specialist at Sage Canyon Middle School.
“As a new school I hope to use these tools and systems to help us identify, prioritize, and train people and responses to address needs of emergency and crisis response,” he said.
“The job of facility safety and management for large community centers, like schools, can be high stakes, very intense, and complex,” said Melville. “By working together to be informed of best practices and researched based comprehensive approaches and by being collaborative helps generate the best ideas of how to deal with these difficult situations,” he said.
Alpine School District ensures that safety specialists and other employees actively participate in high-level training to remain prepared. The complex nature of school safety requires continuous growth and collaboration with experts. Eventually, all school safety specialists will be trained in the PREPaRE model.
“We have a lot of great people working hard to help keep students safe—and not just in response to emergencies, but also in preparation, prevention, and protection and mitigation,” Gill said. “Educators work hard to help students in each area so that students feel welcome and can thrive in our schools.”