With an increasing concern for safety, there is an increasing need for protocols and safety procedures to be put in place. As of current, a new classroom standard that has been in the works since last fall will soon be implemented in the Crown Point School Corporation. Emergency Lockdown Buckets will be placed in each and every classroom, as well as any public area in which students and staff are present.

“There’s been several instances around the country throughout the last several years, where unfortunately, schools have to go on a prolonged lock down because of a natural disaster or Godforbid, some kind of incident inside of the school,” Supervisor of Safety Dave Coulson said. “In the event things can’t move about in the school for a period of time there may be a need for certain items to be in the classroom already.”

The Emergency Lockdown Buckets contain numerous items that students may or may not need in an emergency. For example, the buckets transform into an emergency toilet in the event that any school has been in a lockdown for an extended period of time. 

“Sanitary wise, we have wipes, paper towels, and antibacterial gel, so we do have items in there. We also have garbage bags,” Coulson said.

School corporations have had to adapt over the years to keep up with the growing trend of violence in the world. After a previous incident at Lake Central they had to adapt and make sure their students and staff members had the necessary resources to be able to go for prolonged periods of time in isolation. After taking a page from their book, Crown Point Community School Corporation decided to work towards similar implementations of the Emergency Lockdown Buckets. It’s best practice for school systems to learn from one another.

“They kind of modeled their program after other programs that are out there, so we are certainly modeling ours after Lake Central,” Coulson said.

“We are involved with a group called the Lake County Safe Schools commission. It’s a group of schools in Lake County that meet with other law enforcement agencies meet bi-monthly. Part of what we do is talk about school safety,” Director of Secondary Education Mark Gianfermi said. “We just went through some of the best practices out there nationally. They recommend certain things like an emergency lockdown bucket.”

It’s important for these buckets to get out to each and every classroom as soon as possible. A lot of time has gone into setting this up.

“We’re going to have buckets in every classroom in the corporation. We have quite a few schools, as you know, a lot of students, so in addition to the classroom we’ll have them in other spaces such as the cafeteria, gym, the field houses and whatnot,” Coulson said.

Such a massive project requires a massive amount of manpower in order to swiftly get everything organized. 

Key Club as well as National Honor Society student volunteers have been pivotal in the setup of the Emergency Lockdown Buckets.

“We kind of looked and saw what service organizations and groups we could reach out to and Key Club was one that stepped up and said yeah we’ll get you 30 or 40 students over here and they did. Cause we’re all in this together it’s good to have everybody involved” Coulson said.

With the necessary funding from Gus Bock’s Hardware store, Secretary of Safety and Security LaWanda Duvall was able to order and attain 700 buckets and the other sanitary items, which is enough for every classroom in the school system.

“Our first phase was ordering everything and getting everything here, phase two is getting everything assembled as we’re doing, phase three is going to get the items picked up here, and going to all of the schools and then they’ll be deployed to all of the classrooms from there,” Coulson said.

Continuing to be innovative and resourceful is a part of keeping the school systems safe and secure. It is the duty of the Safety and Security team to constantly come up with solutions to possible dangers before they occur in order to protect students and staff alike.

“We’re always exploring new ways, we are engaged with a lot of school corporations that have safety and security programs in place to get new ideas, best practices that are clean from unfortunate situations and to be as proactive as we can,” Colson said.

“Crown Point school corporation takes safety and security very seriously. It’s a top priority so anytime we can find different programs to engage in and things that make our environment safe or safer, then that’s what we’re going to do,” Coulson said.