Tabletop Training: Preparing for Crisis Events

by J. Pat Lamb, Director of Security and Operations, Irving ISD

Very good people sweat the details of security behind the scenes. These details involve response options to any number of incidents, ranging from the trivial to the appalling. Unfortunately, we have been given very real and tragic scenarios recently from which to learn, and by which we may refine existing protocols. These protocols — created, tweaked, and long-evaluated — are our crisis management lifeline. Too often, I fear they sit on shelves neglected by well meaning, but very busy school administrators and principals engaged in the real business of education; these good folks would never intentionally ignore the business of crisis management training and preparation. That said, it falls to each of us to ensure the safety of our students.

I appreciate what Christopher Reeve said when addressing the Democratic National Convention years ago, “All of us need to help all of us.” When it comes to providing that very basic of imperatives, that is, a safe and secure environment for our students and teachers, we are in this quest for safety together. And working together is what it will take in the long run to thwart senseless violence in our schools.

We strive to achieve the goal of providing a safe and secure environment for our students, teachers, and visitors through many avenues; the most prominent being the use of crisis management training. Each of our schools has a crisis management team. This team is comprised of professionals, paraprofessionals, and classified personnel; that is, we have principals, teachers, office staff, librarians, nurses, and custodians on this team with the sole purpose of preparing a response to any number of crisis events. For the past five years, I’ve conducted crisis management tabletop training with these teams. In the relative calm of an office, we gather for one hour. During that hour, I give a brief overview of the training; I ask each member of the team to explain their role relative to crises, in general; I review the campus-specific crisis management plan; and, I conduct the scenario training. The scenario can range from a missing student to an active shooter. The goal of the training is to let the team talk out their responses to conclusion, evaluating those responses in hopes of improving upon their plan. Brenda Bingham, a thirty-year education veteran and current principal of Britain Elementary, was one of the first principals to embrace this training. As fate would have it, we conducted her team’s first tabletop session on September 10, 2001. “It is amazing how calmly and precisely we were able to carry out actions as our nation was in crisis. We had a checkout system which remained customer-friendly in spite of the high security measures we put in place. Just the confidence the tabletop scenarios instill is a huge reason to partake in them.” Tracie Fraley, who now serves as our divisional director of secondary teaching and learning, served as a principal for 14 years, and several of those years were spent at our MacArthur High School. She wants all administrators to know that crisis management training “is the most crucial piece of maintaining a safe school environment! While many school leaders see this training as something they do not have time to do, with all the high stakes of testing and the like, it is a necessary part of what we must do. As a campus principal, I have weathered a gas leak, bomb threats, fires, a tornado, and student illnesses; I’ve had a teacher suffer a heart attack, experienced the death of a student, and dealt with an outsider in the building who was in possession of a gun. Because we took the time to be prepared with a comprehensive plan that we taught to and practiced with all stakeholders – I NEVER had one parent complaint or concern when these events occurred or in the aftermath.”

Experience has a way of proving the value of certain training. Though we may never completely eliminate the threat of violence at our schools, our experience certainly suggests we can prepare with the intent of preventing it from reaching crisis level and completely disintegrating the trust between a community and its school system. Parents and teachers have a common goal: that students enjoy school in an environment maintained by caring, knowledgeable, and experienced administrators … those who look for the uncommon, the out-of-place, the anomaly. This crisis management training seeks to disclose vulnerabilities in our response protocols; once we understand the gaps in our current plan, we can set out processes to mitigate the inherent threats relative to those gaps or vulnerabilities.

When I sit down with our crisis management teams, I go over several ground rules before we work through the scenario. The rules are simple and are given to help ensure everyone who has an opinion is afforded the opportunity to share that opinion.

1. Fight the scenario’s problem and not the structure: In other words, some personnel may think that the scenario could not possibly occur at their campus because of precautions they may have in place. That being understood, this ground rule states that the campus must assume the circumstances as given in the scenario.

2. Don’t look to your School Resource Officer, or to another “outside” authority figure who may be present, for your primary guidance: Each team needs to work through the scenario by discussing what their roles and response actions are relative to the crisis event. When the time is right, “outsider” input is given in order to keep the exercise moving towards completion. The team should not count on one person, say the principal, for instance, to “carry” them; everyone has to be engaged.

3. Everyone’s opinion counts: Each team has a written plan; as the team encounters the scenario, they find gaps in that plan. I’ve seen gaps discovered and solved by custodians, food service personnel, librarians, attendance clerks…you see the point. We need to listen to everyone involved. Each voice counts; each opinion holds value.

4. Work with the staff you have on your team: My favorite stunt is to remove the principal in the exercise. I usually have them at some training event out of town. That means one of the vice-principals, or the assistant principal, has to take the lead. It forces the issue and stretches the players. Invariably, those most stretched are most appreciative of the opportunity the exercise affords.

We work together for an hour and even if we’ve not completed the scenario, we discontinue the training at the end of that hour. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and busy people have many things to attend to during an academic day. I do appreciate, and have seen in a number of situations, campus crisis teams who continue the training at a later time, usually with the rest of their teachers and staff. At the end of the hour, I encourage the team to evaluate their efforts and to state what gaps in their plan they’ve discovered. I then ask for each member to complete our survey. From conducting these tabletop training sessions, I’ve adopted a short list of hot topics that demand the attention of our campus teams.

1. When a school goes into lockdown, should it use a code word or phrase, or plain text? One of the concerns brought forth from the Colorado school was that when the administration called for teachers to go into “Code White,” not all teachers knew instantly what that code was, and they had to find a piece of paper on which the code was deciphered. I’d submit to you that it is always better to plainly tell the teachers, and especially the substitute teachers, to go into a lockdown; give them explicit instructions during stressful situations.

2. Substitutes don’t have access to computers. They rarely receive a building key. They can’t be expected to remember a series of code words or phrases. Many won’t know the egress routes relative to fire drills, bomb threats, and the like. How will you provide timely information for them? How will you care for the students under their tutelage? Moments count in a hostile situation. Plan now.

3. Make the custodian and the kitchen manager a part of your crisis management team. When your police department establishes a crisis command post, they will want to talk with your head custodian, since he knows where all the cut-offs are located. As well, your kitchen staff needs to know how to respond should a need for lockdown or evacuation occur when hundreds of students are under their care.

4. Train with the newest teacher/employee in mind. I appreciate that the members of the crisis team know what to do in a given situation, but will the newest teacher/employee know what to do? Include this training when you conduct in-service training.

5. Employ the use of visitor identification. There are several sources available, but we’re piloting a program offered by Raptor Technologies. Within moments, a campus will know if it has a Registered Sexual Offender on its campus (the system accesses the RSO lists in 47 states). As well, when the authorities arrive and want to know who is in the building, we can simply click on the “Who is in the Building?” link for a quick download. It’s important to know who is on your campus at all times.

6. Positively engage all visitors in your school. Don’t allow any adult to walk around or within your campus without being challenged. Everyone should have to sign in at the front desk and receive a visitor’s pass. Everyone.

7. Become evangelists of your crisis plan. Talk about security at every opportunity. Plan together. Create strategies. Understand your vulnerabilities. Raise awareness. Send out a monthly email to your principals highlighting one security point they can focus on when training their staffs (see insert 4 for this month’s email). Refuse to let security take a back seat. Sweat the details of security now. Value everyone’s opinion.

Conclusion

We cannot prevent all violence against our schools. That’s a given. We can, however, have the courage to run towards, and not away from, that which causes us fear; we can understand the source of our greatest fear, analyzing its component parts, all for the purpose of rendering it manageable. And once we know our security vulnerabilities, we can start the process of resolving them. We can do something about violence and how we respond to it; we can make a difference; we can lessen the threat. We must not allow apathy to set in. The “horrific” really could happen in our districts. I imagine that if we had questioned the participants in these most recent events, on the morning of the hostilities, and asked if they thought any such violence could occur in their schools, they most likely would have been skeptic to the possibility. Yet, as was proven again, violence knows no bounds and is not relegated to factors such as geographic location, socio-economic condition, religious affiliation, or other so-called determinants. Any time, any place, violence can be perpetrated on our school grounds; it’s a lesson we all must learn. It takes communities of people to provide for the safety of our schools. And as we respond, as together we sweat the details of security behind the scenes, our schools will continue to be the safest places in our communities. Truly, failure is not an option.