Ep 131: What's New in SSAVEIM
Episode 131
Published Jun 5, 2026
Duration: 06:18
Episode Summary
Episode Notes
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:The SSAVEIM class, School Safety and Violent Event Incident Management. This is an eight hour class that is designed to combine public safety, police, fire, and EMS dispatch, PIO, emergency management and school personnel, school administrators, teachers, safety, SROs, all brought together in the same classroom. We're making some changes there. Tell me about 'em.
Kevin Nichols:
So the first thing we're doing is we're kind of giving it the same treatment that we gave the ASIM Basic course. We're going to put together a QuickStart version for SSAVEIM that will front load a lot of that lecture allow you to take it at your own time and your own pace, and allowed us to shrink the time in class spent, that face-to-face time in class spent on lectures and do more scenarios and spend more time at the boards working the scenarios.
Bill Godfrey:
We also really narrowed the focus of what that class is about and what it's addressing, and that is managing violent events at a school. Now we've partnered with the I Love U Guys Foundation, when we originally developed SSAVEIM and we follow the teachings of the standard response protocol, known to many as the SRP, as well as the standard reunification method, or SRM. What we came to realize in working with the foundation is they have great programs and great hands-on stuff that they're doing for all of the nonviolent event reunifications. And it turns out there's a whole lot of reasons schools might need to do a reunification that have nothing to do with a violent event, hazard material, you know, whatever.
Kevin Nichols:
Weather. We had one at our place where the air conditioner caught on fire. So we had smoke in the building, not necessarily a fire, the engine burnt out, but we had to evacuate a school over that and do a reunification based off of it.
Bill Godfrey:
Great examples. And the foundation and their training covers all of that. What the foundation training doesn't cover is the violent event reunification, which as anybody who's ever done one knows it's a very, very different animal. You are immediately forced into an offsite reunification because the site, the school is now a crime scene. So you've got the logistics of moving kids, securing an offsite location, the security that's involved in getting kids loaded onto presumably buses, or if the site is close enough to walk, how do you move those kids walking carefully? All that kind of stuff. It's a complicated animal. It's a complicated animal. So where we were, for example, covering standard response protocol and all the modalities, that's now five minutes and then the rest of the time is spent on lockdown because violent event incident management is about what this this class is about.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah. We wanna show the schools are really familiar with the SRP. They, most schools in the United States use it, or a large portion of them do. It's been adopted by several state agencies or state school boards associations. So they're familiar with it. We wanted to bring the awareness of what the entire spectrum causes to the emergency responder side, but we really wanted to focus, like you said, on that violent event which involves lockdown and then the violent event, incident manage or violent event reunification as well on the other side of it. So just making sure we focus on what all the people in the classroom would be dealing with.
Bill Godfrey:
So this class in one eight hour a day takes public safety personnel and school personnel together through lockdowns. What it is, what the common problems are, what the planning needs to include. Running an exercise takes them through the public safety response. So active shooter incident management and how they respond in, which is always an eye-opener for the school personnel who think that they understand how public safety's gonna respond. And then they're standing back with literally their hands over their mouths agape going, oh my goodness. And we get through that, including the exercise. Then we move into reunification, which is overwhelming for the school personnel and many times they've never practiced one. So this is the first time they're doing it hands on. And the public safety people were the ones standing back with their hands over their mouth agape going, oh my God, I had no idea there was this much to it.
Kevin Nichols:
And not just that. There is a lot on both sides that each of the other sides does not know or may not be aware of. But what this also does is make sure we're on the same page to where the response side doesn't look at it and go, that's a school problem, or the school side doesn't go, oh, that's a response problem. In a violent event reunification, it's both sides problem. It's gotta be one problem that we solve together and it really brings people together. One of the biggest benefits of the class is you get the school district, the school side of it together with the responder side in the same room, having these conversations before we have a bad day at our place.
Bill Godfrey:
And the emergency manager needs to be in the room with 'em.
Kevin Nichols:
Absolutely, man. They bring so much to the table.
Bill Godfrey:
And I don't just mean the emergency manager from the school district, I mean the emergency manager of the community, of the public safety area as well. 'cause I guarantee you we have never seen an instance where we go out and do this class and there aren't a lot of questions and comments about, Ooh, we didn't think of that. We need to update this plan. We need to fix this. Oh, we thought this. For the emergency managers, they gotta be in the room in this class because there's going to be a list of things that come up that need love and attention.
Kevin Nichols:
Again, you're letting the emergency managers know these are the things that we may expect from your office if something like this happens. But you're also letting the school district and the response side know these are things the emergency managers can provide in these type of events.
Bill Godfrey:
Absolutely.