Macon Teachers Get Updated SAVE Act training 

Historically, a part of the Macon County teachers’ annual in-service training has focused upon Active Attack training. The focus of this training is to teach our educators the proper response during an active attacker situation on campus and includes training on how to treat and stop traumatic bleeding resulting from serious wounds. This includes using tourniquets, chest seals, wound packing and other immediate life saving skills.

This year is different.

Tennessee legislators passed the SAVE (Schools Against Violence in Education) act in 2007. It established specific and consistent requirements for local education departments to provide safe school environments.  The act establishes state-level safety standards to provide guidance to school districts to address, plan, and implement a comprehensive school safety planning strategy and Emergency Operations Plan.

In 2023/2024, Tennessee enhanced the SAVE Act legislation….with changes to strengthen physical security at every public school and enhance accountability in the school safety systems. The new laws allocate $230 million for enhanced safety, including placing school resource officers in every public school, security upgrades, and Homeland Security agents to help coordinate school security activities. The legislation also requires schools to develop annual safety plans and conduct additional safety, fire and intruder drills throughout the school year.

To support these changes, the in-service training this year included familiarity and orientation training on the makeup of school safety teams, designated roles and expectations of school teams in each school. These teams are charged with managing and carrying out the various emergency and recovery actions which would be needed in any given emergency. These Emergency Operations Plans cover virtually every type of emergency… includes active attacker, earthquake, flood, tornado, hazardous materials release, bomb threats, missing persons, fire and many other emergency situations which might occur in or at school locations. Also included is a detailed Threat Evaluation guide to be used to determine the level of threat severity and actions to be taken for any threat or emergency situation as it relates to the school system.

Each school has designated teams, responsible for specific actions during emergencies and requires plans for communications, bus loading, student tracking, in-classroom provisioning and managing the re-unification or return of children to their parents after any given event is under control or over.

Two FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) classes have been added as a mandatory training requirement. These classes have to be completed on line at the FEMA website.  These are IS-100 Incident Command System  and IS-700 National Incident Management System (NIMS). These two classes are to familiarize school staff with the terminology and command structure which will be used in all emergencies. This same command structure is already in use by all of our emergency service agencies. 

ALL of this is to accomplish one thing and one thing only….to best assure the safety of our school children and the school staff.

The team of officers conducting the training was Macon County Sheriffs Office SRO Larry West,   Lafayette Fire Department Deputy Chief/AEMT Billy King, Tennessee Homeland Security Special Agent Chris Locke  and Macon County Constable Tom Dallas.  Agent Locke is assigned to assist Macon County schools with the SAVE Act requirements, threat assessments as needed and other security or training needs of the schools and any county agency.

The instructors stated that “Active Shooter Response”, “Stop The Bleed” and CPR/AED training is available for businesses, churches, day cares and individuals in Macon County. For more information contact any of the above instructors.