Our public safety drone has finally arrived! The future of the trade relies heavily on technology and our students will be at the forefront. As part of the program, students will be trained and have the opportunity to test for their FAA Remote Pilot license. Drone technology has gotten a bad reputation due to military use and privacy concerns but they can help us with so much more! A common call we receive is missing Alzheimers patients who have wandered away from home. Driving around neighborhoods is slow and inefficient. A drone can cover miles in minutes and locate missing elderly or children much faster. Drones can respond to everything from lost hikers to assisting with brush fires. CJPS is building a drone response team to help our communities with these things. See the "DRT" tab up top!

Haddam Volunteer Ambulance Chief Doug Dole visited the CJPS shop with an amazing donation of a stretcher and stair chair! He also brought their newly refurbished ambulance and toured the students through it. The donation came at a perfect time as the juniors are working on their Emergency Medical Responder program. We are looking forward to providing well-trained volunteers to the HVA in the coming years and working with them on future training sessions. A special thanks to Emergency Resources Management for connecting our programs! More to follow with ERM.. stay tuned!

Mr. Linskey and Mr. Cruickshank were absolutely blown away and held back tears after being presented with patches and plaques made by our students to show their appreciation. Thought of, and coordinated by one of our sophomores, students raised money with the Middlefield and Portland fire departments, contributed their own, and worked to make the thoughtful gifts. The thoughtfulness of our students continues to make us proud. We can't wait to see what their futures bring and how we can help them get there. THANK YOU!

Vinal CJPS students attended a meeting of the CT-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team and provided a briefing on COVID-19 and the 2019-nCoV. Their presentation went amazing and the roughly 20 responders in attendance and 40 responders who observed via teleconference were blown away at the quality of the briefing. Responders commented sincerely that they felt safer deploying knowing the class was behind them and looking out for their safety. We are so proud of the professionalism of our students and the quality of their work.

Vinal Tech was fortunate enough to receive educational licenses to ESRI's VERY powerful ArcGIS software which our EOC took advantage of. You may notice the "esri" logo in the corner of many maps you see in the news, weather reports, and even in your town planning and zoning! That is because almost all of this data works through this powerful software. Students can plot any number of thousands and thousands of layers such as police stations, hospitals, fire departments, and even Dunkin Donuts with the simple clicking of a checkbox! They are then able to plot multiple layers over each other, run analysis tools, and even share their maps with the world. The example below is an amazingly creative map made by our student Will who plotted the new coronavirus against world temperature differentials to show how global temperatures affect the transmission rates. Brilliant!

We had a visit from the Connecticut Critical Incident Stress Management Team to talk about critical incident stress and all the amazing resources available for responders. Having been to several critical incident debriefings, Mr. Linskey and I are very familiar with how valuable these amazing teams are in the wake of horrific tragedies and we were happy the students were able to meet these amazing individuals.

We had a very active cycle 10 with the new class of 2023. Several trips all came to fruition this cycle. The students learned drill and ceremony at the CT Police Academy, learned about the extensive training firefighters undergo at the CT Fire Academy, and got to speak to a prosecutor, defense attorney, and the Honorable Judge Geathers before she took the bench for them during arraignments at the New Britain Superior Court. Overall it was a great cycle and the trips certainly balanced out the intense amount of Constitutional law that was covered in preparation for their delving into the Connecticut General Statutes soon. More to come!