Recording from April 30, 2025
What This K-12 Reunification Webinar Covered
Most schools have a plan for the moment an emergency begins. Far fewer have a detailed, practiced plan for what happens after — the process of safely transferring every student back to a parent or guardian. This webinar brought together two members of The “I Love U Guys” Foundation with three decades of real-world reunification experience between them and the Chief Product Officer of Singlewire Visitor Aware to work through the Standard Reunification Method (SRM): what it requires, where schools get stuck, and how to build a process that holds up when it matters.
The panel opened with the fundamentals of the SRM, available at no cost at iloveyouguys.org. Unlike the Standard Response Protocol, the SRM is intentionally flexible — a method, not a mandate. Schools are encouraged to take what fits their size, resources, and layout and leave what doesn’t. The discussion covered where to start: drilling with adults before students are involved, practicing at the actual reunification site, and building the team around skill sets rather than job titles. First responders — police, fire, and emergency management — belong in both the planning sessions and the drills. They see the campus differently than staff do, and their perspective on traffic flow, perimeter setup, and on-site coordination can save significant time on the day.
A major thread throughout the conversation was communication — before, during, and after. Targeted notifications sent through Singlewire InformaCast, drawing from the student information system, mean only designated guardians receive a reunification alert. Pre-built message templates eliminate the need to draft communication under pressure. Crucially, trust with families is built long before any incident: brief conversations at school events, advance notice before drills, and talking points for guardians turn an anxious crowd into informed partners. The panel was equally direct about student accountability: Visitor Aware’s family reunification dashboard lets every teacher mark their students’ location and status in real time, giving the safety team a live picture of who has been accounted for, who hasn’t, and where resources are needed.
The webinar closed with lessons earned from more than 30 real reunifications. None were perfect, and that is the point — the goal is a process that holds, adjusts as needed, and protects the custody transfer that is ultimately the school’s responsibility to complete. Build redundancy into sites and team roles, train substitutes, plan for technology outages, and keep communicating with vendors, neighboring districts, and community partners. Reunification is not the end of the incident. It is the moment a community judges how prepared their school truly was.
Panel Participants
Chris Swietlik (Host) • Director of Communications • Singlewire Software
Betsy Miller • Instructor/Explorer • The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Pat Hamilton • Alliance Director • The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Joanna Haugland • Chief Product Officer • Singlewire Visitor Aware
Five Key Takeaways for Your Reunification Plan
- Reunification is a school responsibility — and it needs a written plan — When law enforcement clears a scene or fire confirms the building is safe, their role ends. Getting every student into the hands of the right guardian is the school’s responsibility, whether the incident was a power outage, a gas leak, or something more serious. The Standard Reunification Method gives schools a flexible, free framework to build from — available at iloveyouguys.org — and the panel’s message was clear: winging it is not a plan.
- Drill with adults before students, and practice where it will happen — The purpose of a drill is to find gaps, not to perform flawlessly. Initial reunification drills work best with adults playing every role — teachers, parents, and reunification team members alike. Practice at the actual reunification site so teams learn the walking paths, station placement, and entry and exit flow. Once the process is solid and the gaps are addressed, bring in students and invite first responders to participate. A panelist who ran more than 30 real reunifications did student-inclusive drills only twice in that entire period.
- Communicate before the incident — and to the right people when it happens — The first reunification notification should go only to designated guardians, drawn directly from the student information system, not broadcast broadly. Pre-built message templates in InformaCast eliminate the need to draft communication under pressure. But community trust starts long before any event: a five-minute conversation at a school concert, advance notice before every drill, and talking points for families afterward all build the kind of familiarity that keeps reunification calm. Parents who understand the process become advocates for it.
- Real-time student accountability is the core of every reunification — No guardian can receive a student until the school knows where that student is. Visitor Aware’s family reunification dashboard lets teachers account for students in real time — logging their location, status, and any special circumstances — without radio chatter, paper cross-checks, or separate communications. When an InformaCast scenario resolves, Visitor Aware transitions directly into the family reunification process. The same dashboard that shows who is safe, who is still unaccounted for, and where resources are needed also maintains a permanent digital record of the custody transfer.
- Build in redundancy, give yourself grace, and keep improving — Identify multiple reunification sites in case a primary location is unavailable. Build backups into every team role — substitutes, part-time staff, and community partners all need to know their part. Plan for technology outages: Visitor Aware’s CSV export option means a data or Wi-Fi loss does not stop the process. After every drill and every real event, debrief, survey staff, and update the plan. Neighboring districts, emergency managers, and The “I Love U Guys” Foundation itself can help connect schools that are building from scratch with communities that have already done this work.
Resources Referenced in This Webinar
The “I Love U Guys” Foundation — SRM resources (free)
Visitor Aware Safety Manager
www.singlewire.com/safety-manager
Singlewire Safety Grant Funding Guide
www.singlewire.com/safety-grants
Account for every student. Reunify every family.
Safety manager keeps your reunification process connected — from real-time student accountability to family check-in and custody transfer — all within the same platform as your emergency notifications. See how it works for your school.
Read the Full Webinar Transcript
This transcript was generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker attributions are approximate.
Chris Swietlik — Host · Singlewire Software
Welcome, everyone, to today’s webinar, planning together, overcoming k twelve reunification challenges.
This webinar is presented by Singlewire Software and the I Love You Guys Foundation.
I’m Chris Swietlik. I’m the director of communications at Singlewire Software.
Today, we’ll be covering the challenges, solutions, and best practices for k twelve reunification with our panel of experts.
To kick things off, we’re gonna be launching a poll to see how attendees are currently handling reunification. So if you can take a moment and respond to that poll when it appears, and we will do a little housekeeping to kick things off here as that comes up.
Wanted to start by saying that throughout the webinar, all attendees will be muted. So if you have questions, please put them into the chat.
We’ll be addressing questions as they appear throughout the webinar, and we’ll leave time at the end to answer any questions that we don’t get to or if anything else comes up.
Also, this session is being recorded, so a link will be available once the session is over.
We will send out a link where you can access it, if you need it.
So I wanna start by, bringing our panelists up and introducing themselves. And if we can start with Betsy.
I think, Betsy, if you can thank you.
Betsy Miller — Instructor/Explorer · The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Way to kick off the webinar. Right? First person do not unmute.
Anyway, I’m Betsy Miller, and I’m an instructor explorer with the I Love You Guys Foundation. I’ve been with the foundation for almost two years now, but prior to that, I was an educator for over thirty three years in Adams Twelve Five Star Schools in Colorado. I started off as a teacher, assistant principal, and a principal at both the elementary and middle school levels. So, hopefully, we’ll be able to bring in some of those experiences that I had and some of my colleagues had into this conversation today.
Chris Swietlik
Great. Thank you for joining us, Betsy. And then we’ll kick things over to Pat.
Pat Hamilton — Alliance Director · The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Hi, everyone. Pat Hamilton. I am the alliance director for the foundation, and my one year anniversary is tomorrow with the foundation, which is kinda crazy already. But before joining the foundation, I was on the board of directors. I’ve been involved with the foundation since two thousand and nine in the Keyes family, and I served, as the chief operating officer for Adams twelve five star schools and was with the district for twenty three years. So thanks for having us.
Chris Swietlik
Great. And lastly, we’ll bring Joanna on the stage here.
Joanna Haugland — Chief Product Officer · Singlewire Visitor Aware
Hi. My name is Joanna Haugland, and I’m the chief product officer of the Visitor Aware product suite with Singlewire Software. Thanks for having me.
Chris Swietlik
Great. Well, as you can see, we’ve had some people start to respond to our poll question. And it seems like far and away that running trainings and drills to prepare for reunification is one of the biggest challenges, that our attendees are facing.
And so, Pat, I’m wondering if maybe we can kick things off by just talking about some ways that they might address this challenge.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. Absolutely.
And I’m glad to see that, basically, we haven’t had any responses for identifying the reunification team. So that means we’ve got a lot of people on the call that are already on their journey, to have a reunification plan. So for training and drills oh, something as soon as I said that someone said help you out, let me chime in real quick and add one.
So on writing and training and drills, you know, I think the one of the first things that I would recommend is that unlike our standard response protocol drills when we’re when we’re drilling for lockdown or evacuate or shelter. For reunification, we don’t need to involve the students. We can have adults that play the role of students, adults that are playing the role of teacher and parent, and reunification team. So not having students involved with those drills, at least those initial drills is a it’s a good thing. It’s a good place to start because you’re kind of in that safe place.
The whole intent of running drills and trainings is to identify those gaps. So your drills don’t have to be perfect ever. Let those drills look for those mistakes, throw challenges, throw some, injects in there that might your team might not be prepared for to see if you can identify those breaking points and then create a plan to work around those. So that would be my first advice.
And then, also, if you can run your if you have a location that’s already selected, if you can run drills in your pre identified, re reunification areas and locations, that’s gonna help you as well. It gets your team familiar with those areas. It’s gonna get you familiar with the walking paths themselves, how far away is your parent check-in gonna be from reunification.
So the more of those drills you can practice in those areas and the buildings that you have identified to run reunification, the easier it’s gonna make things for you, like, just from my own practice. But, yeah, we rarely would practice with students. I think we did that twice, in all the years I did this. And by the way, I’ve done over thirty reunifications when I was with Adams Twelve, real ones.
Thankfully, none of those were as a result of an active assailant situation inside the building, but we certainly had acts of violence that occurred on school grounds outside of our schools. So, yeah, we only did really two drills with students that was kind of early on. And then from that point forward, we just ran them with adults. We were able to teach the same methods.
Chris Swietlik
That’s great. What’s your Joanna, anything to add on that topic?
Joanna Haugland
Yes. And then to build off of what Pat mentioned, when you are ready to start running those drills or mapping out those drills on a specific, interval, So at the beginning of the year, you as a school have x number of drills, x number of drill types. You can map those out within the Visitor Aware Safety Manager module, which includes a Safety Drill Manager. So that allows you to map out those specific dates and times and specific drills that need to be run per school location so that you can have those already mapped out, preconfigured ahead of time, and ready to roll that out and practice those with your students. So after you as faculty and staff have that process down, you’ve practiced it, and you’re ready to incorporate those students into that process, you can then use the Visitor Aware Safety Drill Manager module to accomplish that in a strategic manner.
Pat Hamilton
That would be really helpful as well, Joanna, on as far as you know, much like our lockdown drills, we do recommend that when you’re gonna run some of these reunification drills that you invite your local first responders, law enforcement, fire, emergency management so they can see that you have a plan. So being able to give them some advanced notification as well so they could participate in those drills will make your drills that much more beneficial and helpful.
Joanna Haugland
And there are so many different things that I wanna say right now for tools that are inside of Visitor Aware to help with that. So we actually have a way for emergency response teams to have a subscription to your drill calendar. So without giving them access to the Visitor Aware product itself, they can have access or insight into those drills that are coming up and that are planned on that schedule. So then even including those teams outside of your direct organization with your school to keep them in the know and let them know ahead of time as well.
Chris Swietlik
I think that we covered a lot of what was sort of the most pressing concern in that poll question, but we identified a couple other items in that poll that we know can be challenges that schools experience.
They might have, you know, different weight depending on what the school is experiencing.
But when we’re talking about building not just a reunification plan, but an effective reunification plan, what are some other common challenges that schools might experience?
Pat Hamilton
I’ll I’ll start, and then I’ll I’ll look to my co presenters here. But I think I’ll start with maybe something that we talk about in our training, and that’s who kind of owns what. So we say that cops own the crime, fire owns the flames, EMT, and those medical services own the patients. And schools, we own the students.
And so reunification and getting reunification right is really gonna be an it’s gonna be our responsibility at some point in any crisis. And it doesn’t have to be, again, an active assailant situation. It could be a power outage, a gas leak. Anything that makes you have to close the school down early, you may have to run reunification to get those students safely with their parents.
You know, at ten o’clock in the morning, you’re not necessarily just gonna ring the bell and let kindergartners or first graders walk home. You don’t know what they’re walking home to. So reunification is a great tool to have in that case. But, to circle back to that.
So, having that plan in place and, gosh, I lost track of what I was saying there. But having that plan in place, practicing that plan will make things a lot easier for you, Chris. And, Betsy, I’ll turn it over to you because you oh, so on who owns things? So what I was gonna say about that was there’s gonna be a transfer of command.
So it might be maybe that fire has responded to your school for a gas leak, and they’ve determined that there is an active gas leak maybe in your school or in the community that’s gonna result in an evacuation.
Fire part, they’ve done their job in that situation, and they’re gonna say, you need to evacuate, but they’re not gonna run your reunification for you. So as a school system and a school district, we need to have a plan for that reunification.
So that was my that was gonna be my advocacy point there is that we own the kids.
Even after the crisis is over, we have to own that part of the process, and that’s ours. We need to get it right.
Betsy Miller
Yeah. And I would add on to that some of the challenges is communication. We hear that a lot from our first responders and people who have responded to incidences, and crisis situations that they hear that over and over again. Communication, communication, communication is the greatest challenge.
And that is the case, and it’s not just communication with the first responders that are arriving, but it’s communication with your own staff, communicating what is appropriate to communicate to the students, and then, of course, communication to your parents and the general community. And so really having, again, an advanced plan for what that’s gonna look like, developing templates in advance for getting that message out and having an accurate, accurate message that’s going to the families and the community because they’re that’s what’s you wanna communicate early and often with accurate information.
And if you’re not doing that, they’re gonna start listening to the their local, Facebook group or, you know, the neighborhood ring people, and so you want to make sure that as a school, as a leader, as a principal, you’re getting that message out.
Joanna Haugland
I would also good Yeah.
Pat Hamilton
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Joanna Haugland
Communication is huge. So within Visitor Aware and InformaCast, that mass communication piece can actually be configured for that template that you’re talking about. So getting that messaging out, not having to think in the moment of, okay, what needs to go into this messaging? It’s already preconfigured in that template.
If that scenario were to happen, that’s already being sent out to those people that are designated to receive that messaging. So what we call distribution groups. So all that is already assigned. You hit that button.
Everything just works, then that messaging is out there. So having that messaging ahead of time preconfigured is a great way to handle that.
Pat Hamilton
It is. I was gonna add there too that, don’t let the first time your parents ever hear about reunification is when they’re getting called to the school to do some to do, reunification with their students. So, definitely, this is one of those things we don’t need to keep it a secret. We it’s okay to tell our community, to tell our parents ahead of time, we have a plan for this, and you can explain what their expectations are. You know, it’s you’re gonna be told where to go. You’re gonna be expected to have an ID with you.
There is a process for this. The process is gonna take a little bit of time, but you don’t have to necessarily tell them. And I wouldn’t necessarily tell them where the reunification site’s gonna be, in advance, because that will just create a line of parents that are waiting for to do reunification when you maybe haven’t even decided where you’re gonna do reunification. So, you don’t need to tell them where, but you can certainly tell them about we have a plan. This is what the plan looks like. This is your part.
The standard reunification method, part of that method is giving the parent a role in the reunification. They have a responsibility, to get their student back as well. So it’s filling out that card. It’s having that ID, and it’s not yelling at school staff that are doing their best that we can in that situation.
Joanna Haugland
Yes. And I yell at school staff. Yes.
That
Betsy Miller
And as a principal, I can tell you.
Right? We know how much parents, and they read every email we send home, every flyer. They’re continually checking the website. Right?
We also have those parents that we need to have a safety meeting. So you host the safety meeting. Two, three people show up. But I used to catch them when I had that captive audience to communicate this information when they were there for a sporting event or a play or a choir concert.
Spend five minutes talking about your reunification plan. And I’ll tell you, you’re gonna get a lot of allies in the community when they’re when they hear this message, and they’re gonna feel a lot of comfort that the school and the district has a plan if something happens to get their kids safely back to them. And so, really take advantage of when you have them as a captive audience. Just share your message.
Pat Hamilton
Can I share a quick story about that real quick? Just briefly. So, reunification. It was a hard day. We had had an attempted abduction from one of our middle schools, and we were reunifying three schools at the same time because the suspect was still at large.
The second person in that line, he had the card in his hand. We were explaining what the process was gonna be and that we had a process, and that person said, you guys don’t have a process. You’re just making this up. Well, okay.
Well, we had the cards in our hand, and we didn’t just print those cards. But I didn’t have to say anything because the two parents that were behind him in line, the two moms went full, mama bear on him, and they explained to them very nicely that we did have a process, and I just had to step away. So having those conversations before that choir concert paid off for me in that case. So, yeah, great advice.
Joanna Haugland
Those moms can be vicious too.
Pat Hamilton
They can. Yes. They can.
Joanna Haugland
I’m one, by the way.
Pat Hamilton
Oh, good.
Chris Swietlik
Same.
It’s always good to have, the right advocates in your corner.
I wanna shift the conversation a little bit. We’ve talked about the challenges. We understand what the hurdles are.
And we might even understand we know what we need to do at the end of the day, which is get these students back into the care of their guardians.
But that’s a big process. There are a lot of parts to it. So where should schools be starting if they’re starting from scratch or even if they have a plan in place that they know needs a little touch up?
Pat Hamilton
Okay. Well, I’m I’m biased, so I’ll get my bias right out into the room. I would always recommend people go to iloveyouguys.org and then go to the standard reunification method page, and there’s all of our resources are there at no cost. We don’t ask for emails.
It’s a we call it a frictionless download. So it’s there. Take it. Take what works for you.
Unlike the standard, response protocol where we want people to actually adhere to that really tightly oh, thank you. Thanks, Chris.
The SRM, on the other case, is really it’s what works for you. So take the parts and the pieces that work for you. I was fortunate.
I worked in a district that had, five thousand staff members and thirty three thousand students. So we had a lot of resources.
I went to school in a district that had a thousand students and only about a hundred fifty teachers and resources total. So I understand the differences in the complexity, of the reunification, what it’s gonna require, and that’s why this is a method. So please take it. Take what works for you. If it doesn’t work for you, leave it on a table. There’s a whole bunch of resources on that page. You don’t have to use them all.
Betsy Miller
Yeah.
I would add to that. Start small. Because there’s so many resources, don’t feel like you have to use it all. Start with, you know, even start with your safety team and develop your plan.
Go to your walk or to your reunification site, walk that site, determine your path, where each of your stations are going to be when you have your plan, and then train as a safety team first and find the gaps and the challenges before you even feel like you need to roll it out to the rest of your staff. As that smaller safety team, it’s a little more manageable. You can find those, pain points, so to speak, and you can fix them before you share the plan with everybody else. But the bottom line is sometimes it’s just sort of stepping off that cliff, so to speak.
Just taking that first step and get going down the path, and developing your to do list and just each week checking one or two things off that to do list and starting down that path. Sometimes, that’s the hardest part. And don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.
Pat Hamilton
That’s a good point. I’ve, of the thirty of reunifications or I stopped counting at thirty, but of those, I never had a perfect reunification.
I had thirty successful reunifications, some more successful than others, but definitely never had a perfect one. So give yourself some grace in that space.
And then it’s it’s not a complicated system. Once you really dive into it, you’ll realize it’s not complicated, but it does take some elbow grease and some effort. And make sure that you are including those community partners. Again, law enforcement, fire, EMT, those folks have them in some of those planning sessions because they’re just gonna see it differently maybe than you do.
So it’s that it’s the forest-for-the-trees kind of analogy. You might be thinking of having your parents park in a particular part of your campus for reunification, and your law enforcement partners might tell you, man, actually, if we were involved, we could help you reroute traffic this way to get, you know, cars in and out off of that campus easier without ever having students and adults trying to cross in front of traffic, things like that. So they just bring different perspective that we don’t necessarily think about every day. I was never a school principal, so I do know from talking to school principals that you all think about traffic all day every day because you have drop off and pickup.
But it’s good to have those voices in the room as well because they just might see in that particular day for that what you’re gonna try to accomplish in that day, which is reunifying students very quickly with their parents, in a way that creates accountability.
They might have some tips and tricks for you that you just haven’t thought of because they’re they just they drive past your campus every day and see it differently than you do. So include them in the those initial conversations. It’ll be really helpful. And then, again, I’ll throw it in there again. iloveyouguys.org, for sure.
Go around there.
Take what you want.
Betsy Miller
For sure.
Pat Hamilton
No cost. Yeah.
Betsy Miller
I would add to that too as you’re developing your teams, thinking about, people’s strengths and their skill set.
Just because, you they’re the PE teacher that maybe sometimes gets a bad rap, but because they’re just the PE teacher, well, they could have some strong leadership skills. Maybe they’re, they’ve had some background in the Visitor, and maybe they would be a good fit for an incident commander position.
You know, so titles may not be the same in your school as they are through this reunification process, but skill sets do cross over. And you think about, you know, who’s gonna be a good fit for the greeters. You’re gonna have those first frontline folks that are welcoming the parents to the reunification, site. What kind of skills do they need, in that position?
You know, friendly, outgoing, maybe they know the families and the community. Maybe they speak multiple languages. So we kind of think of that greeting, happy, welcoming, but they also need to be able to be problem solvers because parents are gonna come elevated and maybe anxious and worried, and so you need to be able to help problem solve anything that they have and then also have a have a backbone because we also know parents and, you know, we can all be guilty of that wanting to sidestep the process. So having a plan in place and be able to say this is our process, we need you to follow the process.
And, you know, that’s the same for each of the stations as you go through. So really thinking about the strengths of the people, that can serve on your team makes a huge, huge difference.
Joanna Haugland
And then Yeah.
Pat Hamilton
The other option is to find, is to find those two mama bears and give them each a reunification vest and then just have them walk around with you.
Joanna Haugland
That’s right. Those mom networks are pretty tight, so they probably know everybody by first name, really.
Wow. Thanks. Hundred percent.
And then in Visitor Aware, you mentioned family reunification team members, so those individuals that are helping to run the process and manage everything. Within Visitor Aware, you can actually assign users to that location even if they’re not rostered to that location. So, depending on how you wanna run things, as far as who is ideal for that position within that reunification process, you can actually grant that user access to that location to help manage that operation.
Pat Hamilton
That makes that makes, you know, we recommend that you identify for your reunification team that you identify people who are not directly responsible for students at the at the impacted site. So what that means in layman terms is if your school’s being reunified, that school staff, maybe with the exception of maybe an office manager or someone, that’s bilingual that knows parents. But other than that, you want those teachers their job is to manage those students. They’ve got the relationship with those students.
They’re gonna keep the students comfortable. So their job is really the student management part. The principal has a job as well. They’re at the very end of the process.
So that last face that, a parent and a student is gonna see, we want that to be that school principal so they can do the hug and go and tell and explain what’s going on and what is the next day going to look like. Is it you know, if the school maybe the school had a fire, and you know you’re not gonna be back in school for a couple of days. For the principal to do be able to deliver that message to the parent and the student is really important. So, yeah, identifying strengths, of the people that are gonna be on your team and also realizing that we really can’t ask the people from the impacted site to be involved with reunification other than the student management and student care that they’re gonna do on a daily basis anyway.
Chris Swietlik
Going off of that, Pat, what now that we’ve talked through and where we kinda start, what once we have this plan in place, what are the benefits that schools are gonna see should they have to go through this process?
Pat Hamilton
Well, you can avoid, a method that we call the Simba method, which is my the very the very first reunification I did, was it’s a middle school, about a thousand kids, and it took four hours. And it was really painful, and it would look a lot like the Symba method. And that’s when you walk out with the students and you have, an SRO or somebody lift that student up and you ask whose child is this. That’s why it took forever.
So you can avoid that, those painful types of excruciatingly long reunification processes because all that’s gonna do is create angst and anxiety with your students and with your parents. So we don’t wanna we don’t wanna create trauma on top of what might what, what might already be a traumatic experience. Experience. Even if it’s something for us, we might think, oh, it’s a you know, it was a busted water pipe.
But, again, we are disrupting a student’s educational environment and their day, and we’re disrupting our parents’ work environment and their day. So they’re gonna be a little bit elevated. So the more reassured they can be that we have that process and the smoother that process goes, most likely their anxiety is gonna come down. The other thing too is on any crisis, this is the last component of the day, whether that be an active assailant or one of these situations that’s not quite as stressful as that.
But this is gonna be the last thing that we do for the day. And then because students and parents are gonna get reunified. They’re gonna go home, and they’re gonna wait for additional communication from us on what the next day looks like or what the future plans are. So having this go right will save your voice mail.
So after that first reunification I did, that was awful. And by the way, I did two or three that were really, really bad. That was just painful.
I would spend the next couple of days returning calls to parents to explain, we’re going to do better. We’re figuring this out. We’re gonna do better. So if you can have this right the first time, or mostly right, again, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but mostly right the first time, you can save yourself some time on the back end returning calls and apologizing to people, which is that’s never fun either. It’s part of the job, but it’s it’s a part of the job we can avoid if we plan for unification correctly.
And tell those parent by the way and, again, I’ll come back to tell your parents what you’re working on. Tell them what tell them what their role is. You we don’t need you to go to a reunification site until we ask you to. I mean, that’s a really stay home, stay informed, and be ready. Those are the things that we tell our parents.
Betsy Miller
Yeah. And that communication really builds trust with the community. And as we said before, then they become your advocates. They start spreading the message to others that aren’t getting the message at school.
Chris Swietlik
Can we build off that a little bit too?
I know we’ve talked a little bit about some of the strategies for communicating with parents. You know, Betsy, you shared some good examples about taking advantage of other, types of events that are not necessarily safety focused. But when we’re talking about first responders, when we’re talking about the community at large that, you know, may not have a student at the school, but, you know, they’re around the school, they’re in the area, but, you know, if you’re a school leader, you don’t want them to be if you’re trying to do reunification.
How can we build those strategies to effectively communicate with the different audiences that all need to be informed about this process?
Pat Hamilton
That’s a great that is a great question, and I think it’s it’s maybe one of the first things that we do. So there’s different points of the communication where we’re starting to kind of filter down who we want at that site. The very first thing is gonna be using InformaCast or something like that where you’re going to have you’re going to basically only contact people that are associated with that student. It’s probably gonna be their emergency contact. So we’re already starting to limit them. We’re not gonna blast this out on media that we’re gonna run reunification at x y z building.
Instead, we’re going to very selectively using the student information system that we have and that parent guardian information that’s in that student information system to target who’s gonna get the message. So that’s that very first kind of filtering of who’s gonna be at your site that we can do.
Some advanced training of your parents on you know, if you are if you do have to come to the reunification site, we’re at we ask that you only send one person. We get it. If you are if you are, you know, you’re responsible for two toddlers in the house and you’ve gotta bring them, that’s okay. We’re not gonna say we’re not gonna say anything to you about it, but it helps the reunification site.
If we can just bring that one responsible adult who’s gonna be picking up the students, that’ll help us. So those are all things you can kinda communicate in advance and then know how to use the tools that you have to target your audience. So we’re only having that select version or select group of people show up at the reunification site. And then the other thing and then this is where our relationships with law enforcement and fire come into as well.
So they’re gonna help us hopefully have a parameter set up around the reunification facility as well. So as people and your greeters too, by the way. So as people are walking up to that site, they can just engage them. Are you here for unification?
Yep. I have a fourth grader here, or I have an eighth grader here. So there’s another way to kinda just make sure that we’re trying to keep people on-site that are supposed to be there. These are these are big processes.
So, you know, inevitably, there’s gonna be a few people looky loos as we’d call them that might be standing around on the edge. It could be media, by the way, that are standing on the edge of your campus trying to film this and talk to people. So you just need to have a plan for that stuff. It’s, it doesn’t have to be a complicated plan, but start with, this is who we wanna notify about reunification.
How are we gonna do that, and what information are we gonna draw from to do that? It’s most likely in your student information system, and using an automated feature that you have, will make will make that part of your job much easier. And you Joanna has thoughts on that. Yeah.
Joanna Haugland
Yeah. You had mentioned InformaCast, which can draw from that student information system data to know email, phone number, where we can send out those communications to those parents, letting them know, hey. This is the reunification site. Show up here at this location. Here’s your check-in point and kinda guide them ahead of time. Give them the heads up.
Pat Hamilton
And then having a also having some prescriptive messages. Joanna, you were talking about that as well. Having those prescriptive messages too, so you’re not trying to necessarily write that in the moment.
There’s templates that you can create that would help you to even if it’s just that initial conversation of, we’re gonna run reunification.
We’ll let you know where in a couple of minutes. But, you know, in the meantime, we need you to make sure that you’re at home and ready to go, and we want you to stay informed. So have your communication device turned on. And by the way, I you know, by the way, if you don’t have your driver’s license or some other kind of government ID ready, then if you could be finding that while we’re while we’re letting you know what this is gonna be, that’ll be very helpful as well.
Betsy Miller
Okay. And, also, we do have some templates at iloveyouguys.org at no cost that you can steal from. No sense in reinventing the wheel, as a principal. You know, you wanna try and delegate and beg, borrow, and steal from anybody you can. So I highly recommend you go check those out so you don’t have to create them your own. At least gives you a place to start.
Chris Swietlik
Yeah. Those are great resources to make available, especially for people starting from scratch.
I know we’ve talked a little bit about law enforcement and involving them in this process, but similar to the question we began this with which is, you know, how do we how do we start this process?
How do we foster those relationships with first responders, police, and make sure that everyone’s on the same page should reunification have to occur?
Pat Hamilton
So we, we sometimes joke about the SRP and the SRM being Trojan horses because really what they are is they are a tool to get people into the room to talk.
For you to successfully implement the SRP or the SRM, you really need to have the, all of those surrounding agencies that help your community, law again, law enforcement, fire, EMT, emergency management. You need to have them all in the in the room together anyway. And so this is a Trojan horse to get all those people in the room. And then once those conversations start happening, whether it be about SRP or SRM, just look what happened at that point.
You know, it’s gonna be you’re gonna conquer SRM. You’re gonna have the plan down. And then you’re gonna say, why are we happy here? Let’s talk about these things too.
So it starts with just an invitation. Now in Colorado, that’s where I’m I’m based out of and Betsy is too.
Donuts are a thing here, but breakfast burritos are the real thing. So if you really wanna get people to your meetings, you buy some breakfast burritos or you offer to buy lunch or something like that. But if you feed them, they’ll show up for meetings, and then that’s where the conversations happen. And then also, you know, there’s a whole thing about breaking bread together because you will you will foster relationships there, and you’ll you’ll start to build trust. And once you have that trust, then you can move mountains. So it’s really and it’s it’s finding who you wanna talk to, getting them in the room, sending out that invitation, and then let the you know, at that point, you’d become a force multiplier.
You’re gonna have a collective impact on the whole process because everyone’s chipping in. You’ve got good collaboration. So start with the invite, and if you can swing it, buy some breakfast burritos if you’re in Colorado. Maybe bagels other places.
Betsy Miller
No breakfast burritos for sure. And I and they wanna be there. They I mean, they have a vested interest, obviously, in keeping our students and our staff safe and the communities safe. They wanna be there, and so it’s just somebody reaching out.
And then a side effect that we saw from that when we had them on our safety team at my school, and they would come and help us support with drills, which was huge. Then they also just started coming by. If they were near the school, they’d pop in just to see how everybody was doing, maybe walk some classrooms or pop into the cafeteria. And so, again, then the students are seeing them on a regular basis, building those relationships.
And so there’s so many great side effects to having them on your team as well.
And they know the floor plan, the layout of your school. So if something happens, they know that footprint. And you can say something’s happening in the music room and they’re arriving. They know right where to go to. So they’re just such a powerful support and resource, and they also have a vested interest in your school as well.
Chris Swietlik
It’s great to hear about those ripple effects. Obviously, when we’re building those relationships, it’s not just for one thing. It can impact multiple areas.
I wanna go back to talking a little bit about communication.
And when we talk about communication and we talk about reunification, one sort of key component of that we haven’t touched on yet is accountability and being able to account for every student’s whereabouts during a situation that would require reunification. Because if you don’t know where a student is, you can’t get them back to the Guardian. So, Joanna, I don’t know if maybe you wanna start this off, but can you talk just a little bit about some of the tools that Singlewire offers that, help with that part of the process?
Joanna Haugland
Absolutely. So speaking more of, like, the joint solution of InformaCast and Visitor Aware is when you step back and you tie everything together through InformaCast, you can have those scenarios that are preconfigured in the platform for a lockdown, for a secure, for a hold. You can already have those templates ready to go if you need them. In one tap, you have those already in action.
A piece of that would be the ability to then tie in family reunification to that as well. So family reunification within Visitor Aware would automatically trigger with that InformaCast scenario that gets triggered. But then from there, as a staff member, as a teacher, I’m able to go in and receive my email and text notification to go in to my admin portal to then be able to start accounting for my students. So I would set my current physical location.
Once I account for that student, update that status, mark them as present, I would then let everybody else know that the student is with me in this location. So then you’re able to then properly allocate resources in that moment as needed, both as a school, but, resources in that moment as needed both as a school, but also with the emergency response team as well. And then it just keeps everybody on the same page without a constant phone call, mass chaos as far as, like, texting each other or using some other platform to send out communications back and forth. You have one dashboard that tells you the full picture of, okay.
This person is accounting for students. They’re safe. These students are safe. These students haven’t been accounted for.
The student is injured. You have a dashboard that lays that all out so that you can properly allocate resources.
And then do you want me to talk also about rolling into family reunification after that as well? So accounting for the students and knowing their current status during that incident, but then once that incident has resolved, moving into family reunification.
And within our software solution itself, you don’t have to navigate or start a different event. It just easily transitions into that family reunification process.
But once you send out notifications to the guardians, letting them know it’s safe to come on-site and let them know where they’re supposed to arrive, park, etcetera, you then have those check-in points. You then have those reunifiers.
Once they see that the guardian has checked in, they would take that student to that guardian in that specified area.
Chris Swietlik
And I think, you know, part of what you’re talking about that is particularly effective is moving away from any kind of paper based system. Right? You can’t get those real time insights. You can’t share information easily.
So having something that is more cloud based, something that is more accessible, I think, can really make a difference, when you’re talking about these kinda crucial situations.
Betsy Miller
Absolutely.
I think it’s, yeah, really critical when you have that, dashboard is so great because then you’re not trying to communicate over the radio, about specific students. Does anybody know where the student is? You can see it right there because, again, even through those radios, then you have other people in the area, parents or community, and you don’t want that information out. So it’s a great way where everybody is getting all the information at the same time as to who’s accounted for, who’s missing. And it’s great because I may have swept, a student into my classroom in the hallway for a lockdown, and the other teacher doesn’t know that. So they could see immediately I have that student, and it’s just a really efficient way to have that communication and to keep it confidential.
Joanna Haugland
And on the teacher’s behalf, you get really close to your student. So just having that peace of mind, like, oh, thank god. My student is accounted for. And then that weight is kind of off of your shoulders at that point.
One hundred percent.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. And then during the, actual reunification itself too, I mean, this is the this is the transfer of custody. So I always looked at it as, you know, we are the legal guardians. The school district, the school itself is the legal guardian of that student during those school hours.
And so we have, there’s an expectation that we’re gonna have a transfer of custody outside of the normal day when we, you know, when we just ring the bell and students get on the bus and go home or they walk. So outside of that, when we’re in a it’s somewhat of a crisis situation, we need to transfer that custody. So there’s a couple ways to do that. You can do that on paper, which is I mean, that’s the SRM that you’re gonna find online at iloveyouguys.org.
See, I got I got it in there one more time, everyone.
That’s gonna be that’s a paper based system. So but there’s an accountant role in that system where we are we are doing some accounting behind the scenes. We’re going to cross check at the end of this process. We’re gonna be doing a lot of accounting, of those students to make sure that we have accounted for the parent that walked in and then also walked out with the students. So there’s gonna be cross-referencing there. So it adds time to the reunification process after students are gone.
But if you’re doing this in an app based solution, a lot of that accounting and accountability of the students, which is the most important part of this process, by the way, is the student accountability.
That is being done for you, and you can then you have the dashboard options. You have those different options where you can see how that’s going. But, that is going to be done, and it’s gonna save you, not frustration because it’s not a frustrating process other than if it’s been a really long day, you might just be ready to go home. So it’s gonna take a little bit of time to do this on paper. You can do it on paper. It’s gonna be a little bit slower.
It can be just as effective, but that instant accountability of students is gonna occur when you’re using an app based system.
Joanna Haugland
And it saves you some storage space too. Right? So I’m I’m assuming that you would have to store those paper based copies for x period of time, whereas you can have all of that information in a digital archive that you can reference at any time.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. We typically that’s, we tell people store them for a few days, and then if everything’s fine, this it goes into recycling. But that’s again, that’s just one more step of the process. It’s not a permanent record. I would imagine that, you know, which if you have it, an app based solution that’s a permanent record now so you can go back and check that weeks later if you needed to, whereas the paper-based you know, that’s a that’s a policy decision, by the way, for schools. You might a school district might say, oh, we keep it for the school year. That’s that’s your decision for sure.
Our district to get up for a few days, if it was quiet and everything was good, then they went to recycling bin.
I wanna circle back on the communication if we can, Chris, real quick.
So I think there’s
Chris Swietlik
Yeah. There’s a couple
Pat Hamilton
different things that oh, go ahead.
Chris Swietlik
Yep. Just sorry. Just, wanna do a quick time check here too. We have about fifteen minutes left.
I want to, if anyone has any questions to remind them that they can use the q and a chat on the side of the screen there, and we will get to those. Also, if anyone is interested in, any of the tools that we’ve talked about today, specifically from Joanna, We’re launching a poll shortly here. If you just reply yes to that, we will follow-up with you after this session.
Yes. Pat, please go ahead and, take us further on effective communication.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. It’s really a maybe a question or just thoughts, for Joanna because we I talked a lot about this as well with school districts.
What you do before the crisis is just really important, so I’m gonna circle back around to that.
And Betsy had used the word trust, and that’s a really big thing for us as school district. We have to build that trust with our community. A way to do that is to communicate. Use those templates or maybe you have some different templates for drills. So consider, like, are you are you telling your parents ahead of time before you have a lockdown drill at your at their child’s school?
That is definitely something that we would recommend. Let parents know ahead of time. Have you given them some maybe some talking points? So when their student comes home from the drill, and they wanna talk about what they learned that day, if we’ve given our parents some talking points, we maybe have helped facilitate the conversation that now just becomes now it’s not just a school lesson. This is a life lesson. And it’s good for our parents to hear it too. These are these are life skills, not just school skills.
So I’m I’m a big advocate for you build that communication platform and you build that communication trust long before there’s ever a crisis in your facility. So use those systems so parents get used to it. It also gets the end the person who has to do the user interface actually has to type the message or write the message, during the crisis that day. It gets them familiar with how to use the system as well. So there’s it recreate you know, it results in less bumbling in trying to use that system. So, Joan, I’m kinda curious on your thoughts on that as well if you have a take on that.
Joanna Haugland
Yeah. Absolutely. So using InformaCast to send out that messaging ahead of time to your guardian population is definitely a key in that process.
Not only and I take it for granted sometimes because I’m so involved in the space that, like, it’s just, like, firsthand knowledge to me. It’s just I don’t know. It’s just there. But as a normal guardian, they have no clue.
And some of that verbiage and terminology might scare the crap out of them. Same thing with the students. So giving them the knowledge and the power to properly both in like, educate themselves as that guardian, but also educate their students in a way that isn’t going to scare their students. So really thinking ahead of time of, like, what information do I wanna share with my guardian population so that they can properly prepare their students so that in that drill or heaven forbid an actual incident, they’re not panicked.
They’re able to stay calm and focus and know what is happening.
Betsy Miller
Well, I think that’s the key to it too. We always wanna drill the way we wanna perform during a real event. So if we don’t practice this communication part, we’re not maybe gonna think about that during a real event, or we’re gonna be scrambling or unfamiliar with how it works. Or so I think that’s really great advice on both your parts is, you know, doing it with drills as well is really critical.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. It’s it’s a it’s just a way to I tell people and this is one of our keynotes that we do at the briefings, but we tell people about the importance of practicing with those systems. A great way to do that is to include communication in your drills. So then everyone’s getting to practice, and your parents get familiar with what they’re gonna see. And you build that trust because that trust starts long before, the crisis ever starts.
Joanna Haugland
That is so true. Having the your emergency response plan ready to go, following those steps, reinforcing those steps, So it’s muscle memory if something were to happen or during a drill, and then making sure that student gets home safely with the guardian at the end.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. For sure.
Chris Swietlik
Wanna go back to the topic of building relationships. And one thing that we haven’t, really touched on that I’d be curious to get, you know, your opinion, Pat and Betsy.
We’ve talked about law enforcement. We’ve talked about parents. We’ve talked a little bit about the community at large.
Do you have any recommendations for how can we learn from others? So if there’s another school district in my area that is doing reunification well.
How can we kind of do a knowledge share between, you know, local school districts or local schools that make sure that everyone is utilizing best practices if they need the help?
Pat Hamilton
That’s a good question. And, I gotta think about the how to part of that, Chris. But so in my school district in Adams twelve, we actually had Boulder Valley, Denver Public Schools. These were all district different districts that border Jefferson County School District, like, home of Columbine.
These were all districts that bordered our district. And so our as a when I was the communication or, sorry, the security director, we I just talked with those other security directors. We kind of stayed informed about lots of different things. If we were getting swatting calls or something like that, we were just always kind of we had a text group, and we would just text each other.
And we all knew that we had reunification teams as well. And on more than one occasion, we deployed our reunification team to help them, and they deployed theirs to help us if we had multiple school reunifications occurring. We went down the path of even talking about mutual aid agreements, if we should have something formal like a mutual aid mutual aid agreement like our first responders have. So a lot of times, police agencies and sheriff’s agencies and things like that will have these mutual aid agreements. We never went we never got that formalized with it, but it was an understanding, and that understanding came through conversations.
And then the other thing that and those conversations were occurring at quarterly it’s like, let’s meet quarterly just for coffee. And this is all sit down and have a cup of coffee and talk about what are you doing, what are you seeing, what are the problems that you have in your buildings. This is what I’m seeing. So it was just that collaboration and exchange of knowledge that really helped us the most.
No formal agreements, but it’s a matter of reaching out to those who are those districts that, have boundaries that share a boundary with your district?
A meeting once a month or even quarterly, you can cover a lot of ground with the people that are doing the same work that you’re doing. And just don’t be afraid to pick up the phone call the phone and make a call or type an email and see what you get. I think Betsy would tell you that the people that are doing this work, are committed. And I don’t mean just school safety work.
I’m talking about public education work. People that are doing that work, nobody’s getting rich in that field, so they’re committed to this. They’re committed to kids. And if there’s a way to share resources, they’re gonna do it.
Joanna Haugland
Mhmm.
Betsy Miller
I would say also don’t hesitate to, again, reach out to emergency managers and law enforcement, other first responders. I think of our district, one of the cities in our district, also, their city, connects with two other districts. And so that their law enforcement may know if those other districts are using SRP or SRM. So check with your own local law enforcement, other emergency managers.
They might be able to connect you. If you’re really struggling to find somebody who is doing this work in your area, reach out to the I Love You Guys Foundation. We have a general email we might be able to support. We have a database for people who have responded.
We like people who are using the I Love You Guys, programming to send us an email or have a memorandum of understanding or a notice of intent. So we have a pretty good long list of folks that are using our materials. We might be able to help connect you if you’re if you’re struggling in that area. Especially if you’re from a small district, you want to reach out to those neighboring districts because you might want to use some of, form a regional team for reunification because your district might not be small or might be too small and struggle with getting a strong team.
But if you can work together and develop a regional reunification team, sometimes that’s really beneficial.
Chris Swietlik
Yeah. That’s a great reminder about the I Love You Guys website too. There’s an awesome interactive map, on that on that website to really see surrounding districts and schools that are using protocols.
The last question I wanna end with is
just what are the biggest lessons in your experiences with reunification? What are what are the best lessons learned that you could share with others?
Pat Hamilton
Don’t think that you’re going to be able to wing it.
So if your if your plan a is really plan b to wing it, then you need to rethink your plan a. So plan a is figure out what works for you from the standard reunification method or if you wanna use something different, but you’ve got to plan it. You’ve gotta put the effort into it, the elbow grease into it. So winging it at the time is going to result of, ultimately, it’s gonna result in either someone else taking over reunification because they’re gonna see that you’re not accomplishing what you need to accomplish.
So one of your community partners is gonna step in and say, I’ve got this, and then we get to the Simba method. Or, or you’re gonna be doing the Simba method. So have a plan. Practice the plan.
The training part of it also, it’s a matter of getting people in a room, like, twice a year and just talking about reminding them, here’s the roles. Here’s what you do in those roles. So it’s not it doesn’t have to be super complicated, but have a plan, work the plan.
Betsy Miller
And I would say also redundancy. You wanna have some redundancy on your reunification sites. Have multiple options because you never know what’s gonna happen or what that site’s being used for on a specific day. Have multiple sites available.
Redundancy in your team. You know? We never know who’s not gonna be there, that’s on your reunification team, and so you may need to have some backups for those different roles. And then also support for your think of your staff that may be out.
The substitutes that are in your building have a plan for how are we gonna support those folks. Yes. We in our district, we trained, our substitutes in SRP and SRM, but, you know, they’re not always, in the thick of things. And so having a support plan for them as well, I think, is critical.
Joanna Haugland
A fallback plan is very important. I’m glad you mentioned that.
If you are using Visitor Aware family notification process and there’s an outage, so data goes down, Wi Fi goes down, etcetera, You can always resort to, like, the personal devices data plan since this is a cloud based software you can pick up by just logging back in on a different device if you needed to. But we do have an in the moment export option. So if you do lose data, you’re not completely dead in the water. You can actually do everything off a dot CSV file that you could put in Excel or something like that and pick up where you left off.
So that was kind of our baked in second option there just in case because just in case might happen.
And, just from my side as a vendor that’s constantly evolving a product to best support schools is keeping an open mind. We’re not directly in that environment. We’re not directly dealing with these things each and every day.
So don’t be shy to reach out to your vendor and say, hey. I know you have this thing, but we actually want it to do this, or could we, like, adjust this slightly and have it do this? So communication, again, even with vendors is key as well.
The,
Pat Hamilton
my last bit of advice would be just to give yourself and your team some grace to again, these things, it’s you’re always gonna be thinking about things that you could do differently or better.
That’s what after action reports are for. That’s why you have a meeting a day or two after a reunification and talk about what do we wanna change, what do we wanna improve.
But in that moment, if you see things that are going just if it’s really, really horribly awry, make adjustments right there on the spot. Try to fix it if you can without necessarily stopping the process, which I’ve had to do, by the way, which is really painful.
But I’ve done it, and we were better off for it after we made the adjustment. But, otherwise, if it’s not exactly right or if it’s not exactly how you wanted it to work, but students are being safely reunified with their parents and you have that accountability piece down, the other stuff will work out.
You can talk about it a day or two later and implement a plan, and then you can retrain that.
Joanna, what you were just talking about using the c s p CSPV oh, sorry.
C p what’s
Joanna Haugland
the file?
Yep.
I
Pat Hamilton
talked to the I talked to the CSPV, which is a group of this is the Colorado School for the Study of Prevention of Violence.
So, anyway, but using that file and knowing how to download that file in a in a during a crisis might be one of those things that you want to practice and train on. So you know how to do it in that during the event itself.
You don’t wanna necessarily be calling Singlewire at that moment to say, how do I do this again? So practice that. Sounds like a great training opportunity to practice that. So drop your CSV files. I’ll stop saying CSPV because it’s a different format than your CSV file.
Joanna Haugland
Now I’m gonna Google that after we jump off the call here.
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. Yep. The Center for the Study of Prevention Violence.
Chris Swietlik
Alright. Well, I think that’s some great advice to end on.
If anyone has any last minute questions, the chat is still open, so feel free to throw them in. Otherwise, we will wrap up. We wanna thank everyone, both our attendees and our panelists, for joining us today, sharing their thoughts.
A reminder that this webinar has been recorded and will be sent out afterwards, for you to access.
Otherwise, as we’ve said, the I Love You Guys website is a tremendous resource for a lot of what we talked about today, so feel free to visit that. And we do still have the poll open as well if anyone would like to learn more about any of the tools that Joanna talked about today. Otherwise, we’ll thank everyone again for their time, and, we’ll see you next time.
Betsy Miller
Thanks, everyone. Bye.