As part of our consistent efforts to ensure the safety of our students and staff, we were fortunate to enlist the state and local police in 
conducting a ‘live’ exercise at the main complex last week. This was the next logical step to the multiple reviews, tabletop exercises, and practice drills that Gateway has been involved in for many years and gave us an opportunity to experience what would happen in actual time during a particular type of event. As with prior activities, this particular exercise demonstrated a number of strengths and weaknesses in our emergency procedures. Our goal moving forward is to review the information gleaned from this exercise, build upon what worked and modify what didn’t to improve the overall safety of the district.
My thanks to the many state and local police officers who took part in this exercise. It continues to be important to have our local police be familiar with the buildings and to have an opportunity to work with our administrative and support staff. I also continue to be thankful for the continuing support in our emergency planning from members of the Massachusetts State Police STOP division as well as our more locally based members of the state police who assisted in observing and sharing their perceptions. I don’t know whether this level of cooperation exists in other localities and schools but I’m certainly glad that it does here as it provides a wide range of viewpoints, ideas, and suggestions.
I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank the district administrators, support staff, and crisis team members for their continued dedication to the practice of constantly reviewing, updating, and improving our safety plans. As we’ve shared with the community, our safety plans are not based upon a single issue such as an armed intruder, but rather focus on ‘all hazards’. This means that in addition to the types of incidents that always garner media attention, we also plan for more mundane problems such as bus accidents, weather related incidents, natural disasters, medical emergencies, loss of water or electricity and a wide range of other potential problem areas. It is much more likely that one of these other issues will happen on a more routine basis (i.e., weather related incidents). In consistently using the response protocols to any of these incidents, we’re able to become familiar with the process, which will hopefully help us deal with any more serious incident should one ever occur. As with so many things in life, we spend much time and energy planning for the worst and hoping that we’ll never have to actually use said plans in real life. Kudos to everyone who continues to work on improving our plans, and to all of those individuals in our communities–whether they be parents, students, staff, or local officials–for supporting these efforts to help ensure the safety of everyone in the schools and activities of the Gateway Regional School District.
