Ep 99: Mastering Reunification Part 1
Episode 99
Published Dec 30, 2024
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 29:38
Episode Summary
Reunification happens every day from a school perspective - parent pick-up, buses, etc. But what happens after a violent event? How do the public safety community and the school community come together? Listen today to find out how the I Love U Guys Foundation and NCIER programs complement each other.
Episode Notes
In today’s podcast we discuss the importance of reunification training and exercises for schools and public safety organizations. John-Michael Keyes, Stacy Avila, and Kevin Burd from the I Love U Guys Foundation speak with Bill Godfrey, focusing on their respective approaches to reunification training.
The podcast highlights the complementary nature of different training approaches and emphasizes the importance of collaboration between schools and public safety organizations in preparing for and executing reunification procedures.
Key Points:
Training Programs
- The Standard Reunification Method (SRM) by the I Love You Guys Foundation
- School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management (SSAVEIM) by the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response
- Reunification Exercise (REx) class
Important Aspects
- Simulation of realistic scenarios without recreating the triggering event
- Collaboration between school staff and public safety personnel
Benefits of Training
- Reduces stress and anxiety about reunification
- Provides insight into the complexities of the process
- Helps educators understand the public safety response timeline
View this episode on YouTube at https://youtu.be/FspwCcTGuxQ
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:One of the classes that we teach at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response is called SSAVEIM, School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management. And we often get questions. Well, how does this fit with the I Love You Guys? Is it duplicative? Is it different? Are they the same thing or conflicting? Those are today's topics. We got the I Love You Guys Foundation here with us to talk about it. Stick around. Welcome to the "Active Shooter Incident Management" podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey your podcast host. And I wanna thank my guests for joining us here at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response. We got John-Michael Keyes from the I Love You Guys Foundation, Stacy Avila and Kevin Burd. They're training, well, I guess technically you're the training coordinator and you're the training director.
Kevin Burd:
Yes, sir.
Stacy Avila:
Kevin's really just boss in name, really though, right?
Bill Godfrey:
Sounds like so many things in life, doesn't it?
Stacy Avila:
Still in charge, yeah, yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
We're starting off with a zinger, aren't we, John-Michael? Right off the bat.
John-Michael Keyes:
The day is young.
Bill Godfrey:
So I want you to talk a little bit about the standard reunification method, SRM, and set that stage for the training that you deliver and the training that we're delivering, the SAVM class, School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management, and your RECS class, the reunification exercise. So set the stage for us a little bit and talk about SRM and how it fits.
John-Michael Keyes:
I'm gonna go back in time, Bill. And we were at a conference, and it was the first time I saw a breakout that you were doing. And it was an ASIM, and we had the Counter-Strike board there. There were radios and vests, all on a breakout. And conferences, I see a lot of training. This one stuck out. I had to just say, "Who is this guy?" Because he was owning the room, and there was engagement, and there was content. And ended up convincing you to buy dinner.
Stacy Avila:
He has a way of doing that, right?
John-Michael Keyes:
And we talked about ASIM at that point in time. And this is when I realized, okay, Bill's the real deal. I said, "You're missing something." And you, of course, said, "No, I'm not." And I said, "Here at this conference, "we heard that one of the lessons "that public safety learns over and over again "is in setting up that joint information center "sooner rather than later." And I said, "You know what's not on here?" And that's communication, that joint information center. And you looked at me across the table and said, "Ah, I think you're right." And I said, "Yeah, we're not done. "I think we're also missing one more thing. "You said, 'No, we're not.'" I said, "The very next step "after that act of violence event is reunification, "and law enforcement needs to have that on their radar." And you said, "Can I say it?"
Bill Godfrey:
Yes.
John-Michael Keyes:
You said, "Damn it, John-Michael. "That means I've got to go to a four panel." But what that did was provide me with a counterpart, somebody who's willing to evaluate and evolve programs and materials and not stick with it because it's what it is. And that began our professional relationship. And as we looked at reunification, we were often talking with primarily educated education administrators. Often we'll have law enforcement in the room, and law enforcement needs to know this. I had a cop tell me, "I've been trained in the first five minutes on what to do, "but we had an incident. "I got there at minute six, "and I had no training on what to do next. "And it was the longest day of my professional career." And that's where reunification really comes in. And we hear it all the time. Oh, God forbid, we have to do a reunification. Well, we're doing reunifications every day from a school perspective. You're reunifying some students with a bus, some with a sidewalk, some with their parents fetching them, and your teenagers drive home. That's a reunification if you think about it. But the violent event, we need to have the mechanics down from the school perspective, but the public safety side of it needs to have that side as well. And we use the term bookends from a training perspective. Our training and exercise is really geared to get the mechanics down and SSAVEIM is about really what does that incident management look like? And how is it different from that everyday reunification or the nonviolent event reunification? And I think that that package together, we've heard it over and over where the public safety community and the school community, we just did SSAVEIM, we just did recs, and it's the perfect complement.
Bill Godfrey:
Stacy, talk a little bit about some examples of the nonviolent event reunifications, why you might have to do a reunification that isn't from a violent event.
Stacy Avila:
Right, well, I like to talk about unusual things happen at school every day. So there's going to be the water main break, the gas leak, something where if it's an event that we can reunify from the school, like you talked about a controlled release that the schools do every day, or do we have to walk to an evacuation area? It's a totally different feel from that school violence event, right? We're gonna have more people involved, maybe if we're doing the water main break, just our school staff can handle that. But as we kind of go down the spectrum and get into a violent event, well, we're gonna have some more folks there, right? We're gonna have our first responders. It's so important because of that, that they have an idea about what to expect, and more importantly, maybe that the school has a plan. Because if, and I'll own this, especially from the law enforcement perspective, if we get there and we're there minute six and we think there's no plan, we'll take it over, and that's not necessarily gonna go well, right? We'll come up with a solution because we're problem solvers, but it's not gonna take into account the accountability that the district has, right? All kind of the parameters that they have. So we really wanna make sure that we're preparing both our school personnel and staff and our first responders about what to expect on one of these days.
Bill Godfrey:
And I'm gonna add one more just for clarity. There's a law enforcement matter that is not involving the school. The school is safe, but it happened somewhere in proximity to the school, which puts the kids at risk for walking home or things like that. So there's a robbery a block away, two blocks away, something like that, which would cause the school to go into a secured condition. And they may make a decision to do a reunification, partial or full reunification in that event. And that, we're not talking about that as a violent event on the campus. So when we talk about the school safety and violent event incident management, it is specific about this has been triggered because of a violent event on the campus involving this school. Kevin, from your perspective, 'cause you wear shirts on both sides of this course, you're one of our active shooter incident management instructors, been doing that for a long time, as well as being one of the, I love you guys foundation instructors doing that for a long time. From your perspective, what jumps out to you is some of the big distinctions between a violent event reunification and a nonviolent event reunification.
Kevin Burd:
Yeah. So Stacy mentioned it also, stuff happens at schools every day. And sometimes you have the power outages, the gas leaks, the water main break, whatever it may be. And I think the biggest distinction between the two is nonviolent event, number one, this is a great time to practice your plan. All right, let's practice, then let's drill, then we'll eventually get to maybe an exercise. Let's practice the plan. Let's take the opportunity that this power outage, this HVAC issue presented to us, and let's run through it. And you may not need your entire team there. You can get away, if you're familiar with the SRM or SSAVEIM class, we talked about greeters, checkers, accountants, reunifiers, all those different roles. We can start with that and we can practice with that. And if your school has SROs and law enforcement liaison or your fire EMS, I know a lot of times we talk about law enforcement being there 'cause we're always thinking violent event, but reunification has expanded out across the board. We have emergency managers, fire, EMS, other community stakeholders, all getting involved in these conversations, but we can probably not need as many as we normally would. Schools reunify their kids, their students with parents or guardians every single day. So let's take the opportunity. Now, when we get into that violent event, one of the questions that comes up all the time is, well, who's in charge? Who is in charge of that reunification piece? And this is where I have the benefit, you mentioned before, instructing on both sides here, where I can relate the ASM checklist or unification branch, bring that into a conversation. And just enough in an SRM training, so I'm not overwhelming them with a lot of ICS conversations for teachers and educators.
Bill Godfrey:
It's hard enough with public safety. I can only imagine with teachers and educators.
Kevin Burd:
So, but if we take the opportunity to practice or drill, it's not foreign to us that worst case scenario day. And we have a plan, we have those relationships built, and then we can build out, right? ICS, adaptable, flexible, scalable. Let's start small, start with our staff, maybe introduce it, the discussions. And I know that's what I did at my level. Started talking to seventh and eighth graders. Hey, after this lockdown, we may exit the room. Law enforcement may come in, ask a couple of questions. Are you okay? Are you not okay? Is anybody injured? Is anybody missing? Is anybody here that shouldn't be here? One of those questions, then we're gonna move you to a secure assembly area, or maybe right to the bus, but introduce conversations. But the complexity and who's ultimately going to be in charge of that reunification. Let's have those conversations. And we've talked about this for years to all of us. Reunification, for some places we've been, it's a checkbox. Yeah, my reunification plan is in the binder behind me. It's four inches thick with 175 pages. It's part of your EOP. And they haven't tested it, drilled it, or exercised it in ages.
Bill Godfrey:
My favorite part, we're going to use our auditorium as a reunification point. Or we're gonna use our ball field as a reunification point. Which of course, you can think that you're gonna do that, but that's what we now call a crime scene.
Kevin Burd:
Yes. Name of your school has just changed for a violent event.
Stacy Avila:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy. And John-Michael, I remember when we were flushing this out, which along the way, you mentioned that we didn't get stuck in the sand on this and changing things. And there was a, I don't know, do you remember how long it was? Was it over a year, a year and a half or so that we kind of went back and forth on the structure and some of the naming with a focus on trying to simplify and clarify it? Do you recall that?
John-Michael Keyes:
Absolutely. We originally had runners in the mix and there's a specific ICS role tagged runner. And we relabeled that to reunify it to be clear on what the role really is. And so between version one and version two, there was a good amount of collaboration in isolating, clarifying the roles. And even with the pandemic, when we adapted the SRP to become the standard distribution method, the collaboration between us organizationally was occurring over our first version of Zoom, if I recall.
Bill Godfrey:
I vaguely recall that. Bill, can you write me up an incident action plan to do this? Sure, when do you need it by? A couple hours?
John-Michael Keyes:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
That was a fun conversation. So let's talk a little bit about, so I assume everybody, well, I shouldn't assume. I think the audience probably has an understanding that the foundation offers training on both the standard response protocol and standard reunification method. That's the kind of traditional training. But talk a little bit about your REX, your reunification exercise course. What's the format? What form does it take?
John-Michael Keyes:
It's a two-day package. And the first day, we go through the standard response protocol and the standard reunification method. And we do what we call a stage walkthrough. And that's an important part to set the second day. And the second day, we identified something that's really challenging. In order to do a reunification, we need students and we need parents. And the last thing either cops or administrators want is actual students and parents in the room as they're figuring stuff out for the first time. And so we get about 100 folks, break them into three groups. And one group is initially the reunification team. The next group is parents, and the next group is students. And we've provided identification cards so that we can do, it's actually a little adoption ceremony. It's quite touching. And introduce the student to the parent. We've got associated role sheets for accountability. And we have the reunification team identify, we've got vests, we've got radios, we've got lanyards and roll IDs, and they set up the stage for reunification. We then reunify the students with the parents, talk about it, rinse and repeat, and then shift roles and do it again. And at the end of the day, everyone has seen reunification from each of the perspectives as a student, as a parent, and as a reunification team. We are clever in the way we break folks up. If the four of us were sitting at the table 'cause we were colleagues, we use playing cards. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, suddenly you're not on the same team anymore. And so at the end of the day, we've had people working with folks who were strangers in the morning, successfully doing this, learning this. And that's one of the side effects is successfully working with strangers and creating that mental path, if you will.
Kevin Burd:
Because that may be a reality in an offsite reunification for a violent event. Your team may not be available. So you may have to pull on some others that have had the training, and you may work with somebody you've never worked with before. But the position, the title, the roles don't change. So I think-
John-Michael Keyes:
And we don't simulate the event that triggered the need for reunification. And I think that's an important distinction. We're getting the mechanics, the biomechanics of how to move people through the process. And it's, we get folks who'll get 15,000 steps a day for that day. It's active, it's actually kind of fun. It's invigorating people.
Stacy Avila:
They're a hoot to train. And so when we're talking like that model where we're gonna talk about it the first day, then we're gonna see it in just the stage walkthrough so they see the process, and then we go do it. And so we get this good kind of adult learning model. And I'd like to touch on something that Kevin had said earlier, the opportunity to practice your reunification, even on the days that are the nonviolent days, you know, the power outage, practice it every time so that we do it the same way. If we wait to just, well, we don't need to do it on this one 'cause it's not a big deal, you're never gonna be successful on the big deal day, right? So we have to make sure that we're doing it consistently every time.
Kevin Burd:
For the listeners, I wanna, the stage walkthrough, just to paint the visual of why we do that, a couple of the reasons why we do that. Within 15 minutes, we will grab an incident commander from the audience. That incident commander, depending on the instructor, will then allow the incident commander to pick a couple of supervisors. Then those supervisors pick a couple of team members. Within 10 or 15 minutes, the entire reunification team is established. And we position them in the room. Then we grab another 10 volunteers to be the parents or students. Within 20 minutes, they have built a team and they have just walked through in front of the audience, on the stage, if we happen to be in a stage or the front of the room, they've walked through it. And I'd like to revisit where we started this morning. Reunification, such a challenge. I don't know if we can do it. You just did it in 15 minutes. Now there's more that comes along with it, right? Planning the location, the site, but it takes the slides and then brings it to life and they actually see it in front of them. And then they follow up with the three exercises, practice, drill, exercise.
Stacy Avila:
And as you see the process, you see that it's a process that we can do. And so I make a little prediction at the start of day one of a two day REx, which is you probably have a lot of stress and anxiety because you don't have a reunification plan and you're not sure how you would do it. And my prediction is that by the end of day two, you will feel relief that you have a plan and all of your stress and anxiety will just be about, hey, we got a lot of work to do. And so far for the last two years, it's every time. Yep, we know we can do it, let's get to work.
John-Michael Keyes:
We lovingly call it the REx box and it's a jewel. It's a beautiful aluminum box.
Bill Godfrey:
Oh, I should have brought ours.
John-Michael Keyes:
And there's vests, there's radios, there's collateral, there's reunification cards and pens, lots of pens anymore. We ship it to them and then we leave it with them. And the aspiration is there's enough in there just from a collateral perspective, you can get another exercise or two done on your own. And it's kind of fun because it's part of the human nature. We're tool builders and we wanna take a look at this thing. And so leaving the recs box, I think is another fun outcome in all of that.
Stacy Avila:
It is and it allows us to leave them with, you need to keep practicing. Just once we leave the room, doesn't mean that this is just all done and we're checking the box off. We want you to keep doing exercises. And so we leave them with more than enough to do that. Actually, it leaves them with enough to handle an actual reunification or this was a North Dakota story that they new to the reunification, new to SRM had the REC's training. And prior to being able to build the rock boxes for your actual reunification kits, they had a need for a reunification the following week and they were able to successfully complete it just with the materials from the REx box.
Bill Godfrey:
It's pretty fascinating. There's a couple of things that did really jump out at me. I mean, I think it's fascinating to hear how you've pieced all this together, but how similar the approaches are in the class, though the topics are very different, sort of, and with a different focus probably be the better way to say it. So, as you said, spend in your class time talking about standard response protocol and the SRM. In our school safety and violent event incident management class, we do cover SRP, standard response protocol. We spend about 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes covering all of it. So it is not a deep dive because we're not there to talk about all five of the potential SRP things. We're there to talk about one and that's lockdown and the focus on that. And then we go on to talk about the active shooter incident management for the public safety responders and for the school folks to be able to understand as well. And then follow that up with a reasonably deep dive on standard reunification method and the tools. But I think the bigger picture, so kind of like you talked about, you have your three different groups and rotate them through. Our groups are essentially, we've got the school folks on one side and the public safety folks on the other side. And when we go to do the exercises, we do start off with the event. Now we're not talking blank guns. It is a large board, like an oversized monopoly board that would be about a size of this table. And the students are represented by poker chips with the student names on them and things like that. But we start with describing the threat to the school folks who are all around the table and the public safety folks are standing behind them. And their job is to make the announcements and get the campus into lockdown. Sweep the halls, get the kids in, get them all that secured. Then the public safety people will step up to respond to the threat. And then once the last injured person is transported, now it becomes both sides having to come together to transition to a very controlled, very secured movement of kids and staff from their rooms where they are, their classrooms presumably, or wherever location they've taken shelter. And then the decision, you mentioned this earlier, are we gonna assemble them at one location on the campus before we move them to an offsite location? Or are we gonna move them directly to a bus and there's pros and cons and all that? All of that conversation comes up. And inevitably when we're done, the public safety folks say, "God, I hope I never have to run a reunification." And the school folks go, "We had absolutely no idea "that this is what the response would look like."
Kevin Burd:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, from my perspective, that's the beauty of the SSAVEIM class. There's one bookend and the REx as another. However they are introduced to the SRP or SRM, very brief overview, stay two of the ASIM advanced, or maybe their district had an SRP or SRM come in. But I look at SSAVEIM and the beauty of tabletop exercises. And I love, and I'm like, the hair's going up on it.
Stacy Avila:
He's maybe the only person that I know that gets really excited about tabletop exercises.
Kevin Burd:
20 or 25 people, whatever, around a map and poker chips. And you can have some amazing discussions, but in my mind, this is like the rehearsal. We were introduced to it. Now we get to go hands-on and you get all those comments. I get excited about it. Because when you hear those comments, that is why we're there to show you this is what's happening while you're in lockdown. Because that's always been one of the questions from the teachers, right? What is going on out there while I'm in here? Yeah, and we want them to know what we're doing because unfortunately, right? Georgia shooting recently, right? And again, I saw one debrief, but I believe a teacher may have exited the room 'cause they thought they heard something in the hallway. There's a reason why we locked down, right? Whole other conversation for another time. But let's let our educators know what's happening in the hallways, outside on perimeter, command posts. Hey, somebody from the school, you made up as a liaison and a unified command post. Let them know what's happening, that there is a plan in place and this is what's happening. But the beauty of the tabletop is, in my mind is that rehearsal. Now you get to go hands-on, air out some of those questions, have some of those debates in the room. We know how debates can come up, even tabletop.
Bill Godfrey:
I actually think that may be one of the most important talents as an instructor is to keep a debate from going sideways and becoming heated.
Kevin Burd:
Yes, yes. But now you've had the introduction, you get to rehearse it, you get to see it. And then-
Stacy Avila:
You do it.
Kevin Burd:
You do the REx, you do it. And that's from talking to a district, an agency, an emergency manager, when you talk through that whole process, it's like the light bulb clicking again. It's, ah, that makes sense, yeah.
Stacy Avila:
And I like to say to the folks in my room, we have to rehearse these things because there's no excuse to allow a variable that we should have anticipated, come up and get a day of, right? So we need to make sure that we're planning for all the things that we know we need to plan for, so then that will save time for the things that you weren't expecting.
Bill Godfrey:
Sure.
John-Michael Keyes:
Well, it's a unique tabletop, too. It's functional, not simply a tabletop.
Bill Godfrey:
And that's, so for those in the audience that are listening and are familiar with the HC terminology, it's a tabletop only in the sense that we've put the board and everything on top of the table, but from exercise parlance, it is a functional exercise because you have people playing their roles, you have the communication, all of that stuff is kind of happening. And I think one of the most fascinating moments of awareness is when the educators, and I don't know so much the administrators, it seems to be more the teachers and the educators, the light comes on that their lockdown is not gonna be over in 10 minutes, that they may be waiting an hour in lockdown and with very little information. And why is it taking so long? What is going on? What is happening? And when they get to watch the public safety response, it's like the light bulb goes on of, "Oh, now there is a lot happening here." And I think in many cases, they're blown away by how much is getting done. The other thing that I think is important that we share with them is one of the statistics of active shooters is 90% of the time, the act of killing is over in 10 minutes or less, 90% of the time. And so if you're sitting in your classroom on lockdown and you heard, "This is not a drill, "this is something real." And you're at the 15 to 20 minute mark, you can probably begin to calm everybody down. And even though you don't have information, the odds are heavily on your side that whatever has happened has happened. And now it's just a matter of waiting for public safety to do its bit, focus on those that were injured and then get the campus returned to a secure environment.
Stacy Avila:
And I also think if you have an understanding of the why it's taking so long, it helps, again, like you said, the lower of stress and anxiety, and then you're able to support your students better. If you know what the process is, we can have a better explanation. So even though they might not be involved directly, being able to explain and have an understanding that just helps with their recovery process as well.
John-Michael Keyes:
We're seeing a growing trend with security directors focused on how do we get messaging back into the classroom during the lockdown. And that's an encouraging trend to see is investment and practice in talking back to the classroom if something goes down.
Bill Godfrey:
And it's funny that you segued there and brought that up.
Karla Torres:
Hi, I'm Karla Torres, your producer. Thank you for joining us in today's insightful discussion. We've had to split this podcast into two parts. So be sure to like and subscribe if you haven't already. You can also find us on all your favorite podcast platforms. Don't forget to tune in next week for part two. See you then.