The following letter was included in the Dec. 8, 2023 edition of Hornet Headlines, our digital newsletter for Licking Heights families.
Dear Parents and Guardians,
Licking Heights Schools is committed to providing the safest possible environment for our students and staff by taking proactive steps in securing our schools. We want to ensure they have a safe place to learn, work and grow. To maintain our safety standards and adapt to the societal threat of a violent intruder inside our schools, we are adopting ALICE proactive strategies.
Adoption of a lockdown-only response has been deemed insufficient by the Department of Education, independent researchers, and law enforcement. Society is dictating the way we change our thought process on safety, and ALICE options-based strategies will help increase survivability in the event of a crisis. We found the ALICE strategies to be the most adopted by schools across the country, and ALICE training helps to maintain our compliance with the Federally recommended guidelines.
ALICE empowers individuals to participate in their survival using proactive options-based responses. ALICE is an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. Licking Heights Schools has gone to great lengths over the last year to understand exactly what each option entails. We are very comfortable with all the ALICE proactive strategies to empower our students and staff to survive until help arrives. We will implement these safety strategies in age and ability appropriate ways district-wide.
Our staff is fully trained on the ALICE strategies through in-person and hands-on training with our district’s safety team, who are all ALICE Certified Instructors. We are very pleased with the comprehensive roll-out procedure that the ALICE Training Institute has in place and believe that implementing ALICE district-wide is the right choice for our students, staff, schools, and the community.
If you have any questions about the implementation of ALICE in our schools, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at
[email protected] or by calling our district offices at 740-927-6926.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kevin Miller