Hamilton County Public Safety Communications Executive Director Mike Snowden was recently honored by his peers for helping establish a statewide training standard for 911 dispatchers.
The Don Kottlowski Award is an award presented by the Indiana chapter of APCO (Association of Public-safety Communication Officials), an international professional organization for 911 centers. The Indiana chapter provides the award annually to the director they believe has had the most impact on statewide issues.
Snowden’s award was presented by APCO at the 2018 Indiana NENA (National Emergency Number Association) and APCO Conference.
“It’s humbling to know that the work you are doing is being recognized,” Snowden told The Reporter.
Snowden said he does not know who put him up for the award and did not know he would be presented with the award before the conference. He does, however, know why he was chosen.
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“The statewide 911 board exists, and they collect a lot of money every year from cellphone and wire-line telephones,” Snowden explained. “$1 each for every month. That gets distributed to the PSAPs (Public Safety Answering Points) throughout the state in all 92 counties. There are about 120 PSAPs throughout the state. I went to them because no one was training our folks.”
There are no requirements in the State of Indiana for training for dispatchers.
There no certification or licensing for dispatchers in the state.
There is no required continuing education.
“When I got here Hamilton County created our own,” Snowden said. “We have our own minimum training standards for ourselves because no one else is holding us accountable. We are holding ourselves accountable.”
Snowden approached the state 911 board two years ago and asked them to set aside money to do training for all the telecommunicators in the State of Indiana.
“They finally – through a lot of negotiation – said ‘yes’ when they had some end-of-year money in fiscal 2016,” Snowden said. “They set aside some money and started promulgating rules. I helped with the rule creation for what was going to be paid for.”
Those rules came into effect in January 2018.
“In six months they have spent a couple hundred thousand dollars training dispatchers throughout the state,” Snowden told The Reporter. “They will continue to do that in perpetuity as long as there is a funding source for it. The award I got was for that idea: To help train people to do their jobs.”
By way of comparison, Snowden noted a person has to have hundreds of hours of training and be certified to cut someone’s hair or to do nails. Meanwhile, you do not have to have one minute of training, according to the State of Indiana, to be a dispatcher. That is because there is no law that requires a set number of hours of basic training or any continuing education in order to work as a public safety telecommunicator.
When the Noblesville West Middle School shooting occurred, local dispatchers had been trained the day before on how to handle it. That is because at the local level, Hamilton County does not believe zero hours of training is acceptable.
“I am eternally grateful for this award,” Snowden said. “It was an honor. It really was humbling that my peers thought enough of me to say I deserved that award. But the reality is we are just trying to make sure folks know how to do their jobs.”
Snowden said he thinks consistent training standards are necessary for the safety of all Hoosiers.
“Hamilton County has a very mobile citizenry,” Snowden said. “We are going down to the lake. We are going up to the dunes. We are going to Bloomington and Lafayette. We are on our way to Fort Wayne. If you have an emergency [on one of those trips] and you call for help, you should get the same level of care wherever you are in this state.”