Emergency Operations Plan for Greenville City Schools

Twelve professionals met on Tuesday, December 11th, 2018 in the Anna Bier room at Memorial Hall to review, discuss and update the Emergency Operations Plan for the Greenville School District. Lieuteant Eric Roberts from the Greenville Police Department with present School Resource Officers Jesse Osswald and Ryan Borowske and future School Resource Officer (SRO) Darren Fox were in attendance. Representing the Greenville Fire Department was Assistant Chief Shannon Fritz. Representing the Darke County Emergency Management Agency was Josh Haney. Doug Fries, Stan Hughes, Andrea Townsend, Chris Mortenson, Rhonda Schaar and Jeff Cassell represented Greenville City Schools. Greenville City Schools updated the plan at the end of last school year and it was approved on June 21, 2018 with the addition of ALICE concepts with our Active Shooter section. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. These are strategies to use depending on the situation at hand.

The ALICE trainings were started at the beginning of the 2017-18 school year with an opening day presentation by Joe Hendry, a National Trainer and an expert consultant to the Ohio Department of Homeland Security for civilian response to active shooter incidents. After the opening day session, Mr. Henry along with Greenville City Staff conducted training exercises with different scenarios. Following this training, all staff with the exception of the bus drivers completed an online training session with ALICE. This training continued again this year with a refresher for returning staff and initial training for new staff and bus drivers. The bus drivers also did the online training, specific to their work. During the summer of 2017, three administrators were trained with ALICE Train the Trainer in northeast Ohio. This past summer, two more administrators were trained. Eight teachers have been trained this year and five more adninistrators will be trainied in June.

During the meeting on December 11, 2018, the group discussed “rally” and “reunification” locations if we need to evacuate GHS, K-8, or Memorial Hall. Building rally locations are where students and staff would go if they need to evacuate a building. Reunification location is a location that students would be transported to meet with family after an incident. This information is confidential so that the general public does not know our plan and could compromise it. We also discussed the use of door jamming devices with pros and cons and the process that is required to use them. In addition, we talked about the National Incident Management System (NIMS) training for staff and administrators. There are three courses online and a few more in the classroom. The NIMS classroom courses will be done by our SROs. The online courses are in addition to ALICE Trainings and they are focused with Incident Command Systems. The new Emergency Operations Plans are due and will be submitted to The Ohio Department of Education by February 3, 2019.

Submitted by Jeffrey S. Cassell, Director of Administrative Services