Chapter 1
Is Your School Really Ready for Any Crisis?
Colleges and universities are responsible not only for the education but also for the safety and welfare of their students. That responsibility includes keeping them free from physical and psychological harm from the moment they enter the campus. In recent years, it has become distressingly apparent that these institutions are not well prepared for this challenge. While most institutions across the United States have an emergency management plan, many of these plans are not comprehensive and do not meet federal guidelines.
Ask any president, provost, or director of emergency operations at most colleges and universities across the country and they will tell you that they have an emergency management plan in place. But was the plan written in consultation with the local Office of Emergency Management (OEM), fire and police departments? Are the plans practiced? Most frequently, the only safety training that college/university faculty, staff, and students participate in is fire drills. However, even when fire alarms sound, oftentimes those on campus continue to teach, study, and ignore the sounding alarm. Is this because they perhaps have been involved in what they perceive to be more than their share of false alarms or practice drills? It will be unfortunate for those too busy to drill when a real fire strikes and they will not have evacuated.
Depending on your location, your campus may be affected by natural events, such as earthquakes, fires, and floods. Health hazards such as meningitis, West Nile fever, SARS, a pandemic flu, and other emerging diseases pose a threat for campuses. If your college is located near a nuclear power plant, you must have a plan in place for evacuation and lock-down in the event of a radiation or chemical leak as you would not want to evacuate and send students outside into an approaching poisonous air mass. Colleges near transportation routes such as highways and railways must be prepared in the event of a chemical spill from a transportation vehicle or roadway obstruction due to accidents or derailments. Plans must be in place for a massive food poisoning, water or air supply contamination, student disturbances such as weapons, hostage, and kidnapping incidents on campus. And unfortunately, schools must be prepared for terrorist activities that may affect the school and its surrounding community.
Colleges and universities are responsible not only for the education but also for the safety and welfare of their students. That responsibility includes ensuring that they are free from physical and psychological harm from the moment they enter the campus. In recent years, it has become distressingly apparent that schools are not well prepared for this challenge. Colleges and universities have been the targets of violence, crises, and disasters, many for which had the schools been better prepared the outcomes could have been more favorable. Just during the writing of this book, campuses have fallen victim to deadly shootings, fires, power outages, tornadoes, and floods to name a few such occurrences.
The Government Accountability Office (Ashby, 2007) report states that most colleges and universities have a plan but their plans do not meet federal guidelines. I have seen campus websites state that you should use common sense in an emergency. But unfortunately, unless you have been a recipient of disaster training, it is quite probable that you will not be capable of making competent decisions when involved in an event that evokes high levels of stress. Good decision making comes from people who have been trained in best practices. University teacher preparatory programs, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, focus on teaching methods. They do not address the emergency responsiveness of faculty, but as Pfefferbaum states:
Over time, expectations for teachers have broadened beyond instruction in academic skills and knowledge to include health and social and emotional growth of students. Unfortunately, few studies address teachers’ reactions, perceptions of need, and understanding of issues following large-scale community trauma and how these may influence their ability to meet the needs of their students.
Pfefferbaum (2004, p. 251)
College and university officials have no idea what crisis or disaster will strike next or where. The only thing that they can be certain of is that something will occur and that the community will expect the campus to react swiftly and expertly. Just because your campus has a plan on the books and a crisis team in place does not mean that your campus will be prepared when something unexpected happens in a classroom, not unless each and every faculty member and administrator feels comfortable and confident that they know their role, will your college truly be prepared.
While emergency alert text/phone systems have their value, they should not be relied upon as the sole method for keeping your campus safe. When a shooter opens fire on a classroom full of unarmed, innocent students, the survival of those involved depends on swift and immediate actions of those in the immediate vicinity, and that may be a teacher, an administrator, or another student, and not the Public Safety Officer or a member of the crisis team. There certainly will not be time to look for advice from the text alert system. Without training, the actions will be reactionary, not necessarily best practices unless training has taken place. Most college shooters have a long history of depression. Colleges and universities need to look at developing preventive measures and protocols for identifying and then referring persons of concern, in addition to any emergency planning for a campus. The protocols need to be very specific, describing very clear responsibilities for all faculty and staff. The responsibilities must be clearly understood with prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery strategies. Training and preparation prior to an event will clarify for faculty and staff what the expectations are for their emergency response role.
Institutional communities need to develop and practice all-hazard plans so that they can respond and handle whatever crisis may develop at the campus. When these events take place during the school day, action must be taken to stop the incident from progressing or at least taken at a high level of responsiveness, to keep students out of harm’s way. A key finding in the study coauthored by the United States Secret Service and the United States Department of Education (Fein, Vossekuil, Pollack, Borum, Modzeleski, & Reddy, 2002), “Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates”, is that most incidents that occurred at schools were interceded by a school official who was on the scene prior to the arrival of law enforcement.
So, which school personnel feel that they are prepared for an emergency? The results of Megumi Kano’s research of school officials in Los Angeles County found that the respondents’ preparedness perceptions of their school’s current preparedness levels were high when the respondents participated in general and event-specific training activities. Survey participants reported higher levels of perceived preparedness if they had a personal copy of the school emergency plan, if their school conducted various kinds of drills, if their school owned a wide variety of emergency equipment and supplies, if that equipment and the supplies had been inspected during the prior school year, and if their school cooperated with the numerous local agencies and groups on emergency preparedness issues (Kano, Ramirez, Ybarra, Frias, & Bourque, 2007).
The results of a study that this author conducted at a university corresponded with the results of Kano’s in that the respondents who felt most confident in their schools emergency responsiveness had participated in training drills and had a personal copy of their school’s emergency plan. On the surface, it appeared that 56% of the faculty and staff surveyed felt that the school was prepared for any emergency; however, further questioning revealed that only 44% knew where to find the emergency call box closest to their office or classroom, more than 50% did not have a copy of the pocket emergency plan prepared by the campus security team. Only 56% of the respondents felt it was their responsibility to report persons of concern on campus; and 75% of the adjuncts, 58% of the administrative staff, and 73% of the nonadministrative staff indicated that they did not know how to report a person of concern. The final survey question asked whether the respondent was clear about his or her emergency response role. Seventy-four percent indicated that they were not clear on what was expected of them during an emergency. If almost three-fourths of your faculty and staff are not sure of what is expected of them during a high-stress event, they are putting your school, themselves, and your students at a level of high risk and your school is not prepared for an emergency event.
This resource book will provide the reader with recommendations from the how-to guide Building a Disaster-Resistant University (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2003) and the Action Guide for Emergency Management at Institutions of Higher Education (Department of Education [DOE], 2009) for emergency preparedness for colleges and universities, as well as contributed exercise scenarios and best practices from college and university emergency managers from across the United States. While most colleges and universities have an emergency preparedness plan on the books, there are many that do not have the resources to develop exercise scenarios. Submissions to this resource book were made with the intent to assist colleges and universities in the development of their emergency preparedness teams. The expectation is that college administrators, faculty, and staff are not only responsible to educate but to also prepare for, react to, and recover from events that could compromise the safety of any person in a classroom, residence hall, office, or any other campus facility, as well as for any event that could jeopardize the continuation of the use of any campus facility.
References
Ashby, C. M. (2007). Emergency management: Most school districts have developed emergency management plans, but would benefit from additional guidance. Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office Emergency.
Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2003). Building a disaster-resistant university. Retrieved from http://www.fema.gov/institution/dru.shtm
Fein, R. A., Vossekuil, B., Pollack, W. S., Borum, R., Modzeleski, W., & Reddy, M. (2002). Threat assessment in schools: A guide to managing threatening situations and to creating safe school climates. Washington, DC: United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education.
Kano, M., Ramirez, M., Ybarra, W. J., Frias, G., & Bourque, L. B. (2007). Are schools prepared for emergencies? A baseline assessment of emergency preparedness at school sites in three Los Angeles county school districts. Education and Urban Society, 39, 399.
Pfefferbaum, R. (2004). Teachers in the aftermath of terrorism: A case study of one New York City School. Community Health, 27, 250–259.
U.S. Department of Education. (2009). Action guide for emergency management at institutions of higher education. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/emergencyplan/remsactionguide.pdf