Meet Ms. Risa Vine. She has been Choate’s Director of Risk Management since November 2016 and plays a large role in keeping everyone on campus safe. Her job includes overseeing campus-wide risk management, supervising Choate’s Community Safety function, and giving support and training to the school community regarding risk mitigation, crisis exercises, and policy development.
Before coming to Choate, Ms. Vine worked as the Director of Finance and Operations at Carmel Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut and as the Business Manager of Ezra Academy in Woodbridge, Connecticut. At her previous two schools, Ms. Vine’s positions required being trained in a variety of different skill areas from budgeting to facilities operations. She said this broad range of responsibilities made her work interesting, but it did not allow her to focus on one particular aspect: mitigating risk. At her previous positions, risk management was a smaller component of her broader job responsibilities. Because Ms. Vine wanted to have the opportunity to focus and become an expert on a specific duty, she decided to come to Choate.
On a day-to-day basis, Ms. Vine does what needs to be done to ensure safety. She organizes Choate’s emergency drills and educates the community on what to do in unsafe scenarios. Regarding the emergency drill on the first Thursday sleep-in of the year, she said, “We wanted to create a challenging scenario. We knew it wasn’t going to be the most accommodating time for the students, but we also wanted to make sure that the community could manage an emergency gathering drill at a time that wasn’t so convenient. A campus needs to plan, prepare, and practice. These experiences help to improve our plans and our approach to emergencies. In the end, our goal is to improve the outcomes.”
Ms. Vine enjoys talking to students and asking them about their personal experiences with safety drills. She also works closely with Community Safety and the Wallingford Police Department to further develop teamwork and a good relationship between the town and school.
It is important to Ms. Vine that everyone feels safe and is well protected while at Choate. To her, “Choate manages its risk well, protecting the students and protecting the faculty and staff, which are the school’s most important assets.”
Ms. Vine’s most prominent Choate moment was the presentation she made for school meeting on September 12. Ms. Vine felt that it was important to teach the students how to handle emergencies. She was mindful in the ways of how she presented her words so that they weren’t intimidating but instead informational and understandable. She said, “It is important that as community members at Choate, we take control of our safety and make good decisions.”
One of the initiatives that Ms. Vine is currently working on is an enterprise risk management program, which will look across all departments to share ideas, thoughts and challenges so that it is possible to review and mitigate risk across the entire institution. This will be a formal process identifying risk throughout the entirety of Choate whether it is operational, safety and security, or technology related. “It’s a great step for the school and an important one,” Ms. Vine said.
