When a school crisis unfolds, the communications breakdown usually happens in the same three places: messages are delayed, facts are inconsistent, and too many people start speaking at once.
This session shows school leaders and communicators how to build a practical crisis communications system that prevents those failures by establishing one voice, one message, and one approval chain across every channel.
Participants will leave with a clear model for how to communicate early, accurately, consistently, and with empathy, while protecting trust and supporting operational safety during the most difficult moments a district can face.
Related Resources
Building an Effective K-12 Crisis Communications Plan
A K-12 crisis communications template is a pre-built plan that tells a school district exactly who writes, approves, and delivers every message during an emergency, so the response doesn't have to be improvised in the moment. This free template gives district communications teams a ready-to-use plan built around the CDC's Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) framework, covering everything from the first 15 minutes of an incident through recovery and after-action review.
Transcript
Greg Turchetta: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining Bob Barrett and I. As you come in, you know the drill. Put your name, the district you're from, state you're from in the chat, so we know who we've got here.
I'm sure we're gonna have a lot of old friends and some new friends.
Greg Turchetta: Thank you for making time for this today. I… to me.
Greg Turchetta: This is it, right? And Bob, I think you're the same way, right? Absolutely. This is why your job exists.
It's not for the happy stories, it is for when your district needs you the most. Here we are. And so I'm excited to have this conversation with you today, excited to give you the resources we're going to give you. Welcome, Ruth.
Greg Turchetta: There's Maneka there. We got Rik from School District 145.
Greg Turchetta: All right, I'm not going to waste any time here. Normally, in an Apptegy presentation, I'm going to go to a slide that's a little fun, light-hearted, talking about me. Today's topic doesn't warrant that. So, if we haven't met, my name's Greg Turchetta, I'm the Strategic Communications Advisor here at Apptegy.
Prior to joining Apptegy, I spent 10 years
Greg Turchetta: as a senior communications officer in K-12 districts and some time in higher ed. I have dealt with every crisis that's imaginable, short of an active shooter.
Greg Turchetta: But I will tell you, and this story will come out later.
Greg Turchetta: In my first school district, I was 70 miles from Parkland when Parkland happened, and I think Bob will attest to this, too. If you're near that, it changes everything, right? So, that's my background. You know, Bob and I are going to talk to you today about real-world examples based in this plan.
Bob, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Bob Mosier: So, thanks, Greg, and thanks for having me. I'm Bob Mosier, I'm the Chief Communications Officer at Anne Arundel County Public Schools here in Maryland, situated just between Baltimore and Washington. I'm a graduate of this school district. This is my 20th year here, and prior to coming here, I spent 19 and a half years in newspapers, 19 of that in the
Bob Mosier: With the newspaper chain that covers the same county that we're in now.
Greg Turchetta: That's tight.
Bob Mosier: That's really jumping the fence from one side to the other.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, I too did 22 years in TV news prior to joining education, so you've got a lot of media, which will be interesting, because Bob and I see it from both sides. The people that are attacking you and the people that are defending the response. Wendy, yes, it will be recorded, so you can watch it later. All right, let's get going.
Let's dive right into this.
Greg Turchetta: I want to start with the idea of a delay, right? There's 3 ways communications breaks down, and of course, I'm going to start with the negative, because in a situation like this, you've got to be at your best on your district's worst day. If you take anything away from it, it's that.
Greg Turchetta: My greatest concern, what kept me up at night.
Greg Turchetta: most nights, as I was… I was at 3 different districts, so at 3 different districts, I had to go build new plans, right? Because here's the other thing, many of you may be coming into this today going, we have a response plan, we have a unification plan, and we may have the framework of some kind of emergency communications plan.
Greg Turchetta: But it's not to the level I'm comfortable with, and that's where I found myself.
Greg Turchetta: And I find myself asking this question.
Greg Turchetta: how fast can I get the message out to cut off the rumors? Because every delay
Greg Turchetta: is a problem, right? And the one that really kept me up at night was the idea that
Greg Turchetta: in the aftermath of a major event, I'd be standing at a podium with a superintendent, and I'd get asked this question.
Greg Turchetta: It's a question I can't answer.
Greg Turchetta: Greg, do you think if the response and the communication had been faster, lives could have been saved?
Greg Turchetta: Right? That's an X variable of math you don't want to do.
Greg Turchetta: And that's what my goal of all of this today is bringing Bob and having this session with you guys, is making sure you don't get put in that position. Bob, what's… what keeps you up at night?
Bob Mosier: Yeah, I think it's the, it's the… regret's not the right word, but the what-could-we-have-done-differently piece, right? How could it have been better? Sort of dovetailing on what you just said, you know, if we would have done this, could this have happened? Or, in the case of
Bob Mosier: of… of trying to… of your message not getting out the way you intended, right? How could we…
Bob Mosier: do that, because I really do think that when you talk about breakdowns in communication, two things have to happen before you even get to this slide.
Bob Mosier: you have to create your voice, right? Both within your district and with your community. You have to have a voice at the table in the district when all of this breaks down. If you don't have that beforehand, trying to create it in the midst of a crisis is just impossible.
And secondly, you have to build your audience. Your community has to know
Bob Mosier: Where to expect to find information that you're going to deliver to them, because you can deliver it in the timeframes that we're going to talk about today, but if you haven't built that audience, it's going nowhere.
Greg Turchetta: And absolutely, 100% on that. You also have to have the internal system built before this ever happens, right? One of my first questions I ask entering a district, and I talk… you report to the superintendent for a reason, for this conversation. Ma'am?
Sir?
Greg Turchetta: In a crisis, there's a certain level of a response I'm gonna activate as soon as information's confirmed, without sending any kind of statement through the committee that wants to read it, right? I have to acknowledge something happened as fast as possible, as soon as it's confirmed, and you're gonna have to have the trust in me, as your comms chief, to do that.
Greg Turchetta: So that conversation has to be put in place. Also, what's your internal system for confirming information? I can't tell you how many… is it a text group? Is it a WhatsApp group?
Greg Turchetta: I hope it's not email.
Greg Turchetta: But the speed at which you can be informed, right, that's gonna be another piece. How fast can you get that idea that an incident's going on? And then the other gap is, how fast does that go from report to confirmed?
Greg Turchetta: And what system do you have in place to make sure that something that's being said in a chat group isn't speculation or early bad information, but it's actually confirmed there was a shooting?
Greg Turchetta: Right? Closing those distances, because what is a delay? We can, you know, Bob, you and I might have a different, even, interpretation of what delay is. To me, under 10 minutes to say anything.
Greg Turchetta: was my standard. Where do you hold that? Do you put a number to it, or is it situational?
Bob Mosier: I don't know if we put a number to it, but I would say this, that trying to be first, and I know you're going to get to this point, but first comes a lot faster than you think, right? We have… we have a, a Facebook page that permeates our county, and lots of, districts in Maryland have… have…
Bob Mosier: shoot offshoots of that. And they sit around and listen to scanners, and then just publish what they hear, right?
Bob Mosier: there's no context, there's no anything, but once it gets out there, right, then… then you have a different battle to fight, and now you're not fighting… now you're not fighting offensively, you're playing defense right from the… right from the get-go. The other piece that… that I think you battle, and we battle,
Bob Mosier: is the internal one, right? It's who wants to be the messenger. And if you don't have that set up ahead of time, and you know, what you're just… you're begging for splintering, right? And so communications is trying to do one thing.
Bob Mosier: And the academic side that deals with the principals and the staff is trying to do something else, all with the best intentions, right? No misguided intentions there, but the splintering will end up with uneven communication and then doubt.
Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. So these are the three failures that can happen out of the gate. The delay. Every minute without a message is a minute your community defines the story for you.
I think cell phone bans in schools is a great thing when it comes to crisis communications, because it stops the rumor mill of text messages with students.
Greg Turchetta: I would say for many years, you're not going to beat a student to the text message, ever. They're in the room where it happened.
Greg Turchetta: Inaccuracy, right? How much bogus information is out there? You know, there's a report… how many reports of an active shooter have you had without having to have a legitimate one, right? So you're kind of waiting, you're getting set up.
At the same time, you're like, this doesn't feel like it's going to be confirmed because it's not showing those signs.
Greg Turchetta: And then, as Bob was just talking about, the misalignment, there's one voice.
Greg Turchetta: At most, two. The superintendent and the PIO. That's it. Same thing, like, for the police department.
There's a police chief and a PIO. That's it.
Greg Turchetta: that's where it has to be centralized, otherwise, yes, you're chasing your own tail, and so we're gonna try to help you build a plan today that avoids all three of these. Alright, so there's that one rule. One voice, one message, one approval chain.
Greg Turchetta: As I said earlier, I don't think there's an approval… now, again, there's different phases of crises, and we'll talk about that, but in your worst-case scenario, you're sending a message that confirms the school's on lockdown, do not come to the school, and you're not saying much more than that.
Greg Turchetta: And now the police take over, right? And then you're probably done until reunification. So the worst case scenario might be the easiest messaging. The lower ones, and we'll get into those, get a lot more nuanced.
Greg Turchetta: Because then you also have to classify and activate, and I'd be remiss if I didn't stop here for a second.
Greg Turchetta: We're gonna give you the template later for your comms crisis. You've got to get your crisis plan, and as soon as you finish your comms plan, you've got to go meet with your safety director and put these… dovetail these things together.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Because how do you classify and activate levels of crisis? In my districts, we'd use something, the I Love U Guys protocol, right? Secure, hold, lock down, evacuate.
Greg Turchetta: And I would have reporters calling and saying, I hear you have a school on lockdown, and I would say, no, because if you heard it, you would have heard the SWAT team going.
Greg Turchetta: Because in our district, a lockdown was students and teachers don't come out of classrooms unless SWAT team releases them. What you heard was a hold, and that's very different. We go in and out of holds all the time, right? So the levels matter, explaining levels, making sure parents understand the levels, and make sure internally we agree on what the level is.
Bob Mosier: Put them on your… put them on your website, right? I mean, put them.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah.
Bob Mosier: terminology we use, I Love U Guys also, Greg, and put it on your website, and have schools get it out to parents so they become familiar with that terminology. Because all they do know is lockdown.
Greg Turchetta: Right. There's two things you should be doing right now as school starts. Getting parents to update their contact information so that we have accurate ways of getting ahold of them, and that was the bait I used. If there's a crisis, we have to have an accurate phone number to get you the vital information you need.
And then two, when open house comes around, we should be talking about you. I'm pretty sure you explain to them on a snow day how it's going to be handled.
Greg Turchetta: Do you explain to them how Crisis will be handled as well? Alright, decision rights, who approves what, how fast, it's all in the plan, we're not gonna, get too deep into that, but the response timelines.
Greg Turchetta: there's a difference in a crisis that lasts 10 minutes, 10 seconds, or 24 hours and ongoing. I had a lot of experience with hurricanes, and had my school district closed for weeks. That's a very different crisis response than we went in and out of a lockdown due to police activity in the area.
Greg Turchetta: Right? And so the plan's gonna have to be flexible, but address all of those things, and we'll get there.
Greg Turchetta: the official statement. There's phases to this. There's a cadence to your communication.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Depending on the severity of the crisis.
Greg Turchetta: parents, and especially the media, are going to expect updates at certain… what's your schedule going to be for that? And then, how do you keep all the audiences informed? We're going to talk about that. Then on the front lines, do you need a call center?
Greg Turchetta: How are you gonna… what's staff's responsibility gonna be? What are families supposed to do? Oh, by the way, if you haven't been through this, the media's gonna overrun you.
Greg Turchetta: Your cell phone is going to be unusable, because the media is going to be calling you constantly.
Greg Turchetta: And then we get, okay, we get through the crisis itself, we got reunification and recovery, how do we message that? And then the most important part of all of this
Greg Turchetta: You can take this plan, build it, put it in a binder on the shelf. If you're not training on it, and you're not running your school and district staff their drills and readiness trainings.
Greg Turchetta: It's just a document.
Bob Mosier: So, let me add that to that, Rick, if I could. And so, you've used two words that I think are really important. Plan and document. You've not used the word script.
Bob Mosier: And that is… I think that's a critical thing to understand, because if you develop a script.
Bob Mosier: and you get into the habit of, we need to do one, then two, then three, then four, well, guess what? Every crisis isn't the same, and every school district isn't the same, and so it may not follow like that. So what you're really building is a framework that you can then customize, given your crisis.
Greg Turchetta: Absolutely, absolutely. Alright, now let's get to that classification. These are fuzzy, right? Bob and I were talking earlier about the idea that you can have something that feels routine, that moves to significant, just solely based on parent response.
Greg Turchetta: Right? I made that reference to being near Parkland when Parkland happened. It was 70 miles away from my district office. And here's an example I'll use.
We had routine cases where a student made some kind of online threat overnight, and the next morning there was an increased police presence on campus, which means a couple of cop cars up front.
Greg Turchetta: That was normal. Once Parkland happened, any time a police car was out front, our parents went in a lather, because their blood pressure intolerance for school safety issues never came down.
Greg Turchetta: Right? And if you've been anywhere near a major crisis, you've probably experienced that. So, levels… you might look at this and go, this is routine, and parents are going, no, it's not. This is significant to me.
Greg Turchetta: Because it's my child, it's my school. You may have it to where something happened at a school where things like that don't usually happen. So how you categorize it is really between you, the superintendent, the safety director, and everybody else in between.
Greg Turchetta: But these are just a framework, right? So, we're not going to spend too much time saying it should be significant if it's this, right? You can get media interest on things that are routine.
Greg Turchetta: That doesn't color it or change it. So…
Bob Mosier: And different schools, right, the same event at two different schools.
Bob Mosier: can go to two different levels here, to your point about parents, right? And so when you classify, I just think it's important to classify wisely, right? Making a mountain out of a molehill is a bad thing, but making a molehill out of a mountain is even worse, right? It's impossible to over-gauge or overstate the emotions attached to families when their children are involved.
Greg Turchetta: I have a saying I like to talk about, about the things that get superintendents fired. It's not academics. You can explain academics and scores away. You cannot explain a missed response to a crisis
Greg Turchetta: or a lack of communication. These are things that erode trust immediately. I like to use the other phrases, you'll work for…
Greg Turchetta: You know, years to build this, and in minutes, you can lose something that's gonna take generations to restore.
Greg Turchetta: And a crisis is the first place that that shows itself. And…
Greg Turchetta: It's a lesson you don't want to learn after the fact.
Greg Turchetta: If you've ever been through a significant incident, we'll talk later about how you gotta document everything, because, listen, your response is gonna get scrutinized. I mean, if it's… I know people who have been through, you know, actual on-campus shootings to where months later, they were in front of their board with message logs, happened to defend when and where they sent each message, because it turned into a… almost a congressional-type hearing.
Greg Turchetta: Right? So the details matter, the speed matters, and documenting it matters.
Greg Turchetta: Okay, one voice, one message, one approval chain. Every statement, every phone answer, every social post, every media response traces back to that single source of truth.
Greg Turchetta: Your schools have to know. Now, if it's a minor situation and you've agreed the principal's gonna send a message and it stays there, that's not this. But as it escalates, that's when it has to narrow.
Greg Turchetta: It has to narrow. Classroom teachers need to know they're not talking about this.
Greg Turchetta: That's… that is something that has to be discussed in the plan, and why you have to show the plan to people, that we are going to narrow the beam.
Greg Turchetta: Bob, you agree with that?
Bob Mosier: I do, and I think that you have to be ready to adapt as a single situation unfolds, right? It might go to, if it's a simple principle to community, then that's not this plan, but it could then evolve into this plan, and you have to be ready to adapt to that.
Greg Turchetta: Absolutely. Okay, principles that hold under pressure.
Greg Turchetta: safety first, communications supports the response, it never competes with it, right? The people with guns have to do the work that they have to do to take care of a scene.
Greg Turchetta: It's the same thing when I was back in my media days, and I would have to tell people, we're not showing the SWAT team showing up to the school on television, because we're putting people's lives in danger, and we're giving the bad guy a live broadcast of what's going on. It's the same way with messaging. And on that front.
Greg Turchetta: We already… I think we… we talked about communication early enough, saying something within minutes, I think we covered that. The letting law enforcement lead. If you haven't been through this, when you build this plan, your other next step is to go meet with your law enforcement partners.
Greg Turchetta: Because you need to know what their plan is, and you need to have an agreement to, here's how we're going to hand off information. In my former districts, in their joint command unit, I found out I had a seat. I didn't know I was going to have a seat there, but if they come to campus with that mobile command unit, you're in the trailer with them, because we've got to be like this.
Greg Turchetta: So, what is their cadence? What is their preference? What do they want you talking about? Also, in lesser crises, if a student's arrested for a threat, I want to get a message from my law enforcement partners before the release ever goes out.
I want to be able to look at it and see if there's things in there we don't want to say.
Greg Turchetta: And that all comes from relationships.
Bob Mosier: That's really critical, Greg. So, our superintendent has our police chief's cell phone number, and vice versa, but we have the contact numbers, the cell phone numbers, for police communications. And we've had these conversations a hundred times if we've had it once. Here's what we're about to put out, are you okay with this?
Right? And so if police are putting out.
Bob Mosier: let's just say a gun is found in a school, police are going to put out the kind of gun and all that kind of stuff. We want to be right on the heels of that with information that parallels it and doesn't compete with it.
Greg Turchetta: Correct. And you don't want to be out in front of law enforcement, because that's a painful place to be, because they will back the patrol car over you.
Greg Turchetta: And they will… they will say so. And so, trust me, that's a lesson learned, you don't want to go down that road.
Greg Turchetta: At the same time, you've got speed, accuracy, there's a huge empathy piece to this, too. You have to remember
Greg Turchetta: People remember how you communicated, they remember what you offered, they remembered the tact that you used with it. They won't remember what the media did that. As a former media person, I would go back and do things very different now.
Greg Turchetta: In the guise of trying to be first and be exclusive, right? But you have to have heart with this. Here's another piece of this. Many of the people you work with have kids in these schools.
Some people who may be on your communication response team may be
Greg Turchetta: They may be out of service, because, and I learned this one the hard way, too. If they have a child in that school, they're incapacitated, their emotions are taken over, they can't do social media for you now. They've got to get set aside and say, listen, I'm pulling you off the team for this right now, because it's in your school.
Greg Turchetta: I'm gonna put somebody else in. That's empathy, too, on the inside, right? And letting… making sure everybody understands what's going on, and you just can't be, oh, we got 3 dead! 3 dead may be one of your coworkers' kids.
Greg Turchetta: Right? And you can't come back from those kind of comments, so that empathy piece is everywhere.
Greg Turchetta: CDC had a six-word gut check that I really like. Be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action, and show respect. And use all of these before any message goes out. To me, that's how the whole response goes.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Same thing to our coworkers. I'm not throwing my security team under the bus if I'm not getting information at the speed I want it. I'm gonna call them and go, hey, what can you give me?
Or that's not my job, that's that person's job. In a crisis.
Greg Turchetta: It's everybody's job.
Bob Mosier: And I would just add to the beef first thing. So we had a situation last year where
Bob Mosier: A second grader brought a gun to school.
Bob Mosier: And that was in his jacket pocket, and it accidentally discharged. He shot himself in the hand, luckily he didn't shoot anybody else. But as you might imagine, it created a great deal of consternation in the school.
Bob Mosier: and we just… I'll just be vulnerable here, we just… it took us too long to get that out, right? That Facebook page that I talked about had 4 or 5 posts.
Bob Mosier: For a lot of different reasons, we didn't… we didn't get it out first, and so I went to the school, and
Bob Mosier: Maneka Monk, who's our Executive Director of Communications, Community Engagement, was in sort of the war room with the security people, and it was until I got to the school before we actually got something out. And so,
Bob Mosier: like I said, there were some competing interests there, but, you know, when I got there, there was a line of…
Bob Mosier: 100 cars and probably two dozen other parents who had walked to the school.
Bob Mosier: Trying to find their kids.
Greg Turchetta: Bob, you make a good point there that I… that I wrestled with. I was always personally of the belief, if it was a single school incident, I'm, as the PIO, going to the scene.
Greg Turchetta: And my number 2 is going to the war room, as you just described. That's a conversation you need to have as you build your plan. I… the reason I did that was I thought I was more effective being close to the source. I know the media is also going there, they're not coming to the district office.
Greg Turchetta: And I want to be in the place that I can best control what's going on at speed. So, as we're going through these, I want you to consider that. And then the next wrinkle is, as you're planning, what if it's multiple campuses?
Greg Turchetta: Right? Now, how does that affect? You can't go to all of them. Are you going to most of them?
Are you gonna… are you gonna fall back and say, we're gonna use the war room for this, because now there's too much to manage? You ever… you ever wrestle with that, Bob?
Bob Mosier: Yeah, we wrestle with it all the time. In the case of the example I just gave you, the superintendent was going, so it was easy for me, right? And Maneka went to the war room, and we worked through all those pieces. We've done it a bunch of different ways.
I mean, we try to keep
Bob Mosier: folks on our team trained up, so to speak, right? Because I might be here
Bob Mosier: 20 minutes from a school, and somebody on our team might be 2 minutes from the school, and we can get them there, right? And so, while that wouldn't be the ideal situation, if you were just to sit down and plan it out.
Bob Mosier: Years before it happened, it may be your reality.
Greg Turchetta: And the honest truth is, it never goes the way the perfect plan is on paper.
Bob Mosier: Correct.
Greg Turchetta: As we're about to show right here. Okay, I was in South Carolina as a comms chief, and I went to a SCNSPRA training, and the head of the South Carolina Department of Law Enforcement came in and gave me this fact that changed my crisis communications life.
Greg Turchetta: He said, you have to be 3 deep at every role of any part of your plan.
Greg Turchetta: And I went, wow, okay, let me do the math. Now, some of you who might be at a department of one are listening, going, I don't have three to be deep anywhere. Yes, you do. We're gonna have to find them.
But, so, here's the thing. So let's… Bob, how many are on your team, roughly?
Bob Mosier: Writing Communications 8.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, so Bob's gonna have to go off of his team, too, to go get other people to work a phone bank and divvy backups in other places. Here's critical places this is needed, okay? Number one, I refer to the comms chief as the PIO, because in this situation, you are the public information officer, okay?
Greg Turchetta: If Bob's on vacation, he already has to go to backups. If Bob's at a conference, he's gotta go to backups. If my backup isn't here, and I'm stuck
Greg Turchetta: on another scene, because who goes there? Social media. If your social media person's not near a device.
Greg Turchetta: That's probably the hardest one to get number 2 and 3 for, because they have to have logins, they have to be trained, they all have to be there.
Greg Turchetta: Somebody will always be out. It might be the superintendent. That happened to me very many times. Superintendent was at a conference.
Superintendent was on vacation. Okay, the deputy's now in their role. Who's backing up the deputy now is the deputy? Right?
These are all critical pieces.
Greg Turchetta: You have to decide who has final authority as your spokesperson, right? It's going to be the superintendent for sure, it could be the principal on a lower level, and it's certainly going to be you. But then there's the safety director.
Greg Turchetta: Right? At what point does that person flow in and become part of it? But these are all the things you've got to work ahead of time. Legal, right?
Many of the situations you're going to deal with, that statement, or whatever we're going to say, legal's going to have to look at before it goes anywhere near the public.
Greg Turchetta: And then on and on and on.
Greg Turchetta: approvals, right? This is going to be one of those variables.
Greg Turchetta: If you're in an emergency with lockdown and alerts, something has to be out the door before 15 minutes, and I think that's probably loose.
Greg Turchetta: Is the faster you can get something out that confirms something was going on.
Greg Turchetta: you know, these are just timestamps that I put in. You know, sensitive personal legal, that could go an hour or two if legal has to be involved and the attorney is not there to get to it, right? Those steps will slow things down. After hours.
Greg Turchetta: It'd be really nice if these crises happened between 7 and 3, but oftentimes, they don't.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Social media threats is one of those. A kid made a threat at midnight, and you're on the phone at 1AM trying to figure out what to do. There's no water at the school.
What are we gonna do at 5 AM?
Greg Turchetta: Right? Who's available? If I can't get ahold of these people, and something's going on now, who… where's in the plan? Does it designate who's next to call, and is it… in my role, it's, you know, my role is… if I can get ahold of them in 10 minutes, I'm going to the next person, because the clock is running.
Greg Turchetta: And the trust meter…
Bob Mosier: Greg, that's what… that's what… I didn't mean to cut you off, but that's what we talked about, about creating your voice in the beginning, right? Because you have to have the trust that, okay, our rule is 10 minutes, to use your example, and then I gotta move on, because what doesn't wait is the thirst for information from the public.
Greg Turchetta: Yes, because you'll be on the other end of it, where the superintendent says, you had confirmed information, the principal confirmed that's what's going on, why didn't you go with it?
Greg Turchetta: Right? And again, have that set up. I had a threshold, and I would tell my superintendent.
Greg Turchetta: Anything short of a Code Red alert, and even in that, if information comes through that there's an active gunman in a school, and the school's in lockdown, what else do we need to say?
Greg Turchetta: Right? That's right… that message is just about ready to go as soon as you know it's confirmed. So, we can pre-negotiate all of that. And I think that's to your point, is the pre-negotiation part.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, the first hour sets the trajectory. In the first 15 minutes, you gotta verify and stabilize. What is confirmed? I'm telling you, this is the hardest part for me.
Always was. What is confirmed, by whom?
Greg Turchetta: Because if…
Greg Turchetta: I had a situation at a school… in one of my districts where it came through as a fight.
Greg Turchetta: And we're like, okay, it's a text message, we're monitoring that. All of a sudden, the message came in from the principal that said, our lead nurse just saw the victim, he has 15 stab wounds.
Greg Turchetta: What?
Greg Turchetta: Huh?
Greg Turchetta: How do I get that confirmed?
Greg Turchetta: I went to the school on that one, because I was real close, and I went through, and I said, where's the nurse? I need to talk to her. On the way over, my question was, why is this school not in a lockdown? Because if you have an active assailant with a weapon, and somebody has been stabbed 15 times, this isn't a fight.
Greg Turchetta: And so, I literally made the call. I'm like, this school needs to be in lockdown. Throw it in lockdown, and we'll start the messaging.
Greg Turchetta: It doesn't always go the neat way.
Greg Turchetta: Then what kind of team do you need to activate?
Greg Turchetta: Another big piece, once you're in the middle of one of these things, and this is the one people forget most often, pause anything that was scheduled to go out. In the middle of an emergency, you don't need a happy-go-lucky social media post showing up. It looks tone-deaf.
Greg Turchetta: And it's just, it could be prevented. And everybody else knows, stand down. This is what we're doing. And there's no other external comms going out unless alert's required, because that's the next thing that should be going.
Greg Turchetta: Bob thought on that?
Bob Mosier: I'll give you an easy example of that. So, I was at NSPRA,
Bob Mosier: a couple of weeks ago, a little over a week ago, I guess, and so we got a letter from the Department of Education, right? They're now investigating us, gender identity, yada yada, the details that aren't really important, but our social media team
Bob Mosier: had a post planned with pictures that we shot right at the end of the school year of mascots looking forlorn, and we're gonna put out a thing that says, we miss you, but it won't be long, right? And they had, right, they had the presence to cancel those messages, right? And so, to your point, it just looks awful.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, you have to… this is really about gaining control, right? And in many of these situations, control is tough to grasp, but it's at least giving the perception that we're working just this. Okay, so in the first 30 minutes, now we're moving on to, okay, we gotta draft and approve a holding statement. You can have holding templates in there.
Greg Turchetta: I have a split decision in my own head about holding statements. I think so often that each situation is so unique that going to find that holding statement and then modifying it doesn't save any time from just drawing it up quick.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Two or three sentences at first. You're not writing a letter to parents from the principal in the first half hour. That's later.
This is just acknowledging something's going on and we're working it. But, if you remember anything we said today, internal before external.
Greg Turchetta: You have got to notify your staff before anybody on the outside knows. You want to see your comms trust go down the drain? When a principal says, I had this going on at my sister's school, and I didn't know. And guess what?
That kid's siblings go here.
Greg Turchetta: So, if something's going on there, it indirectly is happening here. And that's a hard one the first time you hear that, because there's no coming back from that. It's like, yes, we've got to be better at getting out internal before external first. And we'll talk more about that in a minute, what that looks like.
You gotta prepare the media holding statement, because at the time you're drafting, the media's already calling, asking for information.
Greg Turchetta: While I was physically drafting the statement, somebody else is answering the phone going, he'll call you back in just a minute, right? Like, they're gonna be ahead of the curve.
Greg Turchetta: We're gonna talk more about call center in a second, but do you need a call center?
Greg Turchetta: You may be going, Greg, Bob, what are you talking about?
Greg Turchetta: you're gonna get overrun. The school's gonna get overrun. And…
Greg Turchetta: in my world, the way I built it was, I wanted to take the burden off the school as fast as possible and transfer it to the district.
Greg Turchetta: So how you do that is you transfer those phone lines to a district predetermined number, or two numbers, and all the calls come in there, and then I built a comms team of 3-4 people that staff that. Then, as we have one official statement, it goes into the call center, and now everything's coming in. The other part about internal is, it's not just letting the building leaders know.
Greg Turchetta: Anybody that's a receptionist at anywhere in your district could receive a phone call, and the last thing you want them saying is, I'm not aware of anything like that.
Greg Turchetta: Right? So the faster we can get them aware of that, the faster we… again, our credibility stays up. Yes, I do not have any details to share with you, or where the incident, it's being… it's being worked.
Greg Turchetta: And at the same time…
Bob Mosier: Yeah, go ahead.
Bob Mosier: I was gonna say, when you talk about internal before external, right? If you're not activating a call center, what are you… what statement are you providing to the secretaries at that school, in a single school incident, for example, right? Correct. I mean, we try to… we try to get that to principals quickly and just say, print it out, give it to your secretaries, that's what you read.
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, Roxanne asked the question, how do you set up a call center in a situation like this?
Greg Turchetta: I predetermined a conference room that wasn't far… so, first of all, where's your command center gonna be? Usually, for us, it was where the cabinet met, so it was the conference room next to the superintendent.
Greg Turchetta: Right? So I'm looking for the most adjacent conference room to that conference room, where there's one or two phone lines. Now, this may take some work. You may have to have certain numbers routed in there ahead of time, and people know that's the designated call center.
Greg Turchetta: your people from downstairs who answer the phone need to come upstairs and work these phones, because they're the pros, right? Anybody whose job all day is to answer phones, that's who I want on these phones.
Greg Turchetta: They come through into there, and you… it could be as… I got a slide on this in a minute, but it could be as many as 2 lines, but they roll over, so you gotta have four people in there answering it, and you come out of the Situation Room with the statement, hand it to them, put it on the whiteboard, this is what we're saying, this is all we're saying.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Then there's language components to that. You're gonna have to get somebody in there that has the ability to interpret to your other families that may be calling, and so we'll get more on that in a second, but that's the overview, Roxanne, how you do it.
Greg Turchetta: Okay.
Greg Turchetta: If it's a short burst crisis, I mean, if you've had a… I had one district, we go into a hold daily, right? There was police activity in the area. In Florida, we had an alligator on campus that put us in a hold, right? That's a security crisis communications thing, but it might be one message and resolution.
Greg Turchetta: Something that's gonna go far longer, you have to establish the cadence. And this is one of the things I learned in hurricane responses, was
Greg Turchetta: 10 and 5 p.m, or 10 and 4 p.m, were good times to… for the media and for the public to know. That's when the update will come, unless information changes soon.
Greg Turchetta: So, at 4 o'clock, say the incident happened at noon. We'll be back before 4 o'clock with an update, or at 4 o'clock with an update. You see police do this all the time. And then they stand there, and they don't have much more to say, right?
Because nothing's really developed in the last couple hours. But you're still standing there saying, this is what we know, nothing's changed on that, we're still looking into that.
Greg Turchetta: And,
Greg Turchetta: Okay, yeah. Your IT people can switch that over. Roxanne's asking, how do you switch this technically over procedurally? The people at the school can just forward the numbers, so if you know 1-800-333-4444 is your emergency crisis number, the people at the school know just to forward the lines to there.
Greg Turchetta: That's ideal. All right.
Greg Turchetta: If we get to reunification, so here…
Greg Turchetta: I don't want to go into that yet, because we've got another slide on that later.
Greg Turchetta: But those first 24 hours, you as the comms leader need to start laying out, here's what's next, right? Because as soon as one message goes out the door, you're immediately moving to, what's next? Because it's going to keep swamping you.
Greg Turchetta: And then, how does… how do we exit this? And Bob, you know better than anybody. How do you start building out there, I see an exit ramp to this crisis?
Bob Mosier: Yeah, so I think that,
Bob Mosier: That that… it comes with experience, it comes with talking with other communicators, it… it… it… it just…
Bob Mosier: there's no textbook on it, but I would say this. You will be able to gauge when to do that.
Bob Mosier: if… if the first part of it, the first three blocks in this slide, are successful. And so one of the things that we do, if we're… if it's a single school and communications going just to families of that school, that's one thing. If it's a larger incident, it doesn't have to be a shooting, a stabbing, or whatever, it could be some, you know, large…
Bob Mosier: traffic, accident, whatever, that you have to communicate. But when we put stuff on our website or our Facebook page, we timestamp it, and we build on it, so…
Bob Mosier: the message that's at the top of our Facebook page might have 3 or 4 messages in it, so that anybody can go back, any reporter can be pointed there, and can get the chronology of this thing. Any parent can look at how you've done it.
Greg Turchetta: I love that. Yeah, you pin it to the top of the page, and the timestamp makes it very obvious, this… because Update 3, Update 4, I don't know which one you're on, but I do know what time it is.
Greg Turchetta: That's a great point, Bob. Great point.
Bob Mosier: The other thing I would say about that is that the… on the update piece, Greg, even if there are no updates, and I'll give you an example later, but even if there are no updates, just provide an update to say, nothing's changed, this… here's where people still are, because then they felt like… people feel like they're informed.
Greg Turchetta: No, absolutely.
Greg Turchetta: there's… In your single source of truth, there's gonna be 3 phases.
Greg Turchetta: Ruth has got a point. One thing we did is, whatever the auto-dialer says, yes, we quickly change the main voicemail to district office to that message right before we send when possible. You're absolutely, Ruth, Ruth, I forgot about that one, that is a great idea.
Greg Turchetta: Because a lot of times.
Greg Turchetta: That is true. I can't tell you how many times I send an auto-dial, and somebody called back and said, hey, you guys just called? And it's like, my phone's getting blown up with people who didn't even listen to the message. So, so true, Ruth.
That is absolutely it.
Greg Turchetta: Because overwhelm is the word. If you have been through this, you realize how fast overwhelm happens, no matter how big your team is, and that's why building all of these details into your plan makes sure that you have, you know, you're accountable to make… to try to pull some of that back.
Greg Turchetta: All right. Phase 1's acute. First 15 minutes, limited facts. Phase 2, developing, confirmed facts.
Status, we're starting to really get a… where are we? How big a situation is this? How long do we think it's gonna last?
Greg Turchetta: And then phase three is that stabilizing. How do we get out of the crisis response and start moving into how do we resolve this, and what schedule does that look like? That's turning from the response to the reunification piece. And we got more on reunification in a minute, but every message should acknowledge the situation, provide only verified facts, state the actions being taken, and then clear, specific instructions.
I can't tell you how many times you need to tell people, do not come to the school.
Greg Turchetta: Over and over again, because that's their first reaction, and they're gonna do it. And they're gonna walk right into a crime scene. Or they're gonna walk into a pile of police cars they can't even get through, even if they're just investigating a bomb threat.
Greg Turchetta: And then always commit to a next update time. That's why if you say, by 4 o'clock, it doesn't have to be, at 3.30, we'll be back.
Greg Turchetta: commit to, there will be an update. And why did I say 4 o'clock? You could actually make it 3 o'clock now, because the media's gonna have deadlines. You don't want somebody at the top of the 5 o'clock newscast saying, Anne Arundel didn't tell us anything!
Greg Turchetta: no comment, right? We're timing those so that they hit. They can say, at this hour, here's what we know.
Bob Mosier: I think that's absolutely true.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, this… this might be the trickiest slide of all.
Greg Turchetta: Because it's one thing just to be pushing information out.
Greg Turchetta: It's another thing, what's confirmed to staff? What do we say if they're asked? They got their own safety, their own kids' concerns. I can't tell you how many times I had a situation going on at a school in the district office, and staff were running to me to find out, what do you know?
Because I need to make a choice of what I'm going to do with my kid, and I'm like, well, you're going to do the same thing with your kid that we're asking the other kids to do.
Greg Turchetta: But it's real for them. And where are they going to find that out other than running to you? Because that's the last thing you have time for.
Greg Turchetta: Parents have the same question. What do you want me to do?
Greg Turchetta: Hold, hold, hold, OK.
Greg Turchetta: Where am I gonna get the updates from?
Greg Turchetta: In a big crisis, you're gonna use all the communication tools you have. That's the easy one. Parents will get it somehow.
Greg Turchetta: But in something that's a lesser crisis, I hate a principal letter, right? If a weapon was found at school in 2026, waiting to the end of the day to send a letter telling people what happened is hours after the rumor mill has already taken care of it for you.
Greg Turchetta: you gotta be able to say, get it to them sooner. I actually had a principal at one of our schools that had a bad month, and
Greg Turchetta: He immediately, when there was a social media threat, or a weapon was found on campus, he went on the overhead intercom and told students, this is your principal, just want you to let you know you might have seen some police activity in the cafeteria, there was a weapon found, we have the weapon, there's no threat to your safety.
Greg Turchetta: I thought that was risky at first, but I think it's brilliant when it comes to bringing the temperature down and cutting off the misinformation, right? Because your internal audience is your students, too, especially at a high school.
Greg Turchetta: You know, you've really got to consider that piece as well, because you're going to lean on them when you need information to prevent a crisis.
Bob Mosier: So, a couple things about this slide, Greg, and I may have seen the same presentation you saw, where a principal stood up and said, I told my kids to get their phones out and text their parents the following, and read them a statement, and they'd say, because any parent is going to believe their child long before they're going to believe a school communications person, right?
Greg Turchetta: immense.
Bob Mosier: how that goes. The other thing on this slide, and we had a really unfortunate situation in high school where a student was stabbed in a bathroom.
Bob Mosier: He survived, but it, it, we, the school was on, on, hold, lockdown, some series of that throughout the day. But to the staff piece.
Bob Mosier: You want to inform staff quickly. What we did there, and what we do generally, is when we send out community messaging, we send the text to the principal and say, send this to your staff DL, so your teachers know exactly what we just told the parents of your students, right? That's… that, I think, is a critical piece. But the other thing that you can miss in the staffing
Bob Mosier: is if you have an incident at a building where there is a nearby building, so in this stabbing incident, there is a high school. We are so consumed with what's happening inside the high school, and…
Bob Mosier: We put out the right communications, right, and students are still in a hold, students are now getting lunch, school's gonna dismiss on time, whatever all those things were. But nearby was a middle school, and they were totally unaware that anything was happening until
Bob Mosier: we called the principal, I called the principal and said, hey, we need to use your parking lot as a media staging area for this incident at the high school. And she said, what incident at the high school?
Bob Mosier: Hmm. Right? And so there's a real…
Bob Mosier: teachable moment, right, is that, you know, we came back and talked about that, and we now have a protocol in place with certain level incidents to notify principals of what I'll call surrounding schools, right?
Greg Turchetta: Yeah, feeder patterns, for sure.
Bob Mosier: Yeah, sure.
Greg Turchetta: the bottom one on this might be the trickiest, and I… this… so, in my plans, the superintendent or the deputy superintendent would notify the school board of what was going on, okay? Because people are going to call them quick, and if they get caught broadsided, you've got a problem at the next board meeting, and they're going to call you out on it.
Greg Turchetta: But the superintendent and the deputy superintendent are a little bit busy at the moment managing the crisis. So, sometimes it would get forgotten, or it just wouldn't get to it, or you'd send an email. On your point, too, Bob, with staff, don't email the staff.
Greg Turchetta: Teachers are teaching. They're not looking at email. You gotta interrupt their day somehow. That's where that overhead intercom comes in, a text message, something.
But for the board, I like to designate somebody else. If there's a board secretary or somebody at the cabinet level that's in the war room.
Greg Turchetta: who's just there taking information in and relaying, put them in charge, but put that in your plan. Don't let it be the superintendent, because more often than not, it just won't happen.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, call center operations, we talked about this earlier,
Greg Turchetta: I think we're there. The call log is a legal document. You want to keep a record of what people are asking, what's being said. I've seen situations where the call center gets tips, they get confused, and it's not the police hotline.
Greg Turchetta: So you might even have people calling in that have information that needs to be tracked down. You may have hoaxes and threats. People, when there's a crisis going on, like to mess with you.
Greg Turchetta: And that may come in that way, but give them a holding phrase, let them know when to escalate things, whether the media might call through and try to get information, when attorneys involving the families are involved, all of that. And then the live interpretation piece will be forgotten if you don't put that in the plan.
Greg Turchetta: Okay, this is our internal piece, right? Less than 10 minutes, all building principals, 15 minutes, district admin assistants, verbatim, 20 minutes, building admin assistants with Q&A of what they're gonna get. What's the universal holding line for every employee? I don't have confirmed details to share right now, a district's aware and working it.
Greg Turchetta: Looking into it probably isn't strong enough. I would change that now. The best place for updates, we will use all of our communication channels to keep you updated. Never confirm or deny.
Make sure your staff knows not to confirm or deny anything that somebody asks them. Well, can you just tell me this?
Greg Turchetta: No, you tell them the exact statement. And if there's nothing new, as Bob said earlier, say so. Silence reads as concealment. What are you hiding?
You know there's 20 people dead, you're just not telling me.
Greg Turchetta: Right, that's where, worst case scenario, trauma brain spins up to.
Greg Turchetta: Alright.
Greg Turchetta: We don't say no comment, we don't speculate, you know all of this, I'm just throwing this in. But the one to the right, Bob, misinformation and deepfakes, that's another one that sneaks up on you, isn't it?
Bob Mosier: It sneaks up on you, and it's the…
Bob Mosier: It's the void of information that gets filled by whatever somebody wants to put their fingers on the keyboard and type, right? Or whatever somebody thinks they heard when they listened to the scanner, to use the example that I gave you earlier.
Bob Mosier: it… you… you get into… you mitigate it, by building your audience, like we talked about at the beginning, right? If you build the trust along, then… then people are gonna come to your defense, and we've… we have fortunately seen some of that.
Bob Mosier: In this district. But if you let things spiral out of control.
Bob Mosier: They will, they will consume you. And so the single place of information, report, tell reporters that here's where you go to get everything we've put out. That's why we timestamp things and put them out. Every single thing we've put out is right there, so now I'm not giving Channel 13 anything different than I'm giving Channel 11, right?
And so they're all able to get the same information.
Greg Turchetta: also realize kids with moderate to advanced editing skills could be taking video of your superintendent and changing the words coming out of their mouth and making it look like an official statement from your district. They could be cloning your social media accounts by being off one little character to where people start to think, this really is your school district. That is not a problem you want to deal with in the middle of a crisis, but unfortunately, I think it's getting more prevalent
Greg Turchetta: than not, because, well, the internet's undefeated, and they seem to capitalize on these moments.
Bob Mosier: It's one we dealt with earlier this year, but that's probably another webinar.
Greg Turchetta: Okay, here's the other part of this. Multi-agency events, right? If you have a significant situation, you're gonna have fire, police, you're gonna have your folks responding, you may have FBI responding. How do you coordinate your plan to all of that?
Greg Turchetta: Ask these questions now. Find out who at the FBI field office in your town is the person you might need to get a hold of, because guess what? They're gonna get involved in much of anything that's an online threat, much of anything that's a, you know, a potential weapon.
Greg Turchetta: That escalates to a whole other level, and that, again, another topic for another webinar, but these are the things you need to be looking at now.
Greg Turchetta: Okay.
Greg Turchetta: Student unification, I have strong opinions on this, because I actually went through in one of my last districts and spent a lot of time on this.
Greg Turchetta: You need to ask your safety team what the reunification plans are. And they usually break one of two ways.
Greg Turchetta: one of my districts, we reunified in the feeder pattern schools. So if the high school had an issue, we moved everybody from there to the middle school. So the middle school had to be aware to move their kids over in the building so that 2,000 high school kids could show up on buses. Why did that district, we decided to do it that way, because in the trauma of the event.
Greg Turchetta: two things. One, we thought it was better that kids who had probably gone to that middle school went back there, they knew it, they felt safe. Two, the staff of the middle school might know many of these kids, which creates another comfort level. Again, real empathy move here, right?
This isn't just logistics, it's how do we make that work?
Greg Turchetta: One of my other districts said, no, we're not ever going to another school, we're going to a megachurch. Because these buildings are huge, plenty of places to bring kids in. Now.
Greg Turchetta: We're not also gonna tell you where it is.
Greg Turchetta: So, we… we put all these plans, we had reunification drills at a site that was an X site. No one knew it was… that was going to be the reunification site, and it didn't matter where in the district the incident happened.
Greg Turchetta: That was going to be the site. So when I got there, from a comms lens, I looked at this and I said, there's a big hill over there that anybody with a TV camera and a tripod could sit on, and they can watch the frantic parents running up to the door and trying to grab their kids. I don't want to see that.
Greg Turchetta: So how do you have it set up to where… can we change it so the reunification isn't at the front door, it's actually in the building, right? That's a comms lens of something that you need to see of how a reunification plan goes, but they may be having these drills without you. Find out.
Bob Mosier: I too, Greg, have really strong opinions about this. We have drilled and drilled and drilled here. We have reunification sites that are identified.
Bob Mosier: people don't know where they are, in our district, and then it came to pass. Last year, I think, yeah, last year, so we had what started as a single incident at an elementary school.
Bob Mosier: Which had to do with an unknown odor in a building. We had to evacuate all the kids, fire department comes, they can't detect anything, right? There's your single school incident.
Bob Mosier: But then they wouldn't let the kids back in the building. And now we had to move an entire school of elementary students, right? And so, we got them on the bus, we did the, the, you know, the, your kids are fine, they're still outside, it was a little cold, some of them didn't have coats, and so, we brought buses in and put them on buses where they were heated, and then only when
Bob Mosier: that…
Bob Mosier: those buses started to roll to the reunification site, did we message families and say, students are now being taken to X school, right? Because you also have to set everything up in place at the school they're going to, right?
Greg Turchetta: Correct, which is a huge…
Bob Mosier: We had a gym that… and we had practiced all of this, fortunately. We had a gym that we had to clear out, we had grab-and-go lunches that we had to bring in, all that kind of stuff. And the fact is, if everybody knows in advance where your reunification site is, you're not getting your buses in there.
Greg Turchetta: Right. They will block the road.
Bob Mosier: Correct.
Greg Turchetta: No, that's 100%… I lived that, too. Set wait time expectations. You gotta remember, this will always stay with me. When they showed me, when they come in, and they tell you who their student is, they're going on path A or Path B.
Path A is, we have their student.
Greg Turchetta: Path B is, their student might be deceased at the school.
Greg Turchetta: And so that's gonna be a whole nother situation that has to go back off in another room. But I wanted to know that, and I wanted to make sure that was out of public view, any possible way. But those are the… and then let them know it's gonna be a while, we're gonna go slow, right? They've got to show up with a photo ID, and they have to be an authorized contact.
Greg Turchetta: If Uncle Troy isn't on the pickup list, he can't pick up the kids at the reunification site. Sorry, not doing it.
Greg Turchetta: And so that's… that's really where it comes down to. One thing I left out on the earlier thing that I want to bring up, because I think this one's critical, and this is the other one that kept me up at night.
Greg Turchetta: There is a more than 50-50 chance that on a major crisis, it's gonna happen at your district office.
Greg Turchetta: Right? Somebody may come to the superintendent and threaten them. Somebody may come there… you know how parents come in hot, and they've got an issue. If somebody showed up with a bomb at your district office, and you had to evacuate, what do you do with all of this that we just talked about?
Greg Turchetta: Right? You don't have a command center.
Greg Turchetta: you might be… or you might… I had a scenario where I was locked in my office for a period of time. Our team couldn't communicate with each other verbally, right? We were all in lockdown in our building, and having to communicate what was going on. The other challenge with a district office is think about, well, the district office and your schools.
Greg Turchetta: How many of your district staff come and go from the district office and from the buildings? Psychologists, coaches, people, you know, maintenance people, they're in and out of these buildings. How do we notify these people on the move that they're walking into a danger zone?
Greg Turchetta: We had the same issue where we're like, what do we do with vendors? Do you know how many FedEx UPS deliveries get made at a school every day?
Greg Turchetta: Right? DoorDash? Like, the new thing, like, they're coming there, how do we get ahold of them? That should be part of your plan, too, and I didn't want to skip over that.
Greg Turchetta: Alright, you…
Greg Turchetta: The support piece is as important as the response, right? Kids are traumatized, staff is traumatized, counselors are gonna be available in the office at 9am. You gotta tell them what they're gonna… what's available. Community's going to want to know.
A kid was…
Greg Turchetta: And this happens just as often outside of school, right? A kid was tragically gunned down over the weekend, Monday, their schoolmates are coming back to school, and there's trauma of that. How often do you have counselors available for them? A staff member dies of a medical episode, and your staff needs this support.
Greg Turchetta: Spell it out in your plan. How are you going to communicate that? You're going to have to do it more than once. You have to repeat the offers, because in trauma, people don't hear it.
They'll say, you never offered that, and you did, once or twice.
Greg Turchetta: And then following safe message guidance, you know, when it comes to suicide of a child, is are you making sure you're putting the hotlines out in your messages, right? That's all in the plan. We're not going to take time on there, because we run out of time anyways.
Greg Turchetta: when you stand it down, how do you start to peel it back? As Bob talked about, the website's the center of truth, right? The banner's gotta come down. Social media cadences are gonna return, that's a field thing.
Greg Turchetta: Right? I've talked to people who've been through school shootings that months later, they still weren't back to normal. Memorials were going on. How do you memorialize people?
That becomes part of your crisis communications. People want to participate, they want to stand there, they want to hold a candle, they want to feel that they can grieve with other people. That's all part of communications, not just the emergency.
Bob Mosier: And as you break all that down, and I will admit, I'm terrible at this part, but take time to recognize the trauma inflicted on you and your team.
Bob Mosier: Right? If any of you have ever heard Rick Kaufman speak, he talks about this all the time. He was the communications guy at Columbine High School. He's forgotten more about this stuff than probably any of us will ever know.
But he's very big on that, and he's right, and like I say, I'm terrible at it, but it's easy to get wrapped up in it and not realize the impact that it has on you.
Greg Turchetta: No, absolutely. And then after action review, right? You should be doing tabletop exercises before. One of the things I always did with my team, we had a Monday morning comms team meeting, or Monday afternoon, and I had a habit during that meeting of going, alright, code red, I'm not here, you're not here, team, what are we doing?
Greg Turchetta: And I would do an immediate tabletop, completely off guard, because that's how it works, that's how it happens.
Greg Turchetta: The after review is just as important. When we sit down and we say, okay, what could we do better? What did we do well? What came up that we never planned for, right?
That's gonna happen. These plans are not flawless. You have to be able to sit back and fit, and you need to do that with your emergency response team and your comms people, so that next time we're even better.
Greg Turchetta: This is another phrase that has stuck with me forever. In a crisis, people don't rise to the occasion, they fall to the level of training. I believe that comes from the Navy SEALs.
Greg Turchetta: But it's so true. Like, just because you're in a crisis doesn't mean all of a sudden I'm gonna be flawless.
Greg Turchetta: I'm going to default to whatever my training told me, because in my trauma moment, I'm gonna be trying to figure out things, and I'm gonna have a little bit of a brain fog of what's going on, and that emotion kicks in, and you default to what you know. So talk through them, at least annually. Cover multiple scenarios and variables, much like Bob and I were just doing today. One school, two schools.
Greg Turchetta: The district office is compromised.
Greg Turchetta: Then scenarios. It's a kid with a weapon, it's a threat, it's this, it's that. How does it change it? And then you have to, if you're gonna build a call center, you gotta activate it once a year and let the people that are gonna work it see it, feel it, make sure the numbers work.
How are the alerts gonna go?
Greg Turchetta: And then the no notice drill, as I talked about.
Greg Turchetta: In the template, Barrett, you can go ahead and put the template in the chat now.
Greg Turchetta: Because we're running low on time, but in the template we've given you, it's 39 pages, it's got 9 different scenarios, all built into one framework. These are some of the scenarios that I think you'd probably run into. The last one I never thought would be an issue, but it's on the list. Immigration enforcement at our nearest school.
Welcome to 2026.
Greg Turchetta: These are the things I want you to do. Name your 3D team, your primary and 2 backups for every role.
Greg Turchetta: If you want to do templates, pre-write them now. I gave you some ideas to start with. Test your system access and your contact data. Who has logins?
Who's access to alert? Who can get in and send a Thrillshare update? Also your data. You should be checking to see what your student information system accuracy currently is.
That's a number I wanted to know always.
Greg Turchetta: How do I get better data so that on the worst day, everybody gets the message? How do I get the message to families that if you're not in the system.
Greg Turchetta: you're not going to get the message. If you're not the primary or the secondary, you might not get anything at all. Have those conversations. Run the tabletops, and then complete a readiness audit with your full team.
You'll find gaps. Every plan has gaps. The plan I gave you has gaps. Ruth's point about the, leaving the recorded message, that was one of those I've known and done.
I've left it out of the plan. Put it in.
Greg Turchetta: Because everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, and the crisis is the punch, and you're in the mouth.
Greg Turchetta: And you find out afterwards, you're like, man, if I could do that again, there's so many different ways I would do it.
Greg Turchetta: So the bottom line, when it happens, they hear it from you first. Plain language, safety, a clear next update timeline with preparation.
Greg Turchetta: You've got the template, go ahead, download it, change it to what you need it to be. You're also going to get an email from Barrett afterwards that'll have a recap. If you're watching this then, thank you for taking the time to actually watch the recording. The slides will be in it, of course, the template link will be in there as well.
If you have questions for Bob or I, I put this, our email up on the screen, don't hesitate to reach out. This is…
Greg Turchetta: It's certainly the reason I do what I do, and it's the reason I go to the NSPRAs and SchoolCEO, to learn these things. Speaking of which, end of September, if you want to be all in on Crisis Communications, come hang out with us in Dallas for our two-day conference. This will certainly be a topic that I'll be addressing, and we'll go from there. Bob, final thoughts?
Bob Mosier: Just, two very quick things. First of all, I appreciate the time everybody has spent here. Be open to feedback and using feedback for change. We had a bus accident, with 27 kids on it at a school, last school year, and a parent emailed the…
Bob Mosier: The principal didn't really like the way the communication went, but unlike most parents, offered
Bob Mosier: a solution, what she believed is a solution. There's parts of it that were really good, actually, and so we used that at a staff meeting, and talked about it. So that's one. Two.
Bob Mosier: I said earlier, ask for help, and also ask to help. There's not a group of people in the world that understands this work more than those people who are right here, right now, right? So, if you see something and you think you can offer help to somebody, reach out. I would just urge you to reach out.
You know, if you need to talk to somebody, reach out…
Bob Mosier: Greg or I, I mean, I don't know that I have all the… any answers at all sometimes, but I'm certainly happy to talk through situations with anybody at any time. So, thank you.
Greg Turchetta: We have a couple minutes if you have a question you want to throw into the chat. To Bob's point, too. I met Bob years ago at NSPRA.
Greg Turchetta: And, he was doing a session when he first launched to Superintendent, and I went, wow, that's how you do it, right? Your network is… these are the days your network comes into play. He mentioned Rick. Rick and I, I got the honor the last two years to do an ENDS for Crisis Communications
Greg Turchetta: training with Rick,
Greg Turchetta: He's the GOAT, right? But these people, your regional colleagues, right, your state chapter, if you go to an inspira and you see somebody who's had a crisis, they've leaned on people in their chapter to come in and physically help, right? So, in your region, any of your neighboring districts, you should probably have an agreement already that if you're struggling, and you're a team of one, we're coming.
Greg Turchetta: And those are the agreements, much like local law enforcement, put them in place today.
Greg Turchetta: Awesome, thank you guys. I'm glad it was helpful. Let me know how you like the template. If there's anything you think that needs to be added to it, please send it to us.
It's going to live on the Apptegy page, and so it's something we hope that we continue to do this presentation and give these resources to anybody that needs them.
Greg Turchetta: Awesome. It's 3 o'clock. Thank you all for being here.
Bob Mosier: Thanks, everybody.
Greg Turchetta: Thank you, Bob.
Bob Mosier: Yep, thank you, Greg.
