What is 'school crisis communications'?
Crisis communications for schools means that you and your staff can get the information from one place to the next within your organization and through other organizations that you're working with during the response phase, such as police, fire and emergency management, and it comes from two levels. First is human communications that's effective. For example, staff should be taught and practiced, if you're a principal and you direct someone to go to the street to meet an ambulance that's coming for a child that's having an asthma attack, when you give those instructions, have the staff quickly repeat back to you what you just told them to make sure they understand. If they go to the wrong entrance way, an ambulance could be five minutes delayed getting to the specific site on campus where it's needed. The second is technology. Do we have the ability for school and public safety officials to talk on a common radio network? And then, can we combine the two that I just talked about? If you've got a cellular phone or a portable radio and you're a principal in a pep rally, or a teacher in a hallway with a fire alarm ringing and you're trying to communicate emergency information and people can't hear you, knowing how to use the communication device, knowing that if I take the microphone, press it to my throat when I talk and that will drown out the background noise so that you can hear me when I request an ambulance to be called to the school. Merging the two, people skills, people communication and technology together, make effective crisis communication for a school.
