This article was updated on Dec. 18 at 6:14 p.m.
The Rye City School District held its first-ever reunification drill at Milton School, a proactive measure to prep for emergencies like Monday’s school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin, where two people, including one student, were gunned down.
The goal of school reunification drills is to ensure safe, organized procedures for reuniting students with parents, tailored to each school’s specific safety needs. The Standard Reunification Method, which is the procedure that has been adopted in Rye, is a system designed to safely reunite students with their families following a school crisis, from active shooter situations to natural disasters. It was developed in 2012 by the I Love U Guys Foundation — a nonprofit founded by two parents who lost their daughter in a 2006 school shooting — whose mission is to restore and protect the joy of youth through educational programs and collaborations with schools, families, and other organizations, according to its website.
“Hopefully we’ll never have to use this, but [we wanted] to practice and learn how to conduct a reunification,” Schools Superintendent Eric Byrne said.
The drill, held on a recent Wednesday afternoon at Milton School, focused on the internal process of how a parent or caregiver would pick up their child following an emergency event — as well as how the schools would work with the fire and police departments on traffic control, according to Byrne.
The staged event ran through the entire process, starting at the greeting station in the parking lot, where guardians were checked in before their child was brought to them.
First responders temporarily blocked off streets, closing off Hewlett Avenue from Milton Road to Fairway Avenue starting at 11:30 a.m. until about 3 p.m. on Dec. 4. There was also police activity in and around the Playland parking lot.
“The drill went smoothly, and we were able to identify areas where we can improve, which will help us refine our procedures for the future both at Milton School and at every school in the District,” Byrne wrote in a Dec. 4 email to the community.
“The time people learn how to do reunification is when there’s a tragedy, and we felt that we could, within the community and in our district, try and figure it out in advance,” Byrne told The Record on Tuesday.
Another school tragedy struck the U.S. on Monday when a 15-year-old female student at the Christian school in Madison, Wisc., opened fire killing two — a student and teacher — and injuring six others, before fatally turning the handgun on herself.
School shootings have more than quadrupled since 1970, according to data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. And more than 338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school since the country’s first significant school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, according to Sandy Hook Promise, a gun violence prevention nonprofit.
But the number of school shootings in 2024 seems to be up for debate. The incident in Madison marked the 83rd school shooting this year, according to CNN, surpassing 2023 for the most in a year. Education Week, however, says only 39 shootings that resulted in injuries or death have taken place in 2024.
The planned event in Rye came days before the 12-year anniversary of the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman opened fire killing 20 first graders and six school employees — marking the second deadliest school shooting at the time.
Sandy Hook is a community about an hour from Rye.
Byrne declined to comment on whether district security measures could prevent a tragedy similar to those in Madison and Newtown.
“I believe that we have very good procedures in place, we work very hard to keep everybody safe, but I can’t respond to that question,” Byrne said.
This isn’t the school district’s first effort toward safeguarding the campus and protecting students and faculty. District officials have already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a number of security enhancements over the last few years, including secured vestibule entrances, a camera system, upgraded alarm systems, upgraded lockdown PA systems, a visitor management system at school entrances, drill processes/procedures and threat assessments, the superintendent said.
The district may conduct more reunification drills at other Rye schools in the future, Byrne said at the Dec. 17 Board of Education meeting.
Reunifications drills are not mandated by New York state, but are becoming increasingly popular in schools across the nation, Byrne said in his Dec. 6 email to the community. Altaris, the school district’s security consultant, recommended the drill, and helped the district begin planning it in the summer.
“The Secret Service Threat Assessment Center does a deep dive whenever there are incidences across our country, and they will send out a briefing of what they’ve learned from that,” said John Hawkins, the school district’s director of security. “So we as a team get together and go over those things and try to see how our processes are working.”
The I Love U Guys Foundation’s reunification method, which has also been adopted by New York state, ensures that every step of the process after a crisis is covered. That includes having guardians fill out forms, checkers verifying the forms, providing an emergency contact list, facilitating the reunification point where the child is brought to the parent, determining the necessary staff at each station, and managing signage, according to Hawkins.
“There’s always some type of learning when it comes from events that happen in other parts of the country,” he said.