How can cell phones be used in school crisis communications?
Cell phones, when used intelligently, can be very helpful for school officials to communicate with one another as long as they are trained to talk only when they must talk, to keep their conversations to a minimum, and to keep an open line during a major crisis event. If for example you're a principal and your crisis team notifies the school board office via cell or digital phone, you want to keep that line open on that particular phone in case lines clog up. We have found them not to be very efficient for student communications. We have seen numerous cases where crisis situations spun out of control when students were allowed through lack of proper policy to utilize cell phones during an emergency. I participated in interviews with SWAT commanders from the Columbine incident who all stated that the erroneous information that was given by students wasted valuable resources. Students very often do panic during crisis situations. We've found that many times the information they give is not accurate, so they can actually add quite a bit to the problems of a crisis situation. So we advise parents, students and staff that it's really counter productive for students to use electronic communication devices during a crisis situation.
