Natural disasters, disease outbreaks, fires, and violence at schools can happen at any time. Is your school prepared to deal with these situations with a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan?
An emergency preparedness plan ensures the safety of staff, students and school visitors in the event of an emergency.
Studies suggest previous emergency experience increases preparedness, making it essential that schools ensure their plans are feasible and up to date, in addition to having the resources needed to address emergencies. In 2018, Reuters reported that many public schools in the US are not equipped for disasters. Quoting a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), they found that less than two-thirds of school districts have plans in place to handle an influenza pandemic or another type of infectious disease outbreak.
Additionally, Dr. Laura Faherty, a researcher at the RAND Corporation in Boston and a pediatrics professor at Boston University School of Medicine told Reuters: “The response to an acute emergency that happens on a single day is very different from the ongoing response to an infectious disease like influenza that may affect a school district over many weeks to months.”
CDC researchers also found that when compared with larger districts, smaller and mostly rural districts were also less likely to fund emergency preparedness training for school faculty and staff or students’ families.
The authors noted that limitations of the study included that they relied on school district officials to accurately report on their emergency preparedness policies and practices, while it also didn’t examine whether schools complied with any required disaster planning efforts.
Dr. David Schonfeld, Director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement and professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said that schools may simply state that “students will be provided counseling by school mental health staff” but are not, in fact, prepared to meet that need.
“It is therefore quite noteworthy that more than one out of five school districts don’t even reach this bar,” he told Reuters.
Many states have enacted new requirements for school districts to draft and enact emergency preparedness plans. Michigan now has in place new rules (which became effective Jan. 1, 2020) requiring school officials to develop an emergency operations plan for each building operated by the district. Such plans must include public input and must be approved by a majority of school district board members. Illinois has had its own set of stringent emergency planning requirements on the books since 2005.
To help schools with their emergency preparedness planning, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has produced an online comprehensive toolkit to assist schools with their plans. Click here to access the FEMA Multi-hazard Emergency Planning toolkit.