The Philomath School Board received an update Thursday night on a new quick-reference safety and emergency response tool being rolled out at district schools, a project Superintendent Susan Halliday said grew out of requests from the teachers association for something simpler and faster to use in a crisis.
Halliday said the district plans to reach out to staff and the community for input as the guide continues to be developed.
“When people found out what I was working on, they said, ‘Let us help you and let’s do it,'” she told board members, referring to informal collaborative efforts that had already occurred. “We said let’s do a preliminary document … and people can look at it and they can see what needs to be changed, what needs to be added. But let’s get something into people’s hands of the things that were most essential and most critical.”
Halliday said the push to get a guide into staff’s hands now, rather than waiting for a more polished version, came directly from staff.
“We’ve had staff for the past year really being adamant about we need safety information and need to know what to do, and we’ve had different books and things like that, and they’ve not been updated,” Halliday said after the meeting. “And so, rather than waiting to make sure we had all the information and delaying for another half a year or year, we said, ‘let’s get something out there,’ and it has all the critical elements of what we do already.”
Halliday said the information will grow and build from the first iteration into what it needs to be.
Each board member was given a physical flip chart to review during Thursday night’s meeting.
Halliday said the guide’s first five response categories come from the I Love You Guys Foundation, a nonprofit that developed the standard response protocol used by schools nationwide. Each category is tied to a specific type of action, she said, using a “secure” response as an example — used when there’s a threat outside the building and students need to be brought inside.
The district also added a category for a “room clear,” Halliday said, calling it something schools don’t expect to use often but wanted to have available.
“The document you see here is very quick and very succinct. It talks about the status, it talks about what are the staff actions and what are the student actions” in no more than four or five bulleted items, she said.
A companion document with more detailed guidance — covering staff actions, student actions, administrative follow-up and media communication — will be available separately and won’t be posted publicly, she said.
Halliday credited district staff member Dawnelle Davis with securing formal permission from the I Love You Guys Foundation to use its materials and with printing standard response protocol reference cards that staff can carry with their identification badges.
The physical guide shown to the board was a flip chart bearing the district seal and titled “Emergency Action Plan.” Its cover page lists all six response types with color-coded icons — a purple “Hold,” blue “Secure,” red “Lockdown,” green “Evacuate,” orange “Shelter” and yellow “Room Clear” — followed by matching color-tabbed pages for each, plus a final gray tab for emergency phone numbers. Each response page follows the same format Halliday described, breaking down the status that triggers it along with separate staff and student action items. The “Secure” page, for example, instructs staff to bring everyone indoors, lock exterior doors and windows, take attendance and continue instruction, while students are told to return inside and remain there until an “all clear” is given.
The guides, which will be going up on classroom walls, are being distributed to schools for staff in-service training next week, ahead of the start of the school year, Halliday said. She added that new school safety groups forming after the new year will continue to refine the materials based on feedback.
Board member Erin McMullen asked how information would flow from a classroom to administrators and back out to staff during an incident — for example, if a teacher observes something concerning and needs guidance on whether to secure a classroom.
Halliday said schools rely on a mix of communication tools once a concern reaches administration, including text messages between administrators, walkie-talkies within a building and phone systems. She noted that radio frequencies differ between schools, which limits communication across buildings but not within them.
Board Chair Tom Klipfel praised the format but suggested the guide should be organized primarily around the type of incident — such as an earthquake, an active shooter situation or an immigration enforcement action — rather than by response category, so a teacher who discovers a crisis first can quickly identify the right action without knowing the terminology in advance.
Halliday said that feedback would be valuable, noting the current structure reflects criteria used in staff training, and said the district will continue to gather input from staff on whether adjustments are needed.
Board member Ryan Cheeke suggested building on the color-coded icons already used on the guide’s cover page by extending that same visual approach — a picture representing fire, earthquake or an active shooter scenario, for instance — to help responders instantly identify the type of incident they’re facing rather than the category of response.
“This is a huge step forward,” Klipfel said as the discussion wrapped up. “This is just what we’ve been talking about.”
Halliday said the district welcomes direct feedback from the board and staff as the materials continue to be refined.
