Ep 20: Reunification with John-Michael Keyes, Part 1

C3 Podcast: Active Shooter Incident Management

Episode 20: Standard Reunification Method

John-Michael Keyes Interview - Part 1

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome back to our next podcast. Today we've got a surprise for you. Our guest today is John Michael Keyes from the I Love You Guys Foundation. John Michael, thanks for being here today.

John-Michael:

Oh Bill, thanks for having me.

Bill Godfrey:

I'm so excited to be able to do this. You're our first official guest on the podcast, and I really couldn't think of anybody else I'd rather have to kind of kick this off in introducing our audience to more speakers on the podcast than just the instructors and the team. So I really appreciate you squeezing in the time to do it. I'd actually be surprised if any of our listeners didn't already know who you were or what the I Love You Guys Foundation was all about, but do you mind just for those that may not know, give us a quick, brief history into how the I Love You Guys Foundation came to be and what you do?

John-Michael:

Absolutely, Bill. I'm the executive director of the I Love You Guys Foundation, and the foundation has been in existence now for 13 years. We started it 13 years ago in the face of tragedy. A gunman had entered Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado and held seven girls hostage. Among those girls was my daughter, Emily. Over the course of the afternoon, our stranger let some of the girls go, and while she was held hostage, Emily was able to send a text message, I love you guys. Ultimately the gunman shot and killed Emily, and the Jefferson County Regional SWAT team shot him. But based on that message, we started the I Love You Guys Foundation, and initially worked with other organizations in supportive of a mission. And it wasn't until 2009 when we started diving deep into school safety. And what we saw was there wasn't a common language between students, staff, and first responders in a crisis.
And, we found a handful of districts around the country that were using some very specific language, and based on that, we created the standard response protocol. And, at the time it was based on four actions, lockout, lockdown, evacuate, and shelter. Since 2015 we've had an optional fifth faction, hold in your classroom. And, it just started taking off, and we developed materials and training around the standard response protocol, and the foundation offered the programs and all of the materials at no cost on our website. And from modest beginnings in 2009, today our estimate is almost 30,000 schools, districts, agencies and organizations are using our programs.

Bill Godfrey:

That's just phenomenal. That's just phenomenal.

John-Michael:

It's humbling sometimes, Bill, in all honesty. But the foundation's made a commitment, and what we found is that in some very specific lanes we can do things. And, in 2012 we introduced the standard reunification method, and that's another whole in schools crisis planning. And again, working with districts who had cracked that nut, we packaged the materials up and offer the program at no cost on the website. And, it's been remarkable. The partnership we've had with you in evolving that program has been spectacular.

Bill Godfrey:

It's a fabulous mission, and the work you guys do, it's just beyond phenomenal. And I don't really know how you ever measure the impact. I mean, we can measure the data and we can measure the numbers and the implementations, but the impact and the emotional value, just I don't think there's any way to understate it. John Michael, I'm going to take you back for just a second. So you gave a great overview of the standard response protocol, and I think everybody, at least in our audience listening, certainly understands what we mean by evacuate or shelter in place. Can you elaborate a little bit more on lockout versus lockdown? Because that was a terminology that you introduced to us, I don't know how many years ago it was, but it was something that we hadn't heard before, and I thought that was really, really a big element for emergency responders to understand.

John-Michael:

Well, FEMA has given us guidance saying lockdown for ages and ages, but they haven't given us great guidance on what that really means and what to do. And, so we saw schools and districts and agencies doing things like soft lockdowns, and hard lockdowns, and code red, and code yellow and code whatever. And, FEMA has also given us guidance that codes don't work in a crisis. And so, when we first started going down this path, some of those districts were using the term lockout. And, in a lockout we're going to bring everyone inside, lock the outside doors, and as much as possible do business as usual. Just because 7/11 is getting robbed down the street doesn't mean we need to shut down what's happening inside the building. And so that differentiation allowed us then to clarify a lockdown.
And in our world, a lockdown is a lockdown, is a lock down. It's locks, lights, out of sight. Get that door locked and get behind that locked door, try to get out of sight. And what we've seen in our data is that a locked classroom door is a proven time barrier. In looking at events, we have found only a handful where a gunman has harmed people who are behind a locked classroom door. And in none of those cases was that door breached. Recently in the Parkland event, our perpetrator there shot into classrooms when he could see occupants. Red Lake, Minnesota, our perpetrator there actually shot the lock and didn't defeat it, but gained entry into the classroom through the side panel window. The only other time we lost somebody who was behind a locked classroom door was Platte Canyon High School, and the perpetrator was already in the room and it took 1100 grains of explosives for the SWAT team to breach that door. And so, what we know is a locked classroom door is a proven barrier. And so, that's our focus. Let's get that door locked and let's get out of sight.

Bill Godfrey:

Absolutely. It's interesting. So the distinction, and I kind of want to highlight this for our listeners, the distinction between the lockout versus lockdown is where is the threat? If the threat is off campus, away from the school, then the idea is the lockout to keep the threat from being able to get into the school. So keep the perimeter of the school locked and safe and secure, but continue doing business inside the school. Is that a fair summary?

John-Michael:

Absolutely. And, starting this year with 2020 we're adding some evolution to it. And as we know, these things evolve over time, and over time that lockout where no one in or out may be loosened a little bit so that we will do a monitored entry or a controlled release. And, an example is if mom needs to pick up their daughter for a dentist appointment, we aren't going to make her wait in the parking lot. But certainly that's going to be an evolution over time and we're going to be very attentive to it.

Bill Godfrey:

Of course. And you work with a lot more schools than we do. But I will say my experience with the schools by and large has been, lock down is a familiar terminology. As you mentioned, it kind of means a whole bunch of different things to schools. But when you introduce the concept of lockout and get them to kind of look at the thread, it's like the light bulb goes on and there's this sort of aha moment of, wow, there really is something in between. Is that continuing to be your experience as you're traveling the country and teaching new schools about the Standard Response Protocol (SRP) process?

John-Michael:

Absolutely. And there's one more action that's still kind of in the middle of both of those, and that's hold in your classroom or area.

Bill Godfrey:

I was going to ask you about that one, because you mentioned you added that. Tell us a little bit about why you added the hold and what that means?

John-Michael:

When we initially developed the Standard Response Protocol (SRP), it was about sharing a common language between students, staff, and first responders. But there's this one more action, hold in your classroom, where we may need to keep the hallways clear even if the bell rings. Maybe it's a medical emergency, maybe a student spooled up. The whole point is we're going to keep those halls clear until whatever's in the hallways can be resolved. And, in 2012 we introduced it into our training materials as an optional fifth action. And I'm sorry, it wasn't 2012, it was 2015. 2015 we introduced that, and we started getting requests for all five actions on our materials.

Bill Godfrey:

Of course, it makes complete sense.

John-Michael:

And for the last several years we've had materials with all five actions on it, and we made the commitment this year that with SRP 2020 we will include all five actions as the baseline for the standard response protocol.

Bill Godfrey:

So, standard response protocol, the new version 2020 coming out has got the five actions, lockout, lockdown, shelter in place, evacuate and hold in classroom, as well as I'm sure you've got some other new stuff that you've incorporated in the 2020 release as well.

John-Michael:

One of the things that's new for us, and we're calling them distributed campuses, and the notion really hit home when I was in Kern County, California. And some of the schools in Bakersfield, remember I'm from Colorado, it's chilly out today and there's snow on the ground.

Bill Godfrey:

I don't want to tell you what the weather here is in Florida.

John-Michael:

But, they pointed to what they called an open corridor. And what I saw was a sidewalk with an awning on it. And so we've got individual buildings that have open corridors linking them together, and often there's a secured fence around the perimeter of the campus. And so, we're looking at that distributed campus and modifying some of our lock out instructions based on that environmental aspect of what they've got going on.

Bill Godfrey:

I think that's a great addition. My youngest daughter, her high school that she attends, which you've seen before, has that very kind of environment. It's a campus of multiple buildings connected by various corridors and walkways. And so, I think that's a great addition.

John-Michael:

Yeah, we're excited about that. The evolution of drill practices is another conversation that we're having in as well. The recent media attention on drills causing trauma. And once again, we looked at the language and the specificity of it, and once again, there's a little fuzziness coming from our federal friends. And our approach is that we conduct a drill to create muscle memory, we conduct an exercise to test capacity. And I think during an exercise we might be simulating events. During a drill we don't need to. We just want to create the muscle memory. And so, I think some of the media attention with drills causing trauma, we're really looking at exercises gone awry.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah. There's certainly too many of those that more than we would like to see, where there's just been some poor decision making and poor choices that is just, it harms everybody.

John-Michael:

And again, some of the book isn't written yet. And so as we're all going down this path, if somebody stubs their toe, let's not point the harsh finger of accusation, let's help them up again and keep going down the path.

Bill Godfrey:

Amen. Amen. So, we talked about standard response protocol. You led us through where you were, what's coming new in 2020. Talk a little bit about the standard reunification method and how that came in and where it's going. Because you've got a new version of that coming out as well.

John-Michael:

Yeah. We're pretty excited, and I actually have been heads down in the software side of the world. We introduced it in 2012 based primarily on a method that was developed in Adams 12 five star schools here in Colorado. And, the director of security at the time, he's now the chief operating officer, he had 13 reunifications in seven years. And it's a remarkable number.

Bill Godfrey:

That's a lot.

John-Michael:

He freely admitted that his first half dozen were horrible because he didn't have a plan, and winging it isn't a plan. And so, he did some homework, and got some stuff and developed this method. He shared it with us. We worked with some other districts and released the standard reunification method in 2012. And that's one where we're learning all the time. And so, it was, again, I think 2015 or 16 version two came out, maybe a little later than that, and we're in production right now with version three. And a couple of the things that we've seen is that people think reunification, they think about, oh my gosh, it's that act of violence event. And the reality is that things happen at schools all the time where you need to bring your parents together back with your kids. And so, we're actually taking the core of that and generating with software a few different types of reunification operation kits.
So, if we're reunifying a subset of the population because of a threat that's outside of the building and we don't want kids walking in the neighborhood, that's a very different reunification than a hazmat incident where we're evacuating the entire school. And even that incident is a very different reunification from an act of violence incident. And so in all of this, we're putting together different layers of response. And, that's one of the goals is to fine tune that to make it accessible so that when that little evacuation comes up, we use the standard reunification method, even if it seems like overkill. And that's an ideal opportunity to train our students, train our parents, and train our staff on how it works.

Bill Godfrey:

Absolutely. For the benefit of our, of our listeners, you and I met, I don't know how many years ago it was at one of the conferences, and got to talking, and I became aware of a lot of the work the foundation's done in the reunification. And as I began looking at that from a responder point of view, because we had routinely run into schools who either had no reunification plan or their reunification plan was, yeah, we're going to use our cafeteria, or we're going to use our gym on the same campus where this event would have theoretically just taken place. And of course as responders you're like, that's not going to work. The whole campus is basically going to be shut down and a crime scene, and that's not where we want parents coming and going and all that kind of stuff. So we've got to move the kids off campus.
And when we began looking at what was out there, the stuff that you'd put together, it wasn't just the best, it was so far ahead of everybody else. It's very difficult to compare. It's like comparing a bicycle to the Star Trek enterprise that could move at warp speed. It was your stuff was that far ahead, and you were so gracious with your materials that we began incorporating it into our active shooter incident management course, both our intermediate and advanced course, because we felt like it was important for responders to not only understand that this is a difficult task, here's a plan that's out there if you don't have one, but, oh by the way, here's some of the challenges that go with this stuff. And kind of the interesting evolution for us was as we were teaching it for, I would say probably a couple of years I guess, but only in a fairly overview superficial way, because there wasn't a lot of time to focus on it in the class that we were doing.
And recently about a year ago, so I guess, I think that's about right, about a year ago or so, we began realigning it, maybe close to two years ago now, now that I think about that, we began realigning what we were doing and said, this is more important. And we dedicated a little more time to it and actually built it into one of the hands on exercises we do in the advanced class. And almost as soon as we began doing that, we recognized that there were some things that we didn't understand as well as we thought we did. And I don't know if you remember back those days, but it seemed like I was calling you twice a week asking you questions about, well, how is this supposed to work? And we ran into a problem, and have you seen this before? Do you remember those flurried phone calls that went on for several months?

John-Michael:

Absolutely. And I put your ring tone on lifeline on my phone.

Bill Godfrey:

Well, I really appreciate that you did that. But some of that stuff we ran into led to you and I talking a little more deeply about some places where some of the things that we came upon you'd already had happened before and you had good answers for. Some of the things that came up were things that hadn't arisen before and led to some deep conversation. And on the integration with the responders, we thought we saw some opportunities to kind of simplify things a little bit. And I just love how open, and gracious and willing you were to have those conversations with us and talk about that, which is led to obviously the formal partnership that we've got now between C3 and the foundation to move forward on both fronts, not only on the school side but on the responder side. But with that as a foundation, can you talk through from your side some of what were the things that jumped up and got your attention about some of the things that we ran into, and what struck you that that led to the new version of SRM that you're getting ready to put you out? By the way, are you calling that SRM 2020 or is that got a different name?

John-Michael:

Oh man.

Bill Godfrey:

Or have you given it a name yet?

John-Michael:

I think we're probably going to go with SRM 2020, and part of that is to reinforce that we're doing a biennial, every two years we're going to be updating this stuff. And, I think that's part of the commitment of the foundation is to constantly evaluate and evolve the materials. And, one of the things that has been really impressive is your giving back to us some of the evolution that you have learned in your hands on training, and we've been incorporating that into SRM 2020. And it's a statement to the power of partnerships in that it works better when the commercial sector and nonprofit sector can work together in an arena with shared goals.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I'm very excited about it. So, tell the audience what's new in the version and SRM that's coming forward?

John-Michael:

Well, there's been some simplification. I thought when we had released the second version of the standard reunification method, we had worked with Hays County in Texas, and very strong, incident command background young Marshall there, Will Schwall, had done a tremendous amount of work to assemble what we based the version two on, and job action sheets and org charts. And what we've done with that is leveraged some of your work in simplifying it. And, we realized that it was coming from a heavy incident command perspective, and some of that was a little much for some of the schools. And so, that simplification has been part of our goal with this, but it's also resulted in a couple of additions. And here's a surprise, new role, person with disabilities director.

Bill Godfrey:

Oh, interesting.

John-Michael:

And, what we've seen is that often schools have individual education plans for students with disabilities. We're asking them to put together individual evacuation plans, individual lockdown plans, effectively an individual Standard Response Protocol (SRP) plan so that when you do a reunification, there's a plan in place for some of the students and staff with disabilities.

Bill Godfrey:

That's really interesting John Michael. And I know you and I talked about this after we did it, because we said, well, that was some interesting feedback and outcome. But in one of our courses where we were doing the reunification exercise, the scenario, we told the responders, so you've got these kids here, these kids here, these kids here, and oh, by the way, in this class you've got 20 kids and they're all special needs kids that range from very simple stuff, to wheelchair, to autistic, to can be very combative if they get out of their normal element. So by the way, you've got to factor that into what you're going to do. And it was a like silence in the room. You could hear a pin drop for what seemed like an eternity.
It probably was only about 30 or 60 seconds, but it seemed like an eternity as we all just kind of stared at each other. And you could almost hear the crickets as in, well, nobody in the room had thought of that, and it raised some really interesting questions. But the discussion that came from that one little thing was really fantastic in terms of talking about, how would they manage that? How would they work with the staff? What would the additional effort be needed? How do you need additional personnel? Were there special transport vehicles that were going to be needed? All of those kinds of questions came up and it was a wonderful, wonderful dialogue.

John-Michael:

Absolutely is. And that's a conversation that we're extending in our trainings as well, because it's one of the things that typically doesn't get talked about in crisis response planning.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah. It's hard to imagine, even all my years on the job in the fire service and emergency management, and all of the emergency plans that I've reviewed and been part of over the years, I can't honestly tell you that I can remember an emergency plan that had an annex for people with disabilities and special needs. And it's hard to imagine how we didn't see that back then, because it seems very obvious to me now, but I can't remember any of them from when I was active duty.

John-Michael:

It's another one of those voids, it's one of the things that is also in production right now. Ellen is very deep in it, and it's based on materials that we found out of Marin County, California. And we had contacted them to see if we could use that as a base to develop precisely that annex. And we are really optimistic that that's coming out first quarter as well this year.

Bill Godfrey:

That's fantastic. So, we're in the new version of School Reunification Method (SRM). There's some stuff for folks that have disabilities or specialty needs. You've got some simplification on the Incident Command System (ICS) that's coming forward. What else is new?

John-Michael:

So, one of the things we've been looking at is moving back in time, and certainly we're in that crisis response side of the spectrum. One of the things that we've seen with the standard response protocol is it's kind of like a Trojan horse. And once it gets into the building, then our safety teams begin saying, well, what about going for that tip line or a threat assessment, threat management process? Are there things we can do with climate and culture? And, we worked with the Center for the Study of Prevention of Violence and NASRO, the National Association School Resource Officers, in formulating a grants. It was a cop's grant, and it awarded to National Association School Resource Officers (NASRO). And so we're in the mix there in developing materials for law enforcement and schools to start to build out, how do we get ahead of the bang? And it's an ambitious project. It's not a huge grant, but it's a strong commitment with NASRO, the Center for the Study of Prevention of Violence, the I Love You Guys Foundation, Safe and Sound Schools is in the mix, and was in Dallas just last week with our initial launch meeting. Mo Kennedy, Beverly Kingston with the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV), and actually had the ramp manager kind of evaluating how we were getting things started from the cops office. So, it was a fabulous meeting and I'm really looking forward to that project. I just need to clear some decks before I get to that one.

Bill Godfrey:

That's fantastic. That all sounds pretty exciting. Well, I'll tell you one of the things that I'm very excited about in the new version of School Reunification Method (SRM) is how tightly we've been able to integrate it with the Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) checklist process, the active shooter incident management checklist process, and that organizational structure so that when there is a hostile event that's involving emergency services, involves law enforcement, fire, EMS, that there's a structure already in place for the entire SRM branch to drop into and be able to work with incident command. That there's the role for the school to play to manage that, but still keeps them very integrated with the incident command structure of the incident at the effected site, and kind of ties it all in as one piece, ties it in together.
Which of course, by the same token, if it's not a violent event and it's a reunification that's being done for some other purpose, then the emergency services aren't really involved or law enforcement may be a little tangentially involved to provide some traffic control and things like that. But it's predominantly a school led, but the structure is still the same. And so it becomes this one training package that we can share with everybody. Emergency responders, school officials, church officials, any groups, community colleges, any groups that have large numbers of people that may have a need for reunification to be able to use that same structure, that one process. I'm really, really excited that we've managed to get that tied in so tightly between our two groups.

John-Michael:

Well, it was fascinating to see the Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) checklist evolve, and the conversation, it went from 8 1/2 by 11 to 8 1/2 by 14.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah, we did run out of space. We had to go to a bigger list.

John-Michael:

But that reunification branch is then the core starting point for School Reunification Method (SRM) 2020. And it was really important to us organizationally to be able to plug into the Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) structure and you gave us that simplification that allowed us to do it. And that's one of the integrations that I think is going to be absolutely essential moving forward. It just gives us a framework to drop into that's just a little less fat.

Bill Godfrey:

And I'm excited to hear your feedback once you get the new version released of how it's going in the schools. As I've shared with you offline, we've had just some fabulous, fabulous feedback from the responders in the classes that we've been doing, both the hands on and where we're just teaching the theory. It really resonates with them and make sense. We haven't seen any pushback from the responders on saying, yeah, the school should formally be part of the command structure. I mean, it's been really exciting to see, so I'm anxious to hear that feedback when you guys began doing that with schools.

John-Michael:

Well, often in our audiences we'll have law enforcement, and more and more so specially around reunification fires in the room. And, if we look back historically, we're pretty convinced that the SRP was a vector into building the relationship between schools and law enforcement. And, we are absolutely committed to the notion that all of this stuff works better when there's that strong partnership. But in all honesty, getting fire into the room was a challenge. And what we're seeing with reunification is that fire's coming to the table, that they're bringing that component that only fire can bring, and it's a welcome addition in that reunification package.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah. And interesting, we've seen that in the classroom and in our training sessions as well. When it comes down to doing the work, when we're running the exercises and it comes down to doing the work, there's an awful lot of work for law enforcement, and we actually need a lot of the fire and EMS personnel to plug into some of those, what I'll call nonstandard roles, to help manage the process, which of course fire has a long history of using the incident command system. And so, it kind of makes sense to them. And we haven't had any pushback at all. I'm not sure it's something that people would have naturally seen or would have naturally gotten to that point. Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. But it's been very, very warming to see that when we're doing this and we say to the fire and EMS folks, look, there's not enough law enforcement to do all of these roles. We need you to step in and do this and do this, and some of these reunification roles, really manage them. And there's no hesitation, they jumped right in. And that's very exciting.

John-Michael:

Well, and I think that they're coming to the table maybe influenced by our city and county emergency managers. In the last few years, we've seen a growing increase in awareness and motivation to work on family reunification plans. What if something happens at the mall or the church? And consequently we're seeing in our audiences, and it might be a little more palatable for fire to show up to a training when the emergency manager makes that call.

Bill Godfrey:

Yeah, I think you're right on the money. We need everybody at the table, from emergency management, to fire, EMS, law enforcement, the schools, the districts. Everybody needs to be at the table. Private schools. I mean, you and I have had a lot of conversations about the tendency for private schools and church based schools to have been left out of the mix. And I think everybody needs to be at the table. And emergency management is kind of that common group that can put their arms around everybody and say, hey, we all need to do this together.

John-Michael:

Absolutely. And sometimes they're given the mandate to do it.

Bill Godfrey:

Indeed. Indeed.

John-Michael:

I know more than one sheriff whose stamped a foot.