Conference Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Anthony ArasiSafe and Effective School Emergency Operations Exercises and Updating your Crisis Management Plan — Untested school safety plans are sound only in theory and significant plan failure has occurred in almost every instance of a major school crisis where plans had not been tested through properly conducted exercises. One of the nation's top experts will guide participants through the FEMA and Jane's models for a progressive and appropriate a series of exercises.
Mr. Arasi currently serves as the Director of Professional Development for the Georgia School Boards Association. He also serves as an educational consultant, providing professional services to schools and school systems that include leadership and staff development training, site-based planning and design, professional assistance, policy development and review, program evaluations, as well as local school and school district assessments. Mr. Arasi formerly held the positions of Assistant and Associate Superintendent in the Cobb County School System, which is a large suburban school district outside Atlanta, Georgia. The Cobb County School District enrolls over 100,000 students enrolled in over 100 schools (K-12). Responsibilities included training of principals, assistant administrators and faculties in the areas of leadership, school law, discipline, school safety, multicultural education, personnel management, community relations, policy development and implementation, as well as dealing with the media. He also served as the liaison between the local schools and the school board attorney and provided legal advice to school district personnel, in addition to serving as a media spokesperson for the school district.
Cheri Lovre
School-Agency Collaboration: Teamwork in the Trenches — Whenever lives are at risk, the stakes are high. Inter-agency and school-agency collaboration are essential for the best possible outcome. Additionally, it appears from experience that those events in which a smooth collaborative effort is managed are less apt to generate lawsuits from the families of victims. This presentation will give a variety of ideas on how to approach collaboration in times of extreme stress and how to lay groundwork for this process ahead of time. Examples from past experiences will be provided with analysis on what kinds of circumstances we can predict and how best to prepare.
Cheri Lovre is the founder and director of The Crisis Management Institute, which provides training and technical assistance to schools, businesses, and agencies in the greater field of crisis response, trauma intervention, and violence prevention. Lovre is currently providing on-site follow-up for communities in the ravage torn areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Adam Hamilton & Ronald Stebelton
Terrorism and America's Schools: Assessing the Risks — Ronald Stebelton, Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Elementary School Principals, and Adam Hamilton, President and CEO of Signature Science LLC, will attempt to frame the realistic possibilities of a terror attack against American education. Both gentlemen will assess the potential risks as well as the types of terrorism America's schools are vulnerable to now and in the future. Mr. Stebelton will address his comments from the educational perspective while Adam Hamilton will approach this topic from the scientific/technical side.
Adam Hamilton is President and CEO of Signature Science, a professional science and engineering services company perhaps best known for it breadth and depth in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) anti-terrorism expertise. Hamilton is also the chairman of the Hazmat Committee for the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education. Ronald Stebelton is the executive director of The Ohio Association of Elementary School Administrators, president/CEO of The Foundation to Advance Childhood Education; Chair/CEO of SAIL for Education, Inc. and has served in those roles since 1999. He has been involved in Ohio education for 24 years--the first seven years as a teacher in the Lancaster City Schools, then as a K-8 assistant principal in South Charleston. From 1990 through the 1999 school year, he served as an elementary principal in the Columbus City Schools, first at West Mound Elementary and then for six years at Stewart Traditional School. Ron's experience ranges from rural to urban, so in his current position as the Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Elementary School Administrators, he is able to represent a broad segment of the membership.
Breakout Sessions
Michael CunninghamStudent Threat Assessment: How Schools and Community Agencies can Collaborate to Help Keep Schools and Students Safe — In this session, the presenter will briefly discuss the findings of the Safe Schools Initiative and the recommendations of the US Secret Service and the US Department of Education regarding student threat assessment. He will then describe the key features of the Mid-Valley Student Threat Assessment System, a multi-agency collaborative model serving eighteen small-town and rural school districts in western Oregon. The presenter will conclude by outlining steps school districts should consider if they are interested in creating an interagency threat assessment capacity for their schools and students. The presentation includes lecture, audience participation in actual scenarios, and informal Q & A.
Adam Hamilton
Radiological Threats to our Schools — Adam Hamilton "Practical Knowledge Regarding Biological Threats to our Schools" - Chickenpox and the cold are well-known to many of us, but Ricin, avian influenza, smallpox, plague, and other biological threats are less familiar. The first step to fighting these unseen adversaries is to understand them—thereby reducing anxiety and concern. The educational community must be conversant in various related health and biological threat issues to effectively communicate with public health officials, responders, parents, and students. When a biological event (natural or intentionally introduced) strikes a school, we need to be prepared to respond with confidence and knowledge.
Stephen R. Melvin, PE CSP
Keeping Our Neighborhoods Safe — Stephen Melvin will be discussing "Keeping Our Neighborhoods Safe", a book designed to be a family guide to preparing for, responding to, and recovering from a terrorist attack. Mr. Melvin will discuss his "Melvin Method" of antiterrorism including the virus theory of antiterrorism which looks at the country like a body - which makes our cities, towns and counties into vital organs, our roadway, railways, etc. into the circulatory system, and so on. The model for the terrorists looks just like a virus. They pop up any time or place, use our own cells to reproduce and inject a poison (fear) into the body which causes cellular breakdown. A body fights a virus using white blood cells, which would be police, fire, health - and anyone else who is trained. Mr. Melvin's goal is to train more people to be white blood cells, and he wrote his book to be a vaccine. This looks to be an outstanding seminar in which you will be learn where to get the information you need to help keep your family and community safe.
Adam Hamilton & Sue Barton
Grant Writing for School Safety — This session will explain the process of locating and applying for federal grants for school safety. It will introduce the listener to methods for effectively finding grants, as well as teach the keys to writing a solid grant proposal.
John Buchanan
The Role of Law Enforcement on Terrorism and Violence in Schools — This presentation will cover the relationships and expectations between law enforcement and school systems, and the planning and relationship building that must exist between law enforcement and schools in order to keep schools a safe place to learn.
Patrick Boylan
Terrorism in Our Schools — School safety and Emergency Management, using an All-hazards Approach to educate educators about Terrorism and our schools, covers the possibility of terrorist attacks on the most vulnerable members of our society. Terrorist attacks on many schools from Beslan, Russia, to Murree, Pakistan and beyond are examined, with the opportunity of learning from the tragedy of others. Patrick Boylan will present compelling data suggesting that terrorists have already attacked our schools and children, and present the chilling words of Osama bin Laden who has vowed to attack our children. The presentation will suggest possible ways to not only be prepared for a tragedy but ways to avoid one and to mitigate the effects of natural and man made hazards. He will show how one State Board of Education (that did not follow the mandates of the state legislature) was taken shouting and screaming into facing the reality that tragedy could most certainly strike our most precious national commodity — our children.
Inspector Ulric Mackenzie, Jr.
Public Safety Partnerships with the Education Community — This presentation will cover the relationships between New York State public safety and the New York State educational system. It will describe the lessons learned from September 11th, as well as the methods and planning that have been developed in post September 11th New York.
Floy Turner
Assessing the Threat: Child Abduction Response Team — The goal of this presentation is to provide the participants with sexual offender categories in an effort to identify a child molester/abductor and to become aware of Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Child Abduction Response Team (CART) approach to the critical incident of child abduction. The course objective is to provide participants with current information concerning identification of sexual offender categories for the purpose of developing a clear understanding of an abductor's personality traits. And the necessity for the rapid deployment of the CART Team, which is comprised of law enforcement partners with expertise in crimes against children, missing persons and homicide; with a rapid response organized plan in an effort to spend the critical hours, after the abduction, searching for the child.
Jason Esper
Tabletop Exercises (TTX) — TTXs typically involve the discussion of simulated incidents by key staff, decision makers, and elected and appointed officials. This type of exercise is generally held in an informal setting intended to generate discussion of various issues regarding a hypothetical event. TTXs can be used to enhance general awareness, validate plans and procedures, or assess the types of systems needed to guide the prevention, response, and recovery from the defined event. TTXs typically are aimed at facilitating the understanding of concepts, identification of strengths and shortfalls, and/or achieving a change in attitude. Participants are encouraged to discuss issues in depth. TTXs allow them to develop decisions through slow-paced problem solving rather than the rapid, spontaneous decision making that occurs under actual emergency conditions.
