What is 'emergency code' and how does it contribute to school safety?
An 'emergency code' is , generally speaking, a very dangerous thing. It's a very quick way to make your plans unworkable under stress. Keeping in mind that a school official or a staff member may be under extreme conditions, such as a school crisis, and may lose fifty to sixty percent of their cognitive reasoning ability. Codes often cause staff to do the wrong thing. Having a signal 'Dr. Smith has left his red binder in the library' can cause death and serious injury. You want to use, for most situations, plain speak phrases. It's a good idea to combine them with a colour to correspond to your emergency chart. For example, you might say for an emergency lockdown 'staff please initiate the emergency lockdown protocol ,red protocol', so that they have two ways to understand what you want them to do. The red tab with the word red should be printed in case someone is colour blind, with that plain speak phrase. The only time we should use a code is for a duress code, usually for a bus driver so that they can communicate over the radio that they're in distress without alerting, for example, a gunman. But that is the only example where we would recommend it. And the federal government, the US department of education, and the US department of homeland security firmly recommend not using codes. If you're using codes in your plans, you're ten years out of date with best practices, and you may kill children.
