Photo by Samantha Davis: Marshall Public School District director of Operations Tricia Stelter presents to the school board an update regarding emergency management procedures at Monday night's meeting.

MARSHALL — The Marshall Public School District is in the process of reviewing and updating its emergency management and safety practice procedures, and Director of Operations Tricia Stelter gave an update at Monday’s school board meeting.

The district has an Emergency Management Team (EMT) that is represented by various district staff from each site that work to develop and implement emergency procedures.

“Our operating procedures were probably created 15-20 years ago, and they were created and they were put in the manual, and we do look at them, but they really haven’t been rethinked (about) in that amount of time,” Stelter said. “So this year, one of our goals is that we are going line by line on each of our procedures, and we are dissecting them and making sure that what we have in those plans makes sense and it’s up to date.”

Stelter said one of the first things MPS did this school year was work with the Minnesota School Safety Center, who came and did a comprehensive review of safety procedures and gave feedback.

“They asked us to relook at how we organize lockdowns. ‘Lockdown’ is starting to be an older term that’s used in school districts, and they guided us to this I love You Guys Foundation, where they have what they call a standard-response protocol,” Stelter said. “So, instead of every incident going into a lockdown, which lockdown sounds scary … That might not always be the case. It might be a medical situation, it might be a student that needs to get back to a classroom, and we just need to keep the hallways clear for a brief period of time. So, this is a plan that better guides us through some of those things.”

Specifically, Stelter said rather than the district calling for a ‘lockdown,’ when that level of urgency is not necessarily needed, they will go into a ‘hold,’ that rather just asks students and faculty to keep going about their time as usual in the classrooms, but to just keep the hallways clear until the situation is resolved.

Stelter also went over a few safety platforms the district utilizes, including Raptor Technologies, CrisisGo and GeoComm.

“We use a system called Raptor Technologies, which is a visitor management system. When you stick your license in the card reader, what it’s doing is a background check and looking against the registered sex-offender database to make sure that there are no flags that pop up,” Stelter said. “If there were a flag or concern, then the administrative assistant would get a note on her screen. It pops up on her screen, and says that there is a concern about this person, and then that gets passed on to administration to review further, before that person is let into our building.”

Raptor Technologies also allows the district to create a watch list, which has the capability to mark someone onto a specific list if there is a concern, and that sends over to all other sites to notify in the case of a suspicious person trying to travel to another building. Additionally, it keeps track of all visitors in the case of an emergency so the district can account for visitors’ safety along with students and staff.

The district also uses CrisisGO, another emergency preparedness platform that increases response time.

“This is a mass notification system that allows for text, emails, app push notifications and just a variety of critical information to be disseminated in a short amount of time,” Stelter said. “By using an application like CrisisGo, we’re sending that information out through their computer or their phone, so they have real-time information, and they know what’s going on in that site and that they should not report to that site until that incident is over.”

CrisisGo also allows for teachers to quickly account for attendance in the case of an event or emergency, rather than previously where they had to email or call the office to report.

The final platform Stelter discussed is a new implementation the district is utilizing, put in place about a month ago.

“I was trying to work with Buildings and Grounds to get a mapping system in place to identify all of our critical points of entrances in a building. So, where are shut-off valves, where are fire extinguishers, sprinklers, anything that is a point of interest within a building,” Stelter said. “There was a grant that was issued through the State of Minnesota, the Department of Public Safety, for school districts and law enforcement offices to work together to decrease the response time when there is a critical incident.”

GeoComm is a mapping system that identifies all of the necessary points. It also shows where all fire extinguishers are located in each building.

“GeoComm came in and they surveyed each of our school sites. They identified the layout of the building, and then the room numbers within the building. What’s nice about this is, if there were an incident that were to happen in a building and somebody called 911, Dispatch, when they get that call, they’re going to be able to see not only which building it came from, but where in the building it came from,” Stelter said. “When emergency responders come to that school site, they’re going to be able to see what entrance is the closest one to the emergency that I’m responding to, and they’re going to be able to go to that entrance.”

Additionally, the district will be hosting an ALICE Training day this summer that is open to the public, where the ALICE organization will be in town to teach community members skills and strategies to increase survivability in the case of an emergency.

ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate, and is a program that teaches emergency preparedness. The event will take place on June 8 beginning at 8 a.m. at the middle school.