While the focus in schools is on education, the top priority always is to keep children safe.
Clackamas ESD provides a range of emergency management and school safety support to our partner districts along with districts served by the Multnomah and NW Regional ESDs, thanks to a federal emergency management grant secured through the Oregon Department of Education.
On November 2nd, 2022, we hosted – in partnership with multiple organizations – a safe schools/emergency management summit to offer district leaders thoughtful guidance, and help them build and strengthen relationships with regional law enforcement officials.
School safety is an “everybody” job, which was clear by the breadth of attendance at the summit. Superintendents; leaders of district teams in human resources, operations, facilities, nursing and communications; school resource officers and other regional public safety leaders, including Clackamas County Sheriff Angela Brandenburg and Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth, all participated in the event.
Keynote speaker Bryan Flannery, president of Foresight Security Consulting, detailed the critical role that threat assessment plays in security planning. Dan Kraus, Clackamas ESD’s emergency operations/school safety specialist, led an interactive exercise on identifying and closing security gaps in schools. Summit participants also had the opportunity to dive more deeply into specialized topics such as facility security, staff wellness and incident response protocols.
Representatives of the North Clackamas School District and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office debriefed a recent lockdown incident at a high school as a real-world example of safety preparation and threat response. The team shared their learnings around communications, messaging and making immediate decisions based on information available. They also emphasized that even when everyone is safe, any kind of emergency action at a school creates trauma for students and staff that must be dealt with.
One of the greatest values of the summit simply was bringing district teams and regional first responders together to discuss common concerns and needs, and forge new partnerships.
“You don’t want to wait until a crisis hits to learn how to work together,” said Kraus.
Participants in the day’s activities lamented the reality that school shootings have become the norm, and that society has somehow accepted that. One attendee noted the need for school safety to become a top priority for everyone.
“We read a lot about reading scores and math scores,” he said. “This is ultimately more important than that.”
