Talking Points

Hailed as a groundbreaking school safety measure, Colorado Senate Bill 08-181 was not written overnight. It went through over a dozen drafts, marked up by a growing circle of stakeholders across the state.

The primary objectives of the bill remained constant throughout this process. The main thrust of the bill was that it would require schools to:

Develop a school safety and security plan in conjunction with local fire departments, law enforcement agencies, and state agencies;

Enter into memoranda of understanding with affected state and local agencies;

Conduct annual safety and crisis management incident drills and exercises;

Prepare written reports following the drills, exercises, and any incidents;

Identify safety teams responsible for communicating with other agencies; and

Acquire and annually inventory equipment necessary to communicate with other agencies.

The following is a list of talking points for the stakeholder meetings that were held. Many of these points and concepts were made part of the bill on the first page, in Section 1. Legislative Declaration.

1. Each school day, Colorado school personnel are accountable for the safety of over 800,000 students, or about one-fifth of the total population of the state;
   
   
2. Schools are responsible for their own safety, but currently do not have the ability to meet all hazards with the same level of readiness as professional responders such as firefighters and law enforcement officers, for whom readiness is a matter of protecting others while taking every measure to protect one another;
   
   
3. Educators and school personnel are the first responders in the school, on field trips, and at school-related events. They are the first to detect a school-related threat, first to respond to a school-related incident, and last to leave the site of an incident, and they are the ones left to cope with the aftereffects of an incident.
   
   
4. Therefore, schools must achieve a level of readiness acceptable to school personnel, parents, and the community by organizing and designating safety teams and providing them with the safety plans, procedures, training, equipment, and other support they need to not only maintain a safe learning environment and protect the students, but also to protect the educators themselves;
   
   
5. The National Response Framework, released by the Federal Department of Homeland Security, establishes a comprehensive, national, all-hazards approach to domestic incident response and presents the guiding principles that enable all response partners to prepare for and provide a unified national response to disasters and emergencies and to manage incidents that range from the serious but purely local, to large-scale terrorist attacks or catastrophic natural disasters;
   
   
6. The National Incident Management System ("NIMS") is a comprehensive approach to crisis planning and is suitable for schools to implement and the incident command system established by NIMS is the standardized incident organizational structure for the management of all incidents;
   
   
7. Schools must be in compliance with NIMS, and school personnel must be required to be trained in the Incident Command System according to guidelines established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency;
   
   
8. In this regard, schools would benefit from the recent availability of electronic interactive school safety resources on the Internet and should make use of the advantages of distance learning and student-based learning principles that are well understood by schools today;
   
   
9. In addition, the Colorado Community College System offers on-line college-level courses in emergency management and planning that students may apply toward either an associate applied science degree in emergency management and planning or an associate of applied science certificate;
   
   
10. School safety through NIMS compliance is a collaborative process that involves continual design; implementation; testing; stakeholder and public feedback and dialog; evaluation, revision, and refinement; and innovation, research, and sharing of best practices among all parts of the community;
    
    
11. The Department of Public Safety is the state agency that is best qualified to gather all available, on-line, NIMS-related resources in order to publish and distribute a clear NIMS compliance checklist for schools and to provide guidance and additional services to assist schools in achieving all NIMS goals;
    
    
12. Given the large number of school districts and the diversity of communities in Colorado, there is a need for a school safety electronic data gathering and exchange model to facilitate total community engagement in the formulation and implementation of school safety and readiness plans that address specific issues and needs of each community and to increase the ability of all school safety stakeholders to identify and effectively share resources, needs, best practices, and lessons learned at all levels, laying the foundation for long-term support and local, state, and national school response interoperability;
    
    
13. There is an urgent need to build statewide on-line capacity to deliver required NIMS training to thousands of school personnel studying individually or together in groups, allow schools to efficiently interface with the division and emergency managers designated by the division, and provide a school safety, best practices, and NIMS information database that is searchable by school, district, county, all-hazard emergency management region, geographic proximity, type of school, size of school, type of incident, type of community partner, funding source, level of NIMS compliance, type of exercise, type of after-action report, and other search criteria, in order to increase the number of ways to effectively share resources, needs, best practices, and lessons learned;
    
    
14. Grants are available from the Federal departments of Education, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human Services to assist schools and school districts in their emergency management planning, but schools and school districts would be in the best position to qualify for such grants if the schools or school districts were already in compliance with NIMS or had in place memoranda of understanding with local partners such as law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and public health agencies;
    
    
15. State or regional assistance in coordinating grant applications would provide consistency in applications and benefit school districts and schools by creating efficiencies of time and effort; and
    
    
16. State technical assistance would help schools and school districts become NIMS compliant and maintain NIMS compliance.