As an administrator new to the CCIC, every day I am fortunate to witness excellent teaching, students engaged with the latest in cutting edge equipment, and learning that is authentically embedded in the industry of greatest interest to our students.

In any one morning, a visitor to the CCIC can tour and see students engaged in VR (Virtual Reality) in our IT classrooms, move down the hall to watch other students engaged in project management problem-solving in our Business Services pathway, and then head downstairs to watch more students wheeling an airplane through our hangar doors for Airframe inspections. And this can be experienced in just one small corner of the CCIC!

The array of opportunities each day at the CCIC is just a sampling of the innovations taking place within Career Technical Education (CTE) in the Cherry Creek School District. We are honored to be on this journey with our students here at the CCIC!

This Wednesday, September 8th, we will be practicing a Lockdown drill, also known as an Active Threat drill. An active threat situation occurs when someone poses an immediate threat to the life and safety of students, staff and visitors inside our school or on our school campus. An example of this could be an active shooter, someone brandishing a knife, a suspicious unknown person, etc.

During an active threat situation students, staff, and visitors must take decisive and immediate action to find safety from the threat and create time barriers that allow first responders to stabilize the situation. Unlike drilling for less rapidly evolving emergencies, action must be taken quickly and smoothly, with coordination and purpose. Therefore, it is critical to practice and train the appropriate responses in order to gain confidence and understand how to safeguard students, staff and visitors during such an event.

While I know it may cause anxiety for us to contemplate such a scenario, it is important that we train ourselves how to properly respond rather than react. We want to gain confidence and understanding of the situation so that we become emergency prepared rather than being emergency scared. During these drills we will NOT use any type of simulated gunfire, smoke or role players. We will simply provide instruction, practice, and learn how to respond by going through the actions we want to duplicate during a crisis.

During this Active Threat-Lockdown drill we will be supported by School District Security, School District Administration, Law Enforcement, and Fire/EMS personnel who will assist us in checking doors and classrooms and coaching us through the process. This is important as all of them will have a part in responding to help. Each drill should take approximately 30 minutes as we practice all aspects of our emergency procedure.

At the conclusion of the drill, our building Safety Team will debrief the drill to discuss lessons learned and provide us with strategies to improve our response. We invite all staff and students to provide feedback and ask questions about the process so that we can continuously improve our practice.

Thank you for participating with us in this important training event so that we can help keep our school and our community of students, staff, and visitors safe. Please feel free to contact us at the CCIC or our District Security Team if you have any questions.