The Illinois Department of Public Health has updated the Decision Tree Recommendations for Evaluating Symptomatic Individuals from Pre-K, K-12 Schools and Day Care Programs on August 23, 2022. For more information, click here.

Earlier this month, the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety released the document, Reimagining School Safety: A Guide for Schools and Communities. "This guide aims to help education professionals reimagine and redefine school safety such that safety is not the absence of a negative but rather the existence of positive elements such as interconnection, belonging, voice, and agency. The guide is intended to support educators and education leaders to create systems of mutual care and shift the paradigm about what safety is and how it is achieved, building safe schools through an asset frame, which means defining people by their strengths and aspirations rather than their deficits and challenges." Additionally, "This interactive guide pulls from different frameworks and concepts, including complex adaptive systems, restorative justice, co-designing, and design thinking, to provide educators, school leaders, and district administrators with mindsets, strategies, and grounded examples of what is possible by reimagining school safety.

This is the last chance to register for the sessions of the "Digital Threat Assessment" training through Safer Schools Together being held in Normal and Fairview Heights, IL. The goal of the Digital Threat Assessment class is to give attendees a stronger understanding of the current social media world, provide tools to be able to proactively identify student safety concerns, and provide strategies for dealing with online situations as they arise. For more information or to register, click the corresponding link below or email [email protected].

The Illinois School and Campus Safety Program, in partnership with the Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) Technical Assistance (TA) Center, is pleased to announce a session of the REMS TA Center class "Planning for Family Reunification Before, During, and After an Emergency" will be held via Zoom on September 16th from 9:00 am to 11:30 am CST. "This training is intended to provide participants with an introduction to family reunification and how it is used to reunite children with verified and authorized family members after a critical and often highly stressful incident (e.g., a fire, a natural disaster, a school bus accident, a situation involving weapons or violence at school, etc.) that prevents a normal school dismissal." For more information and to register, click here.

The Illinois School and Campus Safety Program is pleased to announce the class Campus Threat Assessment and Management will be held September 26-27, 2022, in Carbondale. This two-day workshop for institutions of higher education featuring Gene Deisinger, Ph.D will help participants to better understand the dynamics of targeted violence and to develop and enhance strategies for early identification, assessment, and intervention with concerning situations. For more information and to register, click here.

The Illinois School and Campus Safety Program is pleased to announce the class Advanced Digital Threat Assessment will be held on October 26th from 9:30 am-4:00 pm via Zoom. Building upon the Digital Threat Assessment class by Safer Schools Together, Advanced Digital Threat Assessment advances participants' understanding of finding and curating relevant digital information consistent with real-life digital threat assessment data gathering scenarios. Significant engagement and hands-on practice will take place as participants are assembled into investigative teams and given a true-to-life mock scenario. For more information and to register, click here.