Lee County school district adopts crisis training for back to school

The School District of Lee County is adopting a new program to help protect kids ahead of the 2019-20 school year.

New training will help schools in the county provide standardization of safety procedures and get everyone on the same page for crisis response.

The steps:

• Lockout
• Lockdown
• Evacuate
• Shelter
• Hold

This is the new safety response protocol that will be in place on the first day of school.

The District gathered law enforcement, mental health professionals and principals together and went over its specific plan to deal with any kind of threat inside or outside school buildings.

“When you look at it, we are a fluid kind of organization,” said. “Every year we get a whole new crop of students. We have a whole lot of turnover even in the district with the employees. So it’s a constant struggle to keep up and train those folks in what we need for emergency response.”

John-Michael Keyes gave a presentation in front of the collective of community leaders. Keyes lost his daughter to a school shooter in 2006. He formed the I Luv U Guys Foundation, which trains schools throughout the U.S and now in Lee County.

“If you ask somebody what the greatest challenge is in their last crisis, what are the three challenges, often they’ll say communication, communication, communication,” Keyes said. “It really is the foundation’s premise of a crisis response.”

With communication being a common theme, it means common language. Law enforcement has its own language, but that is not the case among other departments.

Although this kind of training is not yet standard statewide, Keyes said he expects more of Florida to adopt this in the future.

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