Enhancing Safety Procedures
9-23-24 (For Families)
Enhancing Our Safety Procedures
September 23, 2024
Dear District 303 Families,
I’m writing to share more information about District 303’s efforts to enhance safety procedures for our students. In our Back to School News and Notes on August 2, I informed you of plans to enhance safety training that will build upon our already-established Standard Response Protocol (SRP). In August, District staff took part in this training, and now we are prepared to share this knowledge with students. The training is called ALICE, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.
Student safety has and will always be top priority for District 303. This requires having not only secure facilities, but that staff and students are well-informed on how to respond if an incident occurs. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about just inclement weather procedures. We must adapt to the societal threat of a violent intruder inside our school. We believe ALICE procedures create the safest possible environment for our students and staff with proactive steps in securing our schools.
Adoption of a lockdown-only response has been deemed insufficient by the Department of Education, independent researchers, and law enforcement. Society is dictating we change our thought process on safety and ALICE options-based strategies will help increase survivability. We found the ALICE strategies to be the most adopted by schools across the country, and ALICE training helps to maintain our compliance with the federally recommended guidelines.
ALICE empowers individuals to participate in their survival using proactive options-based responses. I want to assure you that we went to great lengths to understand exactly what each option entails. We are very comfortable with all the ALICE proactive strategies to empower our students and staff to survive until help arrives. We will implement these safety strategies in age and ability appropriate ways, with customized training for different age groups.
Our staff has been trained on the ALICE strategies through online classes and hands-on training with our local ALICE Certified Instructors. We are pleased with the comprehensive roll-out procedure ALICE Training Institute has in place and believe this is the right choice for our students, staff, schools, and the community.
Next Steps
Later this week, building principals will begin sharing details with students and families on ALICE lessons, which will occur over the course of the school year. Additionally, we have updated our Safety and Security website to include training materials and parent letters for the ALICE lessons. Families can even take part in a course to further their understanding..
We look forward to growing our collective knowledge of these important procedures to ensure the safety and security of our students.
Sincerely,
Dr. Paul Gordon
Superintendent