Disaster Management Activities for School Workers

Schools are often ranked as critical facilities when planning for disasters. Education facilities can serve as emergency shelters, and keeping them open in the long-term recovery period following disasters is important for maintaining education standards. School faculty can do a number of things to help maintain safety during a disaster and recover more quickly afterward.

Structural Dangers

• Understanding the pre existing conditions of a school is important to rating how the building will perform in events like earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding or other natural hazards. If the the staff does nott already have this information available, it is worth investigating further, especially in areas of high seismic activity or storm risk. Schools typically have a lot of free-standing elements which can cause harm if blown around by high wind or shaken by earthquakes. Computer labs and libraries are prime examples of this, but you can mitigate the danger simply by tying down computer monitors or bookshelves to studs in the drywall.

Emergency Planning

• During an emergency, the best course of action is one that is well planned and well practiced by school faculty and students. If your school does not already have a well-developed plan, talk to your local emergency management department or county sheriff's office to help develop a plan. Make sure to have emergency supplies like blankets, non-perishable food and water on hand, as well as comfort items like books and toys for younger children. An excellent low-cost way to do this is to take collections of expendable items from the families themselves, which will avoid using the school budget and also ensure that the items are familiar to the people who need them. In addition to sound planning, the whole school should practice all emergency drills on a regular basis to avoid unnecessary confusion during an emergency.

Recovery Process

• School facilities are valuable during the initial response and first week of recovery following disasters, but their real purpose is to educate. Schools should return to their regular functions as soon as possible. If part of the response plan involves using buses to evacuate immediate dangers, the recovery planning should involve how to return them to normal operations. Achieving normal functions can take time, but this is not an excuse to delay education. Classes should resume at least at basic levels as soon as it is feasible and safe. Be prepared to send students to other schools or establish distance-learning programs that parents can run.