Fridays with Chief Trawick: Defining a Technological Crisis Management System and Why It’s Important

Welcome back to another great installment of Fridays with Chief Trawick, a Reimagined Campus Security, LLC public service resource. In today’s post, we’ll be exploring the importance of a crisis management system.

With the emergence of social media bullying and harassment, in conjunction with a saturation of weapons, we in the United States have experienced a rise in school base threats, which on some occasions have risen to active shooter incidents. Therefore, when planning the response protocols for campus emergencies, we must place significant consideration on student accountability and reunification.

With that as a high priority, we should systematically attempt to blend technology with human capital to maximize our efforts to account for, locate, and reunify our students with their families at the conclusion of a crisis. Based on the potential threats, and the need for rapid information and accountability during those crises, a Technological Crisis Management System (TCMS) is paramount.

When considering securing a TCMS, the technology should provide teachers and/or instructors with the ability to instantly access class rosters via issued and/or personal computers or mobile devices (cell phones, tablets, etc.). That rapid capability allows teachers and staff to account for their students without the burden of recalling the locations of manual or written rosters during an emergency, when informational recall may be compromised due to the fear (mind fog) associated with the threat. They should also possess the ability to seamlessly broadcast the data to incident managers, security teams, law enforcement, and administrators during and after the crisis.

Lastly, the technology should be in the form of a mobile app that’s linked or synced to your network to access your campuses' incident-specific action plans, facility maps, and emergency operating procedures quickly and easily. Ensure the process of Parent Reunification is streamlined into the system to provide mobile guardian validation, reunification processing, and student release tracking.

Additionally:

• create processes to track practice drills and the completion of all your drills (Fire, Tornado, Intruder, etc.);
• monitor the compliance of all drill activity from both campus and individual school perspectives, through Drill Compliance Dashboards;
• run reports on drill completion dates, noting the times, start, duration, and drill completion.

I look forward to you continuing along with me on this crusade for the next installment of this series!

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