They engage in a scenario-based discussion to simulate real-life emergencies.

This time around, the Carbon County School Safety Committee met recently for a two-hour tabletop training exercise in which they were provided an emergency scenario surrounding a large football event at one of their facilities.

The training was hosted at the Carbon County Emergency Management training facility and instructed by Carbon County Sheriff Dan Zeigler.

“Last year we did our first kind of group tabletop and had reached out to the schools to do that on a swatting incident; we wanted to have the leaderships of every district at the table,” Zeigler said. “The chiefs of police in Carbon County have worked collaboratively and broken down some barriers and worked smarter, and not harder.”

Zeigler said he reached out to the superintendents of all five school districts in the county, along with Carbon Career and Technical Institute.

He said several months ago the committee had its first meeting to discuss what they believe they have from law enforcement to offer school districts.

“We just want to improve safety,” Zeigler said. “That’s the genesis of how this committee was formed.”

Zeigler said some of the topics discussed were whether they have maps of the schools so that if they need to go into them, they know where they’re going, and to see if they can help advise to improve those based on the tactics and knowledge that they have as law enforcement officers.

“We had those discussions, and the group decided they wanted to do tabletop exercises related to a large scale fight that was at a football game termed Friday Night Fights (several years ago there was an actual fight at one of the stadiums),” he said. “I created a PowerPoint presentation and conducted tabletop exercises, and all five of the district’s and CCTI had representation, there were several local chiefs of police, Carbon County Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Joe Greco, and Carbon County EMA Coordinator Zach Gilbert.”

During the tabletop, Zeigler said they started doing de-briefings, received opinions and had a good usable discussion and product out of that tabletop.

“We have a tremendous amount of resources in this county and instead of having to bring in outside resources or trainers, we have a tremendous amount of experience here in the county and we’re able to tap into that,” he said. “Budgets are a concern for everybody in every aspect for what we do and when we’re able to tap into these resources, it benefits everybody and is at no cost.”

Zeigler added it’s amazing all that can be accomplished when everyone sits at a table for the tabletop and have the opportunity to take the ideas.

“It was very interesting to see how advanced some of the tools that the school districts have are,” he said. “It just improves safety across the board for all the school districts.”

Zeigler noted that the committee will be meeting on an ongoing basis and will hold a group discussion as to what the next topic is it wants to address.