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 16th through
18th 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 14th, for our Flash Day! If you register and pay online on February 14th, registration
will be $80 for APCO members and $100 for non-members. On February 15th 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
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