Developing A School Safety Plan

What is the first step in developing a school safety plan?

The first step is to identify your team, to bring to bear the local resources both internally and externally. Your internal mental health professionals, your school nurse, your transportation director, for example, for the school system. Your local police, fire and emergency management. Then, begin with your risk and vulnerability assessment to make sure that you are tying your efforts, your planning, your strategies to what your risks and resources are in the flavor of your community. Also, develop that customized and tailored plan that needs to be in place to be effective.

How should a school conduct a hazard analysis?

Well, your hazard analysis has to have multiple phases. You have to do a review of the local community hazard assessment through your emergency management agency, you have to do surveys of students, staff and parents - safety surveys, a tactical site survey on every facility owned and operated by the school or school district - and that's a pretty critical piece. We physically walk through, check every classroom, every closet, the grounds, and look for any types of hazards that might be present. Without those various types of assessments, we're not going to get a real clear picture, and we're not going to get an accurate, assessment-based approach to safety. We're not going to really connect our safety efforts to our real risks and concerns that we have out there. We have a variety of free checklists and tools on our website, and the U.S. Department of Education and other organizations have other instruments that can be used to help make this job easier.

What is a school safety 'prevention plan'?

A prevention and mitigation plan is the first of four phases that need to be in place for a proper written plan. It is the written plan that outlines the strategies, the procedures, the policies, the practices of the school or district, to prevent and to keep things from happening to people and to the place. To prevent any type of crisis that we can prevent, and the mitigation strategies. Mitigation, in simple terms, means to minimize the negative impacts of those events that we cannot prevent, such as a tornado striking a building, or those that occur in spite of our best efforts. When that child went into a Pennsylvania elementary school with five rifles and shotguns and two hand guns, the prevention efforts didn't work, but the mitigation efforts kept that child from killing anyone when they implemented a lockdown procedure. They minimized the negative impact of that terrible event. It was still a bad event, but it was a lot less of a negative event than it would have been had they not had mitigation efforts in place. So it's a written outline, if you will, of those things we do to prevent and mitigate crisis situations in a school.

Why is a prevention plan critical to safety?

Your prevention plan is crucial, not only for safety, but to have a good school. The very best schools have a well-thought out, well-developed prevention plan. Students who are being bullied in the bathroom are not learning as well as they could. A fire that occurs and shuts your school down for a day is going to interfere with the process of learning. Any school, to get an A in safety, has to have a well-thought out prevention plan. If you don't have one, you're more likely to experience serious injury, disruption, and possibly even, in rare cases, death, that could be prevented. We want to make sure that we take time to develop a good prevention mitigation plan because if we don't we're going to waste a lot of time responding to incidents that could have been prevented.

What is an 'emergency operations plan'?

Your emergency operations plan is the written guidelines that guide staff on what they need to do if crisis situations occur. It doesn't take the form that many people perceive. It shouldn't be one big book, for example. For a public school system it would be broken into individual components, a ready reference emergency chart for bus drivers, another for school teachers and support staff, because a teacher does different things than a building principal during a crisis. So it is actually a series of components that guide staff. If you are a small Montessori school with six or seven employees your plan will naturally have to take a different format. You would have one set of guidelines to guide all staff because it is not practical to break it down to each of them. But for most schools it is going to be a series of components that provide very specific instruction to various categories of employee, and at the same time it is integrated and supportive. For example, during a lock-down, a principal gives direction, a teacher follows that direction and supervises and directs students at his or her level, and a bus driver will be supporting the school during the crisis by their efforts. So it is components that are broken down by role, very specific guidance on the steps that we need to take once a crisis occurs.

What are school safety 'protocols'?

Your preparedness plan should be broken into two primary sections. One is what we call functional protocols. Those are the written procedures that guide staff for specific functions that need to be carried out during an emergency, such as a lockdown, shelter in place, to bring people into a building, shutoff our HVAC, to protect people from chemicals outside, or reverse evacuation. We see a danger. There was a case in Ashville, North Carolina, where a bear wandered onto campus, so we need to move children quickly into the building. Media protocol. Those are our procedures for types of actions that we want to carry out rather than a specific type of crisis. The next part is what we call incidence specific protocols, which are specific steps of actions that we would take for a tornado, a fire, or a hostage situation. Those procedures are developed by implementing the various specific functional protocols as they apply, as well as things that are unique to that type of crisis. By formatting our plan in those two key sections and then supplementing it with reference information such as our crisis team members and those types of things, we can develop a very effective and efficient plan.

What is a 'crisis response team'?

A crisis response team is an organized group of people who implement the written plan and are prepared as measures during an actual crisis event. They are the people that operate in unison to make things happen under extreme stress, to make those paper plans and electronic plans become a reality, and to get control of a crisis situation and restore normalcy to the school.

What is an 'emergency evacuation kit'?

An 'Emergency Evacuation Kit' is usually best: a rolling backpack--some type of small container, filled with the things that administrators, and crisis team members must have to manage a crisis, in the event they cannot remain in, or return to their office: things like student contact information, flashlights, first-aid kits--the contents will vary by location. But just think, "If you cannot get back into your office, and you have to remain outside for two or three hours, what will you need to lead, and to perform crisis functions, and response functions?" There should be two kits stored in two separate locations for each facility:not just schools, but support facilities as well. If you're an independent school, and have staff living near your campus in a private residence, you may want to consider a back-up kit being stored there. The kits should be taken out anytime there's a drill, to condition staff under stress, to remember to take that kit out. A staff member remains with the kit, and takes it to the lead public safety official, and makes them aware of the contents, but we remain with that kit.

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.

How can a virtual tour of our school aid in emergency response?

Virtual tours and, just as importantly, a printed version in a book or a manual in your Emergency evacuation kit can be very helpful to public safety responders. One case that comes to mind was a tordado that destroyed a wing of a school and rescue personel didn't know because of the condition, where they should be digging in the debris. So we want to be able to