Sue Scheff: School Safety Partners

As part of being a Parent Advocate, I always like to bring you educational and informational websites and books. Yesterday I learned of School Safety Partners and competely impressed with their dedication to keep your children safe in school as well as educate schools about bullying, cyberbullying and other forms of violence and negative behavior. Learn more visit http://www.schoolsafetypartners.org/

About School Safety Partners:

School Safety Partners is dedicated to creating long-term funding partnerships to support school safety best practices.

We are both a community of interest and a facilitator of joint research projects, reaching out to the general public as well as stakeholders in the public, private, non-profit, and academic sectors. Our purpose is to create a space for stakeholders where true partnering can occur in order to make school safety sustainable beyond Federal funding.

Since our start in January, 2008, our projects have addressed the legislative, training, compliance, funding, and public awareness sides of school safety.

1.We created a reference library documenting all aspects of Colorado Senate Bill 08-181, a first-of-its-kind measure introduced by Senator Tom Wiens to modernize emergency planning in schools, so students, teachers, and first responders can act fast in an emergency.

2.For the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, we produced the national media event, "Colorado Rising," focusing on the future of school safety in America, and our guests and speakers were covered by NBC-TV, CNN, NPR, FOX, Oprah Radio, Channel One News, Associated Press, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, German Public Radio, the Guardian, and dozens of other news sources.

To read more about this event and download the documents distributed, go to
www.SchoolSafetyPartners.org/colorado_rising.html

3.We assisted in the 2008 Symposium and the 2009 Symposium on the Prevention of School Violence at Johnson & Wales University, and in the tabletop exercises on interoperable communications conducted for these events by one of our partners, SchoolSAFE Communications.

4.We produced over 4 hours of video footage, with 2 video crews, covering a full-scale active shooter and multi-hazard school exercise that involved 18 agencies and over 1,200 persons, and tested interoperable communications in several school-related settings.

5.We co-created the School Response Framework Fund in support of the National Incident Managment System (NIMS) and to help Colorado schools become NIMS-compliant as quickly as possible.

6.In cooperation with Senator Wiens and noted school safety expert, Michael Dorn, we developed a toolkit for schools to introduce them to NIMS, the Incident Command System, and the School Response Framework spelled out in Senate Bill 08-181.

7.At the beginning of the school year, we began offering mini-conferences for schools and school disricts in Colorado to discuss school safety legislation, new developments and requirements, training and other resources, interoperable communications, and school safety funding.

8.We also developed a virtual campus that schools can use as an online training site for their safety teams, and as an action center where schools can build strong relationships with community partners, or local responders.

9.We are currently developing with ABC-TV a nationwide community awareness campaign, giving recognition to educators as first responders, and calling for the creation of public-private partnerships to make school safety sustainable in communities across America.

10.We are also currently developing with the creators of the feature motion picture, "April Showers," the educational and school safety materials to accompany the film as it is released to the worldwide educational market.

For more details, see http://www.schoolsafetypartners.org/Communications/176.html

11.Other states have shown an interest in what we have done in Colorado about school crisis response, and for them we have designed webinars and information kits about improving school safety legislation and finding long-term funding solutions.
We hope that you find our information useful and our contacts productive. We invite you to explore all parts of our website, and also share with us your views, experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and innovations. Please register with us online in order to access all of our sections. Registration is free.

School Safety Partners could not have taken shape without the extraordinary consensus-building process that led to a united Colorado General Assembly in support of Senate Bill 08-181. To read about the many individuals who participated in this effort, we invite you to check out the narrative, Model Law: Coordinated Response, in the Quick Tour section of our site.