What are the most common mistakes made by school administrators in preparing safety plans?
One of the most common things that we see is often administrators try to buy plans or pay someone to do the plans and they don't truly get invested in the process. They're commonly dramatically over reliant and over confident in their plans and then we see a major incident and they're completely shocked that their plans failed because they weren't willing to take a really critical look at their plans. You want to vet your plans, you want to find the things that will kill children before a crisis occurs. There are a number of ways to do this; we have assessment tools, you can conduct properly conducted drills and excercises, have an emergency management professional who did not help develop the plan, critique the plan for you. But we have to ask the tough questions and look for the vulnerabilities, don't let them find us. I think of one case where a school system paid a million dollars for a consulting firm to devlelop plans for them. Those plans failed the state assessment process several times and they've now failed three times under actual field conditions and there's a little girl who's got permanent brain damage and always will because they weren't willing to take a look in the mirror and vet their plans and they let a child pay the price for that. So we want to make sure that we look hard to find those flaws that are inherent in any plan no matter how well it's developed before it's tested by a real crisis event.
