Safety a top priority

Dear TPCS Families,

I pray that your summer is going well and that you're maximizing the opportunity to spend time with your family. Summer should be a time when we can relax, let our hair down (if we have any), and focus on our family relationships.

Many of you inquired about the safety plans at TPCS due to the Uvalde school shooting. Before this summer, we had the typical school crisis training and practice around fire, shelter-in-place, and earthquake drills. TPCS utilizes the ALICE response format for crisis management due to an armed intruder or environmental hazard. This summer, our safety team, composed of nine members including principles, facilities, and TPCC church safety personnel, reviewed our current policies and training format. We will conduct training on our crisis management procedures during our upcoming teacher in-service beginning July 29 and focus on our ALICE training. During the school year, we will have a monthly drill in each building to include fire, tornado or shelter in place, earthquake, and intruder drills. This training will occur in each of the three divisions of early childhood, lower school, and upper school. We have altered the cadence of our drills to include more intruder drills as well as shelter in place or tornado drills. We will have one of our intruder drills follow its complete process to involve taking the students to the reunification site (in this scenario, the church) and working through the process of how we would communicate with parents. While I can't share all of the details of our crisis management drills, we would use our Parent Alert text messaging to inform parents about reunification plans in case of a building evacuation for an actual event.

To enhance our safety in the buildings, we will require more information from visitors and guests in our facility. We are creating a holding space in our vestibules at the LS and US. We have a variety of visitors to our campus. Some come to drop off food (Uber Eats), some are vendors or service workers, some are current students' parents, and some are prospective families. In the LS, we will install a mechanical lock on the door leading to the office. As many might recall, once you gain access to the outside door at the LS, there is no lock on the entrance to the office; therefore, visitors have access to the rest of the building if they wish. We will require more information from visitors before letting them enter the offices and access the building. We desire to make our current families feel welcome, but at the same time, we want to increase our attention on the safety of your children while they are in our care.

If you have questions about our safety plans, please feel free to reach out to our Director of Operations, Kraig Cox (kcox@tpcs.org), and we will try to address your concerns as quickly as possible. We are very excited about the projected enrollment growth for next year. We are working tirelessly to have everything in place so that the 22–23 school year will be a positive experience for our students and families.

Serving Christ,

Paul M Williams