Fall 2018 APCO Conference

The Fall Kansas APCO Conference will be held in Salina, KS at the Hilton Garden Inn on October 8th-10th, 2018. This will be a co-hosted conference between the APCO Board and Kansas 911 Coordinating Council. The Salina Police Department will be our supporting local host and has been assisting the committee to make this a great conference! Go to our conference page for more information. August 31st will be our Flash Day for savings. We are currently accepting Call for Presentation papers. Link is on the conference page. We will post the majority of the schedule before flash day and hotel information soon.

Join us in the spring! (Class Details)

On behalf of Sumner County Emergency Communications and Sedgwick County Emergency Communications, we are very excited to have you join us in Mulvane at the beautiful Kansas Star Casino April 16^th through 18^th for the spring APCO conference!  We are working hard to put together a conference lineup that will leave you feeling informed and ignited by the time you are done.  We want to ignite, or re-ignite, your passion for public safety and provide you with tools to be successful, both when at the console and at home! 

Some of the classes we will be offering include –

Receiving, Identifying, and Dispatching Swatting/911 Hoax Calls will be one of our general session classes.  We have all seen this happen in Kansas recently and want to be prepared for if, or really when, we are faced with the same situation in our own 911 centers.  Lt. Ben Finley has worked with numerous law enforcement agencies around the metro Atlanta area on swatting investigations and developed his training program based off of real life experiences.  He will go over the way calls are made, the type of technology these callers have used in the past, as well as new or trending devices and techniques, and will help provide you tools to identify indicators that should raise your suspicion for these types of situations.

We will have classes tailored for the front line dispatcher, including –

Work/Life Balance.  You are more than a warm body in a chair and it is important to maintain an effective work/life balance so that you can serve your family, your community and your self. 

Customer Service Training.  What does customer service look like in 911?  It isn’t the same at 911 that it is in the retail industry, for example.  This is customer service training tailored to YOU, the dispatcher. 

Forensic Nursing and Evidence Preservation.  This will be a discussion of what forensic nursing does and what they are looking for in sexual assault investigations.  This is helpful to know because the dispatcher can play a very important role in evidence preservation and later prosecution.  Never forget that you are the first line in successful investigation and prosecution so being educated on what will happen once you are done with the call is important.

Open Fox Tips and Tricks.  You’ve been trained on the basics but here are some tips to enhance your experience and an opportunity to ask questions of the experts. 

Complacency Training.   A complacent dispatcher is dangerous and unfortunately it is a trap that we can fall into.  Renew yourself in this course and allow it to focus you back in on why you do what you do and why you have to give 100% on every call.   

And many, many more. 

We have classes for trainers, including –

Presentation Skills.  There is an art to presenting in a way that is understood and effective.  This is a great opportunity to learn some new skills and work on knocking your next presentation out of the park!

Improving Trainee Performance.  We all want trainees to be successful – both because it is a reflection on us as trainers and because we want them to stay so we don’t have to keep training people!  Here we will provide you some tools to help ensure that you are successful as a trainer.

We have classes for supervisors, including –

Giving and Receiving Feedback.  Giving and receiving feedback can be tricky, especially when you are providing it to people who you have worked next to for years.  It is even more important that we, as leaders, are able to receive feedback.  This class will help arm you for delivering effective feedback and provide you tools to make sure that you are open to receiving feedback, as well. 

Servant Leadership.  Do you want to make a change in your 911 culture?  Do you want to be a leader that others want to follow?  Servant Leadership is a different way to approach leadership and create some change in your organization.  This class will discuss what it means to be a servant leader in the 911 industry.

And we have classes for administrators, including -

Hiring Roundtable.  What are other agencies doing that is, or is not, working in their hiring?  Where do they advertise?  How do they test?  Come join us in a discussion and share ideas on how to get the right candidate behind the console.

Contingency and Overflow Planning on the Statewide System.  What are the contingency measures for 911 calls on the statewide system and how can you be prepared for potential future issues?

This is just a sampling of classes, there are more to come!  Trust me when I say you don’t want to miss out on this conference.

Join us online, Wednesday, February 14^th, for our Flash Day!  If you register and pay online on February 14^th, registration will be $80 for APCO members and $100 for non-members.  On February 15^th registration goes back to its 2018 rate of $100 for members and $125 for non-members.  And don’t forget we have one day registration passes available for $50!

I can’t wait to see you in the spring!

Elora Forshee

Sedgwick County Emergency Communications

Kansas APCO Immediate Past President

2018 Spring APCO Conference Call for Presentations

Good morning,

Sedgwick County Emergency Communications and Sumner County Emergency Communications are co-hosting the Kansas Spring APCO Conference, April 16^th through the 18^th, at the Kansas Star Casino, 777 Kansas Star Drive, Mulvane.  We are really excited about hosting in this beautiful venue and know that we will have a lineup of classes ready to educate and continue to feed the passion for public safety of 911 dispatchers from throughout the state. 

If you are interested in presenting a class at the conference then we would love to hear from you.  Please contact me via email (elora.forshee@sedgwick.gov) or phone (316-660-4977) to receive a copy of the call for presentations form.  Presentation proposals must be submitted by February 28^th, 2018 for consideration.  We welcome submissions from all levels;  911 front line staff, administrative personnel, field personnel, and vendors. 

Please let me know if you have any questions. 

Regards,

Elora Forshee