Emergency management coordinator adds clarity to school board report

Bill Gordon, the Hot Springs County Emergency Management coordinator, contacted the Thermopolis Independent Record to add clarity about his Feb. 16 testimony to the Hot Springs County School District Board of Trustees.

Gordon clarified that, rather than independently contacting “a firm in Chicago,” he was one of several people invited to take part in a Dec. 7 Zoom call, regarding local school emergency management plans. This call was between Hot Springs County School District Superintendent Dustin Hunt, Hunt’s Administrative Assistant Kathy Groh, County Public Health Response Coordinator Sady Mounts, and representatives of “the Chicago firm,” Facility Engineering Associates, P.C. — which also has officers in Denver, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Cheyenne, Wyoming — including Randy Braverman and Rich Merrill, the latter of whom served as the call facilitator and project manager for FEA.

Gordon had requested that Mounts be included in the call due to her position, just as he was invited out of courtesy to his own position, although he had anticipated being tapped as more of a “partner” in the planning. But when Gordon recommended including reunification between students and their families as an emergency management step, following any sort of incident that would require evacuations of the schools, that was when the FEA representatives vetoed Gordon’s concerns with expressed concerns of their own.

Gordon wanted any emergency management plan to be totally transparent to families about exactly where they could collect their evacuated students, but the FEA representatives countered that such transparency about a student collection point could create “a secondary target” for violence against students and their families. By contrast, Gordon’s viewpoint was, and continues to be, that only “a tiny percentage” of incidents requiring school evacuations would likely inspire such violence, since they would more likely be in response to evacuation incidents that were themselves violent.

To address that supposedly “tiny” percentage, Gordon recommended tapping law enforcement personnel to provide security at any student collection points, the latter of which Gordon deemed essential to foster accountability in the process of delivering students back to their families safely. It was due to what Gordon interpreted as the FEA representatives’ lack of receptiveness to his suggestions that he reiterated his recommendation of evacuation reunifications to the Hot Springs County School Board directly on Feb. 16.

“I do not mean to imply this company is not capable of writing a school emergency management plan,” Gordon told the Thermopolis Independent Record. “But their firm cited experience working with Chicago school districts in which a single high school could have as many as 5,000 students, which is more residents than we have in all of Hot Springs County.”

With that disparity in mind, Gordon suggested that emergency management plans developed for a Chicago-sized school district might not be ideally suited to fit a Hot Springs County-sized school district, and vice versa. Gordon again recommended identified evacuation reunification points to foster both comfort and “practiced familiarity” with emergency management procedures among students and their families.