School safety is the top priority of Otsego Public Schools and each year, Safe Schools Week becomes a focus of our efforts to keep students safe and to always look at how to improve safety for our students, staff and district. 

During this week, every building in our district conducts all of the required safety drills - fire, lockdown, tornado - as well as an evacuation drill and code blue (medical emergency). But this year, Otsego also added a personal story on school safety that put our efforts into a new light. 

Carly Posey was a parent of students at Sandy Hook Elementary when a gunman came into the school and opened fire. Her youngest son, Reichen, was in a 1st grade classroom where the gunman entered and shot his teacher and several classmates. Reichen was able to escape with a few others as the gunman stopped to reload and survived the tragedy. Posey also had a 4th grader who was in the art room across the hall. She also survived along with her 5th grade twins who were in another building. In her presentation to Otsego parents and staff, she shared her experience of that tragedy and the lessons she learned about the must-haves in school safety. She has served on a school safety committee for the last several years, was a leader in the organization I Love U Guys and is now a national speaker and safety advocate. “School safety is all of our jobs,” she said. 

Carly's presentation and her overall message affirmed much of our work around school safety,” says Mark Rollandini, OPS Director of Secondary and Post-Secondary Instruction and Safety Liaison. “With a focus on being prepared, and building a culture that puts safety at the forefront, our district safety team continues to work to build that culture across the district. Safety is not a checklist, it has to become our culture.”

Her main messages were hopeful and stressed preparedness, communication and relationships. 

For schools, she shared that in the Sandy Hook tragedy, there was no communication, no reunification plan and it was chaotic. She also shared that school safety wasn’t talked about. 

She brought up ownership. “Own your own safety. Have a safety mindset. Be aware of your surroundings and say something” if something doesn’t feel or seem right, she said. 

She urged communication not only for schools, but also to parents. “Have the same messaging to your students as the school has. How you talk about emergencies matters; messaging matters.” She said that you can prepare without scaring kids. “We need to practice (drills) but we can do that without making them scared. Like airplane safety, they always give you safety drills in case of emergency. We don’t have to simulate an emergency to talk about it,” she explained.

As schools and parents, she urged us to foster a sense of safety because “feeling safe is just as important as being safe.” Students need to know and feel they’re safe. That’s where relationships come into play. When asked what safety equipment she thought schools needed the most, she responded with “us”. “The biggest safety thing is us,” she said. “You could put all the physical things in place, but without the human aspect, none of that matters.” 

However, she does stress that locking doors, practicing drills, preparing for reunification, communicating, etc. are all important aspects of school safety to create a better environment and hardening the target. “We’re not going to solve evil, but (we need to ask ourselves) what are we doing to mitigate that?” she added. “It’s our students, it’s paying attention, it’s having plans. It needs to be in the culture of the school.” 

Some of our administrators heard Posey speak at a safety symposium last spring and wanted to bring her to share her story in Otsego. Her presentation affirmed the steps and practices that our team has been doing at Otsego Public Schools to enhance our safety and security - both physically and relationally. “We will be improving our Emergency Operations Plan over the next year, as well as standardizing our protocols for responding to safety requirements. Carly's presentation highlighted the expectation that we are prepared, and we continue to make preparedness a focus,” Rollandini adds.