What are school safety 'protocols'?
Your preparedness plan should be broken into two primary sections. One is what we call functional protocols. Those are the written procedures that guide staff for specific functions that need to be carried out during an emergency, such as a lockdown, shelter in place, to bring people into a building, shutoff our HVAC, to protect people from chemicals outside, or reverse evacuation. We see a danger. There was a case in Ashville, North Carolina, where a bear wandered onto campus, so we need to move children quickly into the building. Media protocol. Those are our procedures for types of actions that we want to carry out rather than a specific type of crisis. The next part is what we call incidence specific protocols, which are specific steps of actions that we would take for a tornado, a fire, or a hostage situation. Those procedures are developed by implementing the various specific functional protocols as they apply, as well as things that are unique to that type of crisis. By formatting our plan in those two key sections and then supplementing it with reference information such as our crisis team members and those types of things, we can develop a very effective and efficient plan.
