How can parents help in school crisis communications?
One of the most important ways for parents to help in school crisis communications is to be sure to keep their child's emergency contact information updated. If you change your phone, or your cellular phone, or you want to change who is authorized to pick up your child, be sure you notify your child's school of that change very quickly. Many schools today have very impressive capabilities to notify you, but if they call a wrong number you won't get the information you need. The next thing is to understand how your school will communicate with you during a crisis. Ask questions, learn the methods that they will use. And then when you have a communication, if you ever do have a situation where you're notified of a crisis at your child's school, resist the natural impulse of almost any parent to rush to your child's school. The absolute most dangerous thing you can do is to rush to help your child. What we see from time to time is parents rushing in numbers to a school, and then that ambulance can't get out to get the child quickly to a hospital. They can't get in, public safety personnel can't come and go. The best thing you can do is to tune in to local media, go to your child's school or school system website, and wait for instructions on where to go. Most likely, if it's a major crisis event, you will be directed to a site away from the school. If you rush to the school you may miss your child and be delayed in seeing that your child is okay. So resist those natural urges that may in fact cause harm to your child and other people's children.
