Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Management

Join other schools’ emergency preparedness and crisis management teams for a day of learning and planning. You will learn from experts Martin Speckmaier and John Ganz about best practices in maintaining a safe environment and how to have the right plan in place to deal with traumatic events when they occur.

You are strongly encouraged to attend with your school’s committee or team that makes decisions around emergency planning. A significant part of the day will involve working with this team to hone skills, identify areas of weakness and address these areas in future planning. If you are unable to attend as a team, you will be able to work independently or meet up with others to form an ad hoc group to benefit from each other’s experience.

The Workshop has 2 sections. You will attend both over the course of the day.

Part 1: Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS): Best Practices To Keep Your School Community Safe with Martin Speckmaier

Understanding how to implement best practice procedures under the four phases of REMS – Prevention / Preparedness / Response / Recovery is essential to keeping your school community safe. This empowering presentation will provide an overview of REMS, address the challenges of various configurations of private school campuses, and then provide strategies for effective and sustainable safety and security measures to be in place.

Attendees will learn about threat notification obligations to staff and students, “Duty to Warn-Duty to Protect” obligations and liabilities, emergency preparedness, ICS, NIMS, disaster planning, access control issues, and other pertinent issues facing private schools.

Please bring questions, your current emergency plan handbook, and be prepared to discuss your concerns regarding school campus safety and security. Teams will also be taking back with them workable plans and strategies tailored to the unique challenges posed by their campus.

Part 2: Crisis Management of Traumatic Events in Small School Settings with John Ganz. It is only a matter of time before your school is called upon to deal with an event that challenges your community emotionally and psychologically. Fortunately, we know a great deal about how a traumatic event can impact our school environment. Don’t let your school community wait until this event visits your community. Be prepared to respond effectively.

Traumatic events in school settings challenge school communities on a variety of levels. Though many schools have traumatic event plans, often they go unused. Managing the emotional chaos created by these events while creating and implementing an effective intervention, as well as making the necessary decisions to keep the school community moving forward, are part of our challenge.

In this workshop we will review the emotional and psychological impact of traumatic events on the school community. We will also construct a small school-based intervention plan that will act as a blueprint for a short to medium term intervention aimed at the four major school constituencies: student, parents, faculty, and administration.

Participants will:

• Gain an increased understanding of the emotional and psychological impact of a traumatic event on a school community.
• Explore a small school intervention model
• Construct a scenario-based plan/guideline for a traumatic event intervention
• Develop a plan to identify problems, challenges, and key players to move toward implementing this plan in their school.

Facilitator Biographies

Martin Speckmaier, owner and managing member of Seattle based Comprehensive School Safety, LLC, provides consultations, presentations and trainings to schools and communities which address the latest school-specific safety issues and provide strategies to keep schools safe.

As a School Safety Consultant Martin works with educators, mental health professionals, juvenile justice, and law enforcement to develop and implement district-wide and countywide Threat Assessment Team Systems. Martin’s consultations for educators provide proactive, practical assessments of current safety risks and his trainings focus on violence prevention, cultural diversity, gang prevention, interviewing strategies, bullying, harassment, and crisis preparedness. A 22-year veteran of law enforcement, Martin served as a school resource officer, sexual assault detective, narcotics detective, and patrol officer.

Dr. John Ganz's Ed.D. career includes twenty five years of experience in counseling students and their families, teaching high school and university classes, counseling victims of trauma and violence, facilitating school-based interventions, training school, community and workplace leaders in intervention strategies, and developing programs for debriefing victims of trauma. Recently, Dr. Ganz taught graduate courses in the Department of Education and Counseling at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Since 1986, he has been School Counselor at The Bush School, a K-12 school in Seattle, Washington where he currently heads the Support Services Department. Dr. Ganz has been a presenter at many regional and national conferences including National Association of Independent Schools, and Pacific Northwest Association of Independent Schools. After co-founding Washington Victim Services, a non-profit crime victim advocacy organization, he co-wrote and co-produced two video programs for debriefing groups of victims. Dr. Ganz had been a team leader or team member on several NOVA community-based traumatic event interventions, including leading the NOVA national trauma intervention team following the shooting of high school students in Springfield, Oregon.

Registration

• $95 Early Bird for PNAIS Schools January 5, 2011*
• $145 Late for PNAIS Schools After January 5, 2011
• $175 Non-PNAIS Schools

*To receive the early bird discount, your registration must be complete and payment must be postmarked or received by January 5, 2011.

• For registrations completed by mail or online registrations with payment by check, payment must be postmarked by After January 5, 2011
• Online registrations completed by credit card must be completed by 11:59pm on After January 5, 2011

• Click here for Online Registration
• Download a mail-in registration form

Cancellation Policy

Substitutions may be made any time prior to the conference. Written cancellations received by After January 18, 2011 are eligible for a refund after a $25 cancellation fee. Cancellations received after January 18, 2011 are ineligible for any refund.