The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District is working to improve their emergency action plans in borough schools.
Pegge Erkeneff with the school district said the new training will include all borough principals and administrators for one full day, Wednesday, August 27, along with law enforcement collaboration for additional training August 28 and 29.
Erkeneff: “We’ve taken a look at our emergency action plan and there’s new guidelines coming out for student safety, in fact in June of 2013 Vice President Biden came out with some new guidelines so they’re built upon thousands of hours of studying emergency plans and what we’re looking at now is it used to be kind of only a lock-down procedure in the event of an intruder in a building and what we’ve learned is that we want to give some more options and so this ALICE training, which stands for Alert, Lock down, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, will provide more options which could include running, hiding, or fighting back in the event that there was an intruder in a building, so we’re really looking at what’s the quality of protecting our students and staff that we can provide.”
Erkeneff added that over the past year they have realized how quickly both accurate and inaccurate information spreads when something happens within schools, therefore they will be focusing on quicker information to parents.
Erkeneff: “Using social media or using facebook or twitter or even our mass notification system we’re putting into place more rapid responses to parents so that they get information accurately and quickly and the community, even if we don’t have all the details, to at least say, this is happening.”