A blaring fire siren pierces the air, another drill that has become routine on campus. Students and teachers chatter in the Huss parking lot, unbothered by what has become a formality. While fire drills are a common occurrence at school, there are many other safety practices and precautions that students know little about. Themes will include fire safety, severe weather, talking with trusted adults, closed campus and active threats.

Director of Operations and Security John Cole has worked to launch a pilot program. This initiative, named Community Partnership Month, has a goal to inform the school about important precautions. “It’s a program to hopefully ensure that our entire community—students, faculty, and staff—all receive and understand all the safety and security aspects in terms of drills, knowledge, and education,” Cole said.

Each week during Community Partnership Month, advisories will focus on a different topic. Early in the week, students will have the opportunity to discuss and ask questions about the topic at hand. They will then be informed of the logistics of the drill that will be occurring later on in the week so that they can prepare.

In order to kick off Community Partnership Month, staff working to develop the program reached out to the Committee for Community Conduct. Charlotte Goings, secretary for C3, recently began working on the initiative. “We’re supposed to work out how to communicate [information] back to the students, [and] put student perspective in the month,” she said.

C3 members will meet with Dean of Students Stacy Tepp and the rest of the program committee to review lesson plans for each week of the month and give feedback.

C3 co-Chairs announced Community Partnership Month to the school in an assembly on Sept. 18. One of the most important components of the partnership month is to reach the student body without inducing stress. Many of the topics that will be discussed in classrooms are lighter topics that might get overlooked.

According to Cole, the upper school will talk about “everything from safe driving practices around campus to parking policies and how to go to lunch in the most efficient manner.”

However, other topics are a lot heavier. According to Co-Chair Andy Allen, it’s important that the community learns about the month in a deliberate manner.

“Some topics will be more sensitive to some individuals,” he said.

For example, during the week focused on school invasions, the approach will be more discussion-based rather than drill-based. Ultimately, the goal of the month is to make school feel like the safest place possible.

According to Cole, this is only possible if “there’s work being done to keep [students] safe, and they have the knowledge they need to know what to do [in] the chance that there is an emergency situation.”

Cole hopes that the program, although in its early stages, can influence students beyond the walls of campus as they graduate and share their knowledge with new communities.