Amy Rock (0:55): Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Campus Safety Voices podcast. My name is Amy Rock and I'm Campus Safety’s executive editor. And here with me today is Kelli Lotito, who's a director of safety at the Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora, Colorado, and also a 2024 Campus Safety Director of the year finalist. And today we're going to talk about some of Kelli and her team's accomplishments in improving school safety. One thing that you said you are particularly proud of, Kelli, is branching out to work with numerous stakeholders, not just teachers and administrators. Can you elaborate on this accomplishment and also it's importance?
Kelli Lotito (1:31): It's important, as everybody watching this knows, to have buy-in from your constituents. Teachers and administrators are not always the only people that are on your campus. You need to work with other stakeholders, not only parents, but really students. And so some of that key is I meet with our freshmen over the course of the school year in their health classes, teach them about our Safe2Tell program, which is an anonymous reporting mechanism. But I really put a plea out to them and say, “I need your help. I need all your eyes and ears. I need you to let us know if something doesn't feel right, if something just is slightly off and no amount of concern is too big, too small to report.” So I really need to rely on our kids, our students, and I partner with them for four years. We have them for four years. So if I start early as they come on campus as freshmen, by the time they leave, then they are really partners with me.
And then we also talk about college safety and moving them onto college. Not only do I like to partner with the students but their parents, so anytime I can get in front of parent groups or talk to parents in the parking lot or get my team to talk with parents, that is key because hearing from them is important. We have parents that sit in the parking lot waiting to pick up their kiddos. Our kids come from different locations. We’re a private school, so not all of our kids are neighborhood kiddos. They come from distances of 20, 30 miles away. So some parents bring them to school, drop them off for say a camp right now and don't go home because they have to turn around and come back and their eyes and ears in the parking lot for us too. So parents are key. Everybody knows we've got to get on the parents' good side and get them to help us.
But I also partner with our certified athletic trainers. They're doing sports medicine. They're here after hours, sometimes early mornings. Let's all work together on talking about what's concerning, what's not concerning, not just somebody coming on our campus that's not our own, but let's talk about weather safety and how do we notify our teams on our various fields. We're 87 spread out acres. How can we get everybody in quickly and keep everybody safe? And so our athletic trainers, our nurses are key. We're very lucky to have two nurses on campus, full-time. That's almost unheard of for schools in today's world. And not only medical safety, we talk a lot about medical safety and how can we work together, especially getting EMS on campus and making sure they know where they're going. We have five different buildings, multiple sports fields, and we have three different entrances. So partnering with our nurses is key.
Always getting your administration on board always is very important. So that's some of those stakeholders, those relationships I have worked hard to build over the now starting 22 years here on campus.
Amy Rock (4:54): You had mentioned to me before we started recording that you were an athletic trainer before and partnering with coaches and athletic trainers is crucial because a lot of incidents happen after hours, particularly during sporting events like a football game because you have people from different towns coming together, people with issues with each other that you're not even aware of. At least within the school day within the building, typically you're aware of issues and can kind of mitigate those from becoming something bigger, but involving them in knowing how to handle crisis situations is so important.
Kelli Lotito (5:30): You are so right.
Amy Rock (5:31): And you mentioned Safe2Tell. Do you know Susan Payne? Because I know she is based in Colorado.
Kelli Lotito (5:37): She's wonderful. It's a phenomenal program. I know it's branched out into a lot of different states and we've partnered with them for a long time and it's really honestly used, yes, for school safety, but mostly for mental health. The numbers are staggering.
Amy Rock (5:51): Yeah, she's been a great partner for Campus Safety, so it's great to see how much that has taken off, for sure. And now you also increased available security equipment for your security specialists. Can you start by telling me first, what your security specialists are responsible for -- kind of give an idea of their day-to-day -- and then what type of equipment you were able to increase and how you were able to do that?
Kelli Lotito (6:18): So I have four security specialists. I have three that rotate different shifts throughout the day. I have one that has retired that is my substitute that comes in and helps when some of my guys have to be out and he continues to stay trained and active with us. And my security specialists are eyes and ears, boots on the ground. They're mostly outside the building. They don't do discipline. Their role is not discipline on our campus. Their role is eyes and ears, boots on the ground, notifying administration if something's going on. That might be a discipline issue, but really interacting with our students as they come onto campus, greeting them, especially those first weeks of school, guide them to where they need to go, parents as well. Watching our parking lots for dangerous behavior. We have a lot of new drivers, trying to educate them on good behavior in terms of driving on campus. It's not always our students though. I think many people know that sometimes it's our adults that we struggle with sometimes in our parking lots too.
And then roaming our campus throughout the day, inside and outside, moving through buildings, checking doors. Everybody knows that exterior doors are the bane of all our existences -- that doors can be secured and you turn around five minutes later and then you find a door that's propped open. So really just trying to educate everybody as to why these doors have to be secured.
Our guys also interact with our homeless, our kind of transient population that moves in the area. We're right off of a public transportation line that comes from a city and county building. So we see a lot of our homeless moving around, trying to find places to be, and they're interacting with them, treating them with compassion and care, but also educating them as to what our expectations are as a campus with students and how we can protect our kiddos here on campus.
They also interact with our local community. We have a shopping center across the street, and our kids access that shopping center quite a bit. And interacting with our local community members in case they need something or if they see something out of the ordinary, it's really a partnership and they do a great job.
We started with one security specialist that was unarmed, that was a retired police officer that came to us. And then over the course of the years, er one of our vice presidents for operations worked diligently to try to get our security specialist armed on campus. As the world has changed, as Colorado knows, there's a lot of school safety issues on campuses. So we've gotten to the point as a private campus, as a private school, religious school, we were lucky enough to arm our security specialist, train our security specialist.
And within the last couple of years, we've put them in rifle rated vests as well. They're more in a uniform than kind of a soft uniform, which is what we started with. They're open carry, they're very visible. We've added in OC Spray to give us a non-lethal option for them to utilize. And we've gone and branched out into some of our community to do some additional training that we feel we want. There's never too much training to have. So we have a TI training system, which is a simulator system that we can use here on campus. It's pretty phenomenal. TI training will customize the scenarios, and they're based out of, I believe Golden, Colorado. So we've partnered with them. And then this summer, we're heading to the DeAngelo Center here in a couple of weeks, which Frank DeAngelo was part of Columbine High School. And so he's really created an organization that works off of donations and grants that helps train folks for school safety. And so we're heading out there to partner with them and really excited with that for some training this summer. And then we work with some other organizations and do training consistently throughout the year.
Amy Rock (10:58): Frank has not slowed down over the years. He keeps going, it’s amazing.
Kelli Lotito (11:04): Yeah, we're really lucky to have his expertise and he really networks well with people, and he is really doing everybody a great service by having that organization there.
Amy Rock (11:17): Yeah, it's amazing. And I just wanted to mention, you said with the security specialists not handling the discipline, and I think that's the critical difference in recent years is largely removing discipline from their job roles. Them developing relationship with students is obviously critical because they want kids to trust them and come to them with any safety concerns, but most issues don't need to have someone under the law enforcement umbrella involved when they should be more focused on the physical safety. So I think people are finally realizing the difference of separating those roles, especially in certain communities where the school to prison pipeline is massive. Law enforcement or people that are security specialists shouldn't be doing the discipline side of it. Sometimes it might warrant them getting involved, but for the most part, someone like a guidance counselor or someone with that type of training should be more involved.
Kelli Lotito (12:26): We really do partner with our local law enforcement in terms of game coverage. We bring them in to cover a lot of our games, and I love partnering with the Aurora Police Department. We have lot that have had kids go through our school in many ways, and fostering new relationships with new officers that are coming through there. So we do that and we really try to work hard to build those relationships with our community and our local law enforcement, and then also with our own internal security force. So it's kind of a nice little balance. We also sit in Arapahoe County, so we work with Arapahoe County Sheriff a lot as well.
Amy Rock (13:11): You saw after Uvalde in that response how critical MOUs or just training together with all the different law enforcement entities and the schools is just so critical.
Kelli Lotito (13:23): Yeah. You have to at least invite them on campus, get them used to seeing what your layout is. They have all our maps and such. We welcome them just sitting on our campus writing reports. So if they're on our campus, we'll make contact. They'll just sit there and write reports. We'll buy them lunch. We've told them, come on in. I think our school cafeteria is pretty good, but who knows. But just buy them lunch. Just tell them you're going to feed them. Come in, we'll get you a bottle of water. Whatever you need. Anything to increase that visibility on your campus never hurts.
Amy Rock (14:03): Yeah, I mean, if a student sees a police officer with Aurora there for not a security reason, they're just kind of part of the makeup of the school and not seen as, oh, they're only here because something bad's happening. Well, the food must be pretty good to have kept you there for 20-something years.
Kelli Lotito (14:27): The food has changed. I’m not one that eats a lot in the cafeteria, but I work with some pretty great people. The longest I had been somewhere was seven years. I didn't plan on it, but it's not just a job, it's a community. It's a family. I'm caring for other people's kids. I have to trust where my daughter's going to school, she's being cared for. But when we have kids here, they're ours. And they're ours while we have them. So they're ours. They're our kids.
