Over the past 20 years, I have spent countless hours working with schools to enable innovation, communication, safety and transformation. Today, I had the pleasure to meet Alissa Parker & Michelle Gay founders of #SafeAndSoundSchools at the @Region13’s School Safety Summit. The key things I walked away with were:

Communication is the foundation for everything!

• Who is responsible for communicating?
• Who is the 2nd layer and 3rd layer that is trained and ready to communicate?
• What are your plans to communicate to teachers and students, families and others?
• Who, when, where, what will you communicate?
• How can you improve the accuracy of the information you are communicating?

Create Plans B, C and D as well as X, Y and Z

Plan A will probably fail within minutes, or even seconds of a critical incident. Therefore, everyone and everything needs a backup plan with a back up plan for the backup plan.

Not Here

We all believe that it will never happen “Here”. But it can. As a society, we must remove our blinders, we must prepare today, we must move past status quo and we must prepare like we know it can and will happen HERE. Only then, will we be able to maximize the number of lives we save.

Recovery Begins with Response

The painful truth is that the longer the delay, the more trauma long term for the survivors. The more information we have, the better we prepare, the better we communicate, the sooner the healing process can begin for both the survivors and the community as a whole.