2016 Winter Five Star Journal

Safety & Security
Since September 2015 our dedicated emergency preparedness team has safely reunified 5,500 students with their families.
Adams 12 Five Star Schools leads in school safety
District’s approach is currently used in more than 20,000 schools in North America
If there’s an emergency at your child’s
school, would you know what to do? It’s
a question few want to discuss, let alone
have to answer. But a team at Adams 12
Five Star Schools has spent more than 15
years thinking about those what-ifs and
preparing students and their families for
any scenario.
In fact, the approach Five Star Schools
takes to preparing and responding to an
emergency or school safety issue has become
an international model spread by the
I Love You Guys Foundation—started by
John-Michael Keyes after his daughter Emily
was killed by a gunman at Platte Canyon
High School in Bailey in 2006.
In the aftermath, Keyes began looking at
school safety to understand how students
and parents could better be prepared for
these kinds of incidents. His sister, a police
officer, suggested he learn more about the
process at Five Star Schools.
What he saw was a plain language approach
to preparing students—and a system
in place to reunite family members
with students after a situation. It was what
he used to develop two tools—the standard
page 22 | Winter 2016