Cd'A School District pauses incident management system adoption

COEUR d’ALENE — The Coeur d’Alene School District Board of Trustees tabled a vote to authorize use of the National Incident Management System after concerns about federal overreach were voiced at the Jan. 3 meeting.

Public comment at the meeting questioned what would be identified as an incident through NIMS and whether the system could be used to silence parents who disagree with the school district.

Meeting attendee Stacey Gotcher said she was concerned adopting NIMS would allow the district to use Department of Homeland Security procedures to rule over local incidents, regardless of cause and complexity.

“We all know the Biden administration has labeled parents standing up and speaking out at school board meetings as domestic terrorists,” Gotcher said.

Meeting attendee Randy Neal said he thought it was clear that NIMS, at best, was an intimidation tactic for parents and the community so they might fear to voice their opinions.

Coeur d’Alene Fire EMS Officer Scott Dietrich said NIMS is purely a framework the school board can use to manage incidents and doesn’t have anything to do with federal government intrusion.

“It’s still completely up to the school board and the school,” Dietrich said in a Jan. 11 call to The Press.

“Just adopting NIMS by itself and saying you’re going to follow that, it doesn’t change any regulatory stuff whatsoever,” he said. “It’s not going to give the federal government any more or any less ability to do anything that they already do just because you adopt NIMS.”

A standardized approach to incident management and response, NIMS was developed by the Department of Homeland Security and released in March 2004. It intended to “improve coordination and cooperation between public and private entities in a variety of incident management activities,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“It’s not at all the government telling the school district what they’re going to do,” Dietrich said. “It’s just the government giving the school (district) the resource to use.”

Superintendent Shon Hocker said he supported tabling the item at the Jan. 3 meeting so the district could have time to educate trustees and community members on the details of the system. Hocker said he supports adopting NIMS to align the school district with local first responders.

“It’s very important that we just create, as easy as we can, an operation between us and all of those service providers that would help us in the event of an incident,” Hocker said. “We just want to make sure that our communications and ways we would run that incident will align with all of the other resources around us.”

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said law enforcement and fire departments, including in Coeur d’Alene and across the nation, have been using NIMS since the early 2000s.

White, along with Dietrich, said it would be beneficial for their departments if the school district adopted NIMS as NIMS standardizes terms and languages, as well as the line of reporting.

“If we’re all speaking the same language, it makes it easier for us to understand what the other components are talking about during an emergency,” White said during a phone interview with The Press.

School district communications director Scott Maben said Coeur d’Alene has adhered to the principles of NIMS for years. The resolution to adopt NIMS was presented as the district is in the process of updating emergency operations plans this year. District officials believe it is prudent to formally incorporate NIMS into the updated plans.

Maben said incidents are defined at the local level. It could be an evacuation of a school for a gas leak or a windstorm that brings down trees and power lines. First responders, principals and district leaders would work together to decide if an incident warranted NIMS. Not every incident would require a full response. School principals typically would serve as incident commanders for incidents involving their buildings.

District parent Meagan Slawson said at the Jan. 3 meeting she was curious if the district had to adopt the system because of federal grants received.

Hocker said occasional grant opportunities are offered by the federal government that can only be received if the district is operating in NIMS. The district has not received any. Adopting NIMS would open doors for future grant opportunities.

No date has yet been selected for when the resolution will return to the board for consideration.