School Crisis Communications
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.
What is the role of crisis communications in school safety?
Crisis communications will make or break your response. If you don't have the structure in place to communicate quickly, the most important decisions and the best laid plans will become ineffective. For example, if you have a crisis situation at your school that will require you to move staff and students to an offsite location for family reunification, the decision to do so must be made within the first five or ten minutes or the parents and loved ones will reach your school before you can evacuate and you will have loss of control of the situation. Once that decision is made you quickly have to be able to communicate that decision to the right people. The principal must notify the central office in a school system, so they can get the busses rolling. They have to communicate with the crisis team members to converge on that site and we have to notify our parents why it is imperative not to come to the school and instead why they need to go to that reunification site. So it is what makes things happen that appear on our paper plan but making them happen under stressful and sometimes chaotic situations.
How can poor crisis communications cause harm?
Poor crisis communications can cause harm. For example, if you use codes in your emergency plans, you may cause a teacher to evacuate children into a toxic cloud of chemicals because they misunderstand that critical communication. If you try to communicate and you don't, for example, have public address externally, you implement a lockdown because in the one case in North Carolina, a bear came onto campus with small children, so they implemented what is known as a reverse emergency evacuation procedure. If you didn't have external public address or some other means to notify staff and students outside that there's a danger, your notification may not protect the very people it's designed to. So, crisis communication is one of the most important aspects of getting the job done when we're in the response phase, and again, it's people and their communications ability under stress, the techniques that we use to clearly communicate, plain language, making sure people understand what directives we've given, and then having the technology to get those communications out to people that need them.
What is a school 'media protocol' and how is it connected to school safety and well-being?
Your media protocol is one of your communication protocols and it should tell you if you're on the team that would actually talk to the media. It should give you guidelines, tips, and practical information on how to effectively communicate information to the media. At the same time, it's just as important in many school systems, and schools miss this in their planning. Every other employee in their emergency chart should be specifically told when NOT to talk to the media. So we're taking our procedural day-to-day policy and putting it into our emergency operations plan and then making it a reality as we train and practice. This is one reason why you as a school principal should be doing table-top drills. If you don't do that, don't be surprised when your staff, under stress, end up on national news saying things you don't want them to say because you failed to prepare them by taking ten minutes, periodically, to put them through an exercise and then remind them of those key things like your media protocol such as "Remember, staff, if we had this crisis at our school, you might be contacted by the media, and you wouldn't be authorized to speak, you would direct that to whoever our plan says." Making our plans realistic, "3-D" plans so we don't have one of those deal breakers for our career with an unauthorized media interview that causes panic and fear beyond what it should be.
What training is needed for members of a school crisis team?
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.
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.
How can e-mail be used in school crisis communications?
Many school systems use emergency e-mail notifications as one of a multitude of systems. We recommend at least triple redundant, if not even more redundant, communications. What that means is if I'm a classroom teacher, you should have several ways to communicate with me, in relation to what I need to do during a crisis. For example, schools will use public address, they'll use pre-programmed batch calling for cellular phones, they'll utilize e-mail notifications, and they may use classroom telephones. Many schools, and even one of our clients has quadruple redundant communications. They even go to the extent of broadcast via television through their own network, where if you're a teacher you're notified during a lock down for example to turn on your television and tune it to the school systems cable channel where they can now directly broadcast from within your building or from your school district what you need to do. So they're one of a multi-tiered system to try to communicate during crisis situations.
