Safety & Evacuation Drills | 2024-2025
September 6, 2024
Dear NECSD students, families, faculty, and staff,
The safety and well-being of your child(ren) is our highest priority. We are writing this letter to inform you about safety and evacuation drills that will be conducted throughout the school year.
This year, the state requires that parents/guardians are notified within a week of safety and/or evacuation drills occurring. This notification will be shared via email. Additionally, as drills are conducted, we will send a robocall to the primary number listed for your child(ren) alerting you that a drill occurred that day in your child’s school. Please make sure your contact information is up to date in your Parent Portal account to receive these important messages. You may want to follow up with your child on days that you know their school practiced a drill.
Safety drills, also known as lockdown drills, are in preparation for a threat targeting the school and are in accordance with the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act (Project SAVE). The SAVE law was enacted in 2000 in an effort to improve school safety.
All drills will be announced in the school building before they occur and conducted in a trauma-informed approach. The manner in which students and teachers participate in these drills helps our safety personnel and school administrators reflect and understand how we can better prepare each school for emergency situations. Although we use a trauma-informed approach, these drills may be upsetting for your child. Your child may have questions or wish to express their emotions about the potential dangers in the world. We encourage you to have conversations with your children according to their age and level of understanding. It is important to be sensitive to their desire to communicate, while listening to and accepting their feelings. Please contact the in your building if you need assistance with conversations about their feelings and/or emotions.
Evacuation drills are standard drills that require building occupants to become familiar with exit strategies should there be an emergency in the building that requires an evacuation (smoke, gas, fire, etc.).
For all drills, please ask your children to review the response(s) they were taught during the drill to help them remember how to respond to potential emergency situations. You may want to take this time to also review safety procedures in your home and while out in public spaces during these discussions as well.
Please help us remind your child to speak to an adult if they ever see or hear of any threat to their school or feel that something isn’t right. We each play an important role in keeping our schools safe.
More information regarding safety in our schools can be found in the 2024-2025 District Safety Plan on the district website.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jackielyn Manning Campbell Mr. Anthony Geraci
Superintendent Director of Safety and Security
