How Dover Went From a Binder on a Shelf to a Real Crisis Response Team

So, you know, along those lines, when you're talking about school safety, a lot of districts have a binder somewhere that has the school crisis plan, and we go over it in our, like, back-to-school professional service, and we review those things.

And often, like, that technically counts as a crisis plan.

So before you kind of started this narrowing of this work, what did that look like at Dover before sort of reimagining this?

It looked like a big, sick, red, three- ring binder that kind of sat on a shelf it was really good for you know those natural disaster sort of events or you know fire there's a fire in the building and we gotta have like a protocol in place like that was sort of like it was very technical but i think like what we struggled with is you don't practice we didn't practice sort of like the psychological sort of like response to like a traumatic event kind of thing that wasn't in our daily practice or vernacular at the time.

So I would say like that when the work first started, it was very emergency operations, incident command, things that were, you know, are used by police, fire, and like schools, like that incident command, but it didn't really, we hadn't really fully adopted like the more the psychological trauma approach.

So that's what we needed to to onboard over the years.

Yeah.

And that's so funny because sometimes when we talk to people about student safety or school safety, they refer to their school safety officers or the emergency people.

And so it's very interesting that that kind of has fallen under your work.

I know that some of the work was prompted by some serious student incidences of suicide over the last few years.

And your team responded by building something lasting out of that grief and out of that work.

So maybe share a little bit about what those years clarified for you about what students and staff need from a district as far as these kind of crises go.

And what gave your team kind of the resolve to take this on?

That's a great question.

Trying to reflect back on that time, I think there were some changes to some state-level resources that districts were accessing at the time.

So the state had a team that was a disaster behavioral health response team.

So that was sort of funded by DHHS and they would bring in like a facilitator.

Like if you had an event, you would call and they would come in, sort of set up an incident command and you would have like great folks from around the community.

You would have Opportunity-based providers, social workers, other districts would lend out their counselors and whatnot, and they would flood kind of thing.

But it was more like an external facilitated.

And then there was kind of a shift where it shifted from facilitative to more supportive.

So it put our district in the driver's seat to respond to these incidents.

So at the time, not having that experience of going through, it's kind of like you're You can read the VCR manual, but until you actually do the thing and press the buttons and go through the process, you don't automatize those practices until you go through it.

So we went through it and we made mistakes and learned from our challenges.

One of the things that we learned was that when you're organizing counseling support, you don't put all the counselors in one big room.

So, you know, along those lines, when you're talking about school safety, a lot of districts have a binder somewhere that has the school crisis plan, and we go over it in our, like, back-to-school professional service, and we review those things.

And often, like, that technically counts as a crisis plan.

So before you kind of started this narrowing of this work, what did that look like at Dover before sort of reimagining this?

It looked like a big, sick, red, three- ring binder that kind of sat on a shelf it was really good for you know those natural disaster sort of events or you know fire there's a fire in the building and we gotta have like a protocol in place like that was sort of like it was very technical but i think like what we struggled with is you don't practice we didn't practice sort of like the psychological sort of like response to like a traumatic event kind of thing that wasn't in our daily practice or vernacular at the time.

So I would say like that when the work first started, it was very emergency operations, incident command, things that were, you know, are used by police, fire, and like schools, like that incident command, but it didn't really, we hadn't really fully adopted like the more the psychological trauma approach.

So that's what we needed to to onboard over the years.

Yeah.

And that's so funny because sometimes when we talk to people about student safety or school safety, they refer to their school safety officers or the emergency people.

And so it's very interesting that that kind of has fallen under your work.

I know that some of the work was prompted by some serious student incidences of suicide over the last few years.

And your team responded by building something lasting out of that grief and out of that work.

So maybe share a little bit about what those years clarified for you about what students and staff need from a district as far as these kind of crises go.

And what gave your team kind of the resolve to take this on?

That's a great question.

Trying to reflect back on that time, I think there were some changes to some state-level resources that districts were accessing at the time.

So the state had a team that was a disaster behavioral health response team.

So that was sort of funded by DHHS and they would bring in like a facilitator.

Like if you had an event, you would call and they would come in, sort of set up an incident command and you would have like great folks from around the community.

You would have Opportunity-based providers, social workers, other districts would lend out their counselors and whatnot, and they would flood kind of thing.

But it was more like an external facilitated.

And then there was kind of a shift where it shifted from facilitative to more supportive.

So it put our district in the driver's seat to respond to these incidents.

So at the time, not having that experience of going through, it's kind of like you're You can read the VCR manual, but until you actually do the thing and press the buttons and go through the process, you don't automatize those practices until you go through it.

So we went through it and we made mistakes and learned from our challenges.

One of the things that we learned was that when you're organizing counseling support, you don't put all the counselors in one big room.