If you want to be increasingly “safe schools” prepared, join us to review event safety planning, what we have learned from the Covington Shooting report, and how leadership in the moment helps Tennessee Principals feel more prepared and more confident of their roles in an emergency. This three-part training will cover event safety, The Covington Report and its meaning for school leaders, and emergency readiness for school leaders.
Our partner, Navigate360, will provide us with presenter Thom Jones, Senior Vice President of Threat Detection and Prevention. Thom is a former middle school administrator with more than 19 years of experience, and he has extensive knowledge of school operations and safety needs. He brings together district needs and industry expertise to help shape the direction and development of impactful solutions designed to help create safe learning environments — physically, socially, and emotionally. His presentation will be our opening keynote and will help us focus on Leadership in the Moment: Emergency Readiness for Tennessee Principals. Thom will help us see that, when a crisis unfolds, principals are the first line of leadership, and your preparation and response can shape outcomes in seconds. This session empowers Tennessee school leaders with actionable strategies to move beyond compliance and activate emergency plans with clarity, speed, and confidence.
Whether facing a medical emergency or a critical threat to campus safety, principals will learn how to lead building-level response efforts, empower staff, and ensure every member of the school community is prepared to act, turning planning into performance when it matters most. This keynote presentation will review the principal’s role in school safety, the Tennessee School Safety Plan Law, Tennessee Drill Mandates and Documentation requirements, BTA overview, the TOSS/Learning Forward TN STOP Grant, Building the Principal’s Role in BTA, Alyssa’s Law in Tennessee, House Bill 0322, and an alert systems overview.
Ray Robinson from Warren County Schools and his invited guests will discuss the Covington School report and its implications for safety planning in Tennessee. We will look together at the need for a visitor safety plan, a ‘first alert’ system, and general campus security. Ray does this work every day and has spent many hours reviewing and thinking about how this report and its recommendations impacts our planning process as school and system leaders. We hope you will retrieved the full report from Covenant-Final-Summary.pdf and review it for yourself prior to our August event.
We will end the day’s final hour focusing on School Event Safety. Dr. Wanda Shelton will address how to create and implement an event safety plan. We will also address the need to help parents understand the plan and ways that they can support your work, and how school leadership can partner with coaches and community to build safe event operations. She will review the work we began in 2024 and continue by sharing ideas for weather related issues, parents and community involvement, and ethical conduct of staff and students.
If you are a school leader or an ALI subscriber, you do not want to miss this event on August 26, 2025.
*** 4 HOURS TASL CREDIT***