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 Day 1
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Day 1: Preparing for a Crisis  

Click on the icons to the right to hear Alan Steinberg speak about the steps that schools and communities can take to help prepare for a crisis*. Click here to read his comments. Click here to view the chart that he mentions.

Note: You will need to hit your backspace key after listening to each audio clip to return to this event.



Alan Steinberg, Ph.D., associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress

Not long ago, Richmond, Virginia was viewed as the homicide capital of the country. Shootings took place so regularly that children and adolescents began to see them as a natural way to resolve conflict. Then, in 1995, four students walked home from school one day and got caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between rival gangs. All were seriously injured. That shooting galvanized the community.

Floyd A.Wiggins Jr., the chief of the Department of Safety and Security for Richmond Public Schools, took on the task of creating a citywide school safety plan. One critical piece of that plan was to develop a strategy to respond to crises.

Wiggins assembled a team of nearly 80 people, including representatives from the police and fire department, city council, local university, religious organizations, housing department, parks and recreation, architectural firms, and others. In building the team, Wiggins essentially invited anyone whose work touched on the lives of students.

Team members researched other crisis response plans around the country to learn what worked well. Many school systems had plans that Richmond could use as a basis for its own. Members researched studies to find empirical data on the best practices in crisis response. Wiggins gave the team four months to develop a plan. Each member had specific tasks and deadlines for completing them.



 The team worked closely with police, fire and rescue officials to make sure that their plan meshed with the emergency responders' Incident Command System, the standard protocol used by police, fire and emergency medical technicians in responding to a crisis. The process resulted in a plan that was embraced by the community. About 80% of the plan's many goals have been implemented, Wiggins estimates.  
To keep people on track, Wiggins sends out a quarterly newsletter to school crisis teams. The newsletter provides updates on school safety, reports the latest research on crisis response, and reminds school crisis teams to hold regular meetings. Team members are assigned tasks and given due dates to complete them by.

Adapting a Crisis Plan to the Needs of a School

Many schools already have crisis plans in place. But the plans might sit on the shelf with no one knowing about them, or they might not address the broad range of crises that occur. Further, they may be out of date, for example failing to plan for the possibility of a terrorist attack, such as the events of September 11.

Shortly after Alice Spence, head counselor at Rosemont Middle School in Norfolk, Virginia, began her job, she learned something surprising about the members of her school's crisis response team: Many did not know that they were on the team.

Spence's job duties at the middle school included updating the school's crisis response plan each year. One of her first tasks was to talk to the crisis team members.

"I wanted to make sure that they knew that they were on the team and what expertise we expected from them," Spence says. "Some of them said that they were glad I came to them, because no one had ever told them about their responsibilities before."
Spence also noticed some glaring absences from the team, including the school's security officer, psychologist, social worker, and nurse.  All of those staff members had key roles to play if a crisis erupted, and Spence added them to the team. Spence thought about other needs that might arise during a crisis, such as having someone who could perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation or restrain an out-of-control student. Spence learned that some of the physical education teachers had this expertise. They became part of the team as well.

At the beginning of each school year, Spence convenes the crisis team to review each person's responsibilities and ask for any changes that should be made to the plan. Each member is assigned specific tasks. The assistant principal might be in charge of making sure that all the school doors are locked or calling in community resources, such as pre-screened crisis counselors. A guidance counselor might be responsible for activating a phone tree to notify parents of a crisis event at school.

"During a crisis, things happen so fast," Spence says. "If you know beforehand what you are supposed to do and where you should go, then you don't have to worry about it."

 Practicing Crisis Response Plans

At Washington Irving Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, school psychologist Paula DeForest is part of a crisis team that had a comprehensive district-level plan in place. But the thick blueprint was too unwieldy to use during the chaos of an actual crisis.

"The plan was in a four-inch binder. Are you going to grab that when you're running out the door?" DeForest says. "We needed something that was really procedural."

The team went through the plan, culling it to its most essential elements. The first few pages list the members of the crisis team, their contact information, and their responsibilities. Most experts recommend that each task be assigned to a primary person, with one or two back-up people in case the first one is not available. Also, it is critical to update phone numbers to make sure that they are current.

The Washington Irving crisis team includes police officers and head school bus drivers as well as school personnel. That outside perspective is critical in planning for a crisis, DeForest says. For example, the head school bus driver helped point out that an aerial photo of the school could be used to plan alternate evacuations for students and school staff.

Like many schools, Washington Irving has a crisis bag that a team member can grab on the way out when a school is being evacuated. The bag includes updated student rosters, contact numbers for parents, blueprints of the school, a bus schedule, the crisis plan, and other critical information. Several of these bags are located around the school, with someone designated to take each one out of the school. That way, team members know that they will have access to at least one bag with the critical information and tools that they need in a crisis.

To practice its readiness for different types of crises, the team practiced drills with faculty and students and tabletop exercises of different crisis scenarios. These are exercises in which team members are given a crisis scenario and then decide how they would respond.
In a scenario where students needed to get off school grounds quickly, team members proposed sending them to the neighboring elementary school to be picked up by their buses. The head bus driver pointed out that the elementary school parking lot was too small for the number of buses needed.
"We never would have known that if the lead bus driver hadn't been there," DeForest says.

Many of those exercises came from the Fairfax County Police Department, which lent its expertise on crisis situations. Examples of crises included everything from a fire to an estranged husband coming into a school with a gun to pick up his children.

"The table-top exercises really get you thinking about things that hadn't occurred to you before," DeForest says. "Like, if there is a fire, do we have a safe room where we can take students who aren't mobile? How do we alert the fire department about where they are?"

These school systems in Virginia illustrate the importance of developing, adapting, and practicing a school crisis response plan. Before developing their own plans, school systems researched studies to find empirical data on the best practices in crisis response and obtained copies of other school crisis response plans. Each school brought key faculty and administration members to the crisis response team. Schools also developed good working relationships with the community agencies they would depend on in the event of a crisis. By rehearsing examples of potential crises in advance, school crisis teams honed their abilities to respond to a real crisis.  


Activity and Discussion
Please review the Day 1 Activity and then think about the following questions:
 
As a middle school coordinator, what has been your role in creating or refining your school's crisis response plan?

How has the school responded to crises in the past? What are the biggest lessons learned that can help in planning for responding to a crisis in the future?

During a practice session, crisis team members at Thoreau Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia realized that if there was a lockdown, they had no way to communicate with the teachers in the classrooms other than the public address system. There were no telephones or radios in classrooms. What are some other ways of communicating with teachers in that situation?


* U.S. Department of Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program; The Harvard School of Public Health; Education Development Center, Inc., and Prevention Institute (April 23, 2002). The Three R's for Dealing with Trauma in Schools (satellite broadcast). Retrieved August , 2002, from www.walcoff.com/prevention/. (Copyright 2002: U.S. Department of Education and Harvard School of Public Health, Division of Public Health Practice.)


This completes today's work.

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