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Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools
Emergency management includes four phases—mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Emergency management requires identification of hazards and potential threats, assessment of the impact of hazards on students, teachers, and staff as well as school buildings and school activities. Emergency management also includes prevention—actions to eliminate hazards or reduce the probability of hazard occurrence—and mitigation—actions to minimize the potential impact of hazards that cannot be prevented.
Preparedness, LLC can survey school facilities to identify hazards and offer recommendations for prevention and mitigation. We can develop a program with tools and training so school staff can conduct periodic risk assessments and address deficiencies using a corrective action process.
Preparedness is the organization and training of people, provision of facilities and equipment, and the development of policies and procedures to respond to potential emergencies. The response phase of emergency management includes protective actions to safeguard people and actions to stabilize the incident. Recovery includes a capability to counsel students and faculty, strategies and plans to sustain a learning environment using alternate facilities, and ensuring the availability of vital records and technologies while buildings, systems, and equipment are repaired.
Preparedness, LLC participates in the development of national standards and can use these standards as criteria to evaluate the policies, procedures, organization, and implementation of your emergency management program. We can provide recommendations to help you determine what needs to be done to further develop and strengthen your program.
Public emergency services including law enforcement, fire, emergency medical, and public health officials must be involved in the development of school emergency management programs. We actively engage them in the planning process and involve them in training, drills, and exercises.
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| School District Emergency Planning: Multiple levels of organizations, plans and procedures are needed. |
A crisis management team should be organized and plans should be established for the superintendent and district level staff to manage the strategic issues related to an incident. Crisis communications is a critical element in the district level plan.
Preparedness, LLC can organize and develop a district-level crisis management team, incorporate a concept of operations for the team, and define the roles and responsibilities for the superintendent’s staff. We can organize school-based emergency response teams and write emergency procedures for use by the school’s principal, headmaster, or director.
We write procedures for protective actions including evacuation, shelter-in-place, and lockdown as well as student-family reunification. In addition, we write threat or hazard-specific procedures for medical emergencies, fire, explosion, gas leak, hazardous material spill, missing person/abduction, protests/disturbances, suicide, bomb threats, suspicious package, terrorism, severe weather, transportation accident, act of violence and hostage taking.
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Preparedness, LLC's Emergency Response Aides: Emergency procedures, NIMS/ICS assignments by title, and reference information compiled into an easy to use flipbook. |
Our plan documentation includes use of “emergency response aides” that are designed to enable a principal—acting as the school’s “incident commander”—to quickly determine what actions should be taken. Concepts of the Incident Command System, which is required for all public entities, are integrated into the emergency response aides. We also write emergency procedures and produce aides for teachers to use in the classroom. We can provide all documentation in electronic format for intranet publishing, and we work with high quality commercial printers to produce custom products.
Emergency response teams, policies, and procedures are only as good as the ability of personnel to respond effectively when confronted with an emergency. We conduct training to familiarize team members with the defined concept of operations, roles and responsibilities, and emergency procedures.
We design, conduct, and evaluate evacuation, shelter-in-place, and lockdown drills to train school principals, faculty, and students so they know what to do when there is an emergency. We design, facilitate, and evaluate tabletop, functional, and full-scale exercises in conjunction with partner agencies such as police and fire departments. Exercises familiarize staff with plans, challenge them to analyze a developing situation, and guide them through the development and implementation of an incident action plan.
Download our emergency management services for schools brochure.