New York schools must now notify parents one week before lockdown, fire drills

Niagara Falls, N.Y. (WBEN) - A new rule coming from the New York State Education Department will now require all school districts to notify parents in advance of a lockdown, fire drill and early dismissal drill will be initiated.

This rule change, which will go into effect for this upcoming 2024-25 school year, will require schools to notify parents, students and staff at least one week prior to the said drill.

The drills also must be conducted in “a trauma-informed, developmentally and age-appropriate manner,” according to the amended rules adopted by the state’s Board of Regents.

"We always want to keep the kids mental well being in mind when we're doing these drills," says Bryan DalPorto, former Niagara Falls Police Chief and current Head of Security at Niagara Fall City School District. "The biggest change is we have to notify the parents of the drills prior to conducting the drill so the parents know, which I think is a good idea, to let the parents know these drills are coming, so there's no misconceptions of a drill versus a real event."

DalPorto notes that when it comes to the doing the drills every year, which include eight evacuation drills (fire drills), four lockdown drills and one early dismissal drill, the district always tries to be as realistic as possible to ensure the students are prepared.

"In the past, we've tried to make them as realistic as possible. This puts some restrictions on the way we can do that, but we will conduct the drill so our students remain safe, remain mentally healthy, and we're still effective."

DalPorto also notes that the notifications won't impact scheduling of the drills. However, they will have to plan better because they can't factor in the weather as well as previous years.

DalPorto notes there's a number of ways the district could correspond with parents to inform them.

"We have procedures in place to do that via the telephone, internet, messaging, either emails or through teams and different venues and different mechanisms to make that notification occur so the parents will know."

As far as security or school resource officer training goes for serious events like active shooters or violence ensuing inside the schools, DalPorto notes the training never stops and there are no summer breaks.

"The security staff as well as the administrators and the superintendent are constantly working on different ways to make our school more secure and make these drills as effective, which all plays part into our grand master security plan for our schools," added DalPorto.

"In Niagara Falls, we've taken a layered approach to security in general, where every year we try to ramp up either the technology or our procedures, or both, to enhance the security in our school district. We have weapon detection systems and this year we did a bunch of capital projects to enhance our buildings for better security, such as bulletproof film on glass. These are things we wish we wouldn't have to do, but I think it's prudent to do if you're really security minded and thinking of these things. So it's an ongoing process, and we never stop evaluating and making changes to better our security."