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The Aspen School District is fielding criticism from parents about its communication on Feb. 22 when a threatening phone call to the Pitkin County Regional Emergency Dispatch Center initiated a campus-wide lockdown.
Close to 50 people filled the Aspen District Theater Thursday evening to learn more about the response from law enforcement and school district officials.
Many felt they were still in the dark about what exactly happened on Wednesday morning.
Superintendent of the Aspen schools, Dave Baugh, Pitkin County Undersheriff Alex Burchetta, and Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione gave statements before opening up the forum for questions.
“We live in a safe place, but we do a lot of training,” Buglione said. “We get deputies and police officers up here to get to know the schools, to get to know staff, get to know students, but we can always do better.”
Buglione said after the sheriff’s office was notified of the threat, a school resource officer was in the Aspen Elementary School within 20 seconds. Other deputies arrived on scene within 67 seconds, quickly followed by officers from Colorado State Patrol and other local jurisdictions.
When it was time for questions, many parents were still curious why they received different communication from the sheriff’s office and the school district on a series of platforms.
Superintendent of the Aspen schools Dave Baugh tried to address those concerns and reassure parents that the district had learned from this experience.
“We're very sorry for it,” Baugh said. “We know it was a shortfall and we've been debriefing regularly across the departments now. And there's a concrete plan moving forward for getting you as much authentic, real information in real time.”
Baugh did not provide any details of this new communications strategy at last night’s meeting, but the district communication specialist, Monica Mendoza, is accepting survey responses from parents about how communication could improve in the future.
“I would like to listen to the parents and devise a really straightforward communication plan and find out where they would like to get that information,” Mendoza said. “Do they want it on social? Do they want it emailed? Do they want text messages? Do they want all of it? Because we can certainly do that. I totally understand how frustrating it was for people to be waiting for that information.”
Baugh added in an email to Aspen Public Radio this morning that during a similar future emergency, the district "will provide information as soon as possible and then on the half hour."
Improvement Plans
The Aspen School District sent an email to parents at 8:59 a.m. on Feb. 22 to inform them of the lockdown.
The school was also updating the banner on their website, sending occassional updates on the status of the lockdown, and the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office was updating its Facebook page throughout the morning.
And a Pitkin Alert to the greater community was sent at 10:20 a.m. when the entire campus had been cleared.
Burchetta added that they could have assigned a public information officer to be on scene with incident command who was informed and capable of disseminating up-to-date information.
He is sure that will be in place during the next emergency.
“We're moving forward on this,” Burchetta said. “It's not lip service. We're moving forward on making significant strides to correct and to address the communication deficiencies across the board.”
Some speakers on Thursday night mentioned they were in a holding pattern with some of their information because if there had been a shooter on campus, they didn’t want to give away too many details.
“We don't know who's listening to our messaging,” Burchetta said. “We don't know if the individual that we're trying to look for or trying to find is actually a recipient of some of our messages. So if we're saying, ‘Go here. Do this. Don't go here. Don't go do that,’ we may actually be providing information to the individual that we're looking for and how to evade our efforts.”
Kiara Gonzalez, a senior at Aspen High School, attended the meeting and wanted to know why none of the school district emails and web updates were delivered in Spanish that morning.
Baugh says the district has made strides to improve Spanish messaging over the past two and a half years, but they do not currently have a translator on staff.
Federal Investigation
During the meeting, the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office provided an update on the federal investigation into the caller who threatened the Aspen School District on Wednesday.
Burchetta says the call was international, but that doesn’t give investigators much information.
“All I can say right now is that the origin of the call was international, but that doesn't mean anything,” Burchetta said. “Respectfully, because with virtual private networks, VPNs, you can spoof your location using a simple technology that's available to anybody.”
Burchetta says almost a dozen other jurisdictions in Colorado received threats of a similar nature on Wednesday, including the Roaring Fork School District, and the FBI is taking the incidents seriously.
However, he cannot provide more details at this time or else risks compromising the integrity of the investigation.
