 Today, on Around the Table at Emmitsburg, we're going to be meeting with a group of folks who are here for the multi-hazards planning course for schools. They're at EMI this week, and we're pleased to have them here. In recent years, we have found that schools are also vulnerable to a variety of hazards. Student violence certainly comes to mind, but there are other hazards as well. And this week, the folks are working on anticipating a variety of hazards and planning for them. Joining us is Alfred Roberts, who is an executive director with the Dallas Public Schools in Dallas, Texas. He is specifically responsible for crisis abuse and injury prevention. Alfred, welcome. Thank you. Glad to have you here today. Also joining us is Linda Mason, who is the director of education and training for the Arizona Division of Emergency Management in Phoenix, Arizona. Linda, we're glad you're here today. Thank you. Thank you. Leroy F. Cross Jr. is also joining us. He is the commander for special operations at the Thornton Police Department in Thornton, Colorado. Leroy, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Glad you could be here. And Melanie Grandfrost is here, it's Melanie Grandfrost, excuse me, from the Shoreline Fire Department in Shoreline, Washington. Not too far from Seattle. That's right. Glad you could be here. And certainly last but not least, we even have a high school principal joining us today. Mike Narcowicz is the principal at the Bandon High School in Bandon, Oregon. Mike, we're glad you're here today. Thank you. Okay. Now, you've been working on school hazards all week. And I think one of the things I'd like to start out with here is, what kind of hazards do schools need to worry about? I mean, we talk about all kinds of things in the community, but what do schools end up with? Melanie? I would say, if you can think of it, it could happen in a school. The range runs from chemical spills to natural disasters that we're all familiar with, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions in our area even, to sniper fire from outside. We've had bank robberies that leaked over into the neighborhood that were a threat. Two things such as a tragedy happening to a family within a school that may have a lot of different facets. So as I say, if it happens in life, it could happen in a public school. These hazards are going to impact the school. Is that safe to say? Absolutely. That's good. Very well. Mike, it sounds to me like it's probably going to impact the learning process. It affects the learning process, it affects the staff as a whole, and when the staff's affected, most of the kids will be affected, and the principal has to be aware that all things can happen and prepare for that. Variety of hazards? Alfred, I'm sure you've had a variety of incidents in your district. Certainly. And I think the key to it is having a crisis team that's well trained and going through simulated exercises so that when the real thing comes, they prepare to deal with it in the best way possible. Leroy, from a law enforcement point of view, a lot of the things that Melanie mentioned, you're probably going to get to participate in, aren't you? Correct. It directly affects us, emergency responders, whether it's the place for fire or a combination of both. And it's critical that prior to those things occurring, that we have a good partnership and good understanding with the school systems and the local government to be able to effectively resolve whatever problem we're faced with. So we need to start early, we need a good team. Linda, I think the planning process is critical here, isn't it? It's very, very critical, and I'm really pleased to say that many of the states have been very aggressive in working with the schools and making sure that programs are available to bring them into the loop to allow them an opportunity to work with the first responder agencies in their area, because in many situations the schools are the hubs of our communities, and the more that we can prepare and work together and coordinate as a community, the better prepared we are going to be to handle an event or a situation when it arises. So it sounds like we need to start early on this planning process, but we have this potpourri of hazards, both external and internal. And I kind of like to talk about that for a few minutes. Mike, in your community, what are some of the hazards that you have to look at external to the school, some of the things that you might run into? One of the main things, being from the south coast of Oregon, would be weather, whether it be high winds, high rain, floods, two main bridges coming into town, one of the drawbridge, the drawbridge is stuck, that could be a hazard, so you never know. Being rural, having facilities, it takes an hour for someone to get there. If we need six hours for a bomb squad, say our police department, I think has seven officers, so if we need more police, it's 20, 30 minutes away. So those are the outside forces that we're planning for an emergency that we need to be aware of. Alfred and Dallas, what are some of the hazards that you've seen specifically from the outside that might have an impact on one of your schools? Well, certain things, such as chemical spills, we have an airport that's located right near a school, so the potential for some kind of accident is likely there. Other than that, some of the things that have been mentioned previously, violence in the neighborhoods, spilling over into the school, we do have situations where flooding occurs, so that could be a problem. Then we're in Tarnata, LA, so we are very vulnerable in terms of weather related to that kind of incident. Now, one of the other things that Melanie brought up, and I thought was interesting, is that there can also be things that happen in the school, and it's not just the violence kinds of things, there's some other things that could happen as well. What are some of those? Well, we've recently had a propane leak in our chemistry lab that affected the south wing of the school, and people started getting nauseated and everything, and we have to prepare for that, which we're going to do in case of a propane leak. We've had bomb threats, or A-bomb threats, and that affected everything. It's in the kids' home, the rats of violence, kids having a hit list, and that kind of thing. It affects not only the learning process, but the whole process of the school. What's happening in the school? Melanie? Well, we had an incident where a man who had killed four people in the previous two hours to the final incident killed four people and then holed himself up in a house near two elementary schools. It required a lockdown for seven hours of those two schools without very much information as to what was going on. That's probably our most recent, and it actually touched off our involvement, our multi-agency involvement, because at that particular event, some of us did not know each other. The police chief did not know the school superintendent, and we realized that that was a bad situation, and we're working to remedy it. So we learned from a very serious crisis that we need that multi-agency approach. What do you contribute to that? Well, some of the information that we teach in the multi-hazard program for schools is that to do not only an external vulnerability analysis, but an assessment within your school buildings as well. And that is where you identify areas that the school may be vulnerable to these events, such as chemistry labs, such as what you mentioned, and things of that nature. Look at other things as far as school structures located and what might be involved in causing damage, not only to the school property, but the participants in that building, such as when damage comes into the area as well. So it's not only what's in the community, but it's what's in the school system as well, and identifying those vulnerabilities early on is a way that you can mitigate against loss of life or damage. It's interesting that it sounds as though we're saying that whatever is in the community is also reflected into the schools, and vice versa. Absolutely. It really doesn't make sense not to have the schools in the emergency planning process, because that's one of the vulnerable hazards. Absolutely. Well, in our community, we are the evacuation point. If anything happens in the city, they come to the schools, and we have to deal with it. We have tsunami warnings, which are tidal waves. We've never had one, but we can go through the drills and proceed as an earthquake through California. I want to come up off of that, Mike. Let's go to some specific hazards here. What do you do for a tsunami? Go to high ground. That's a good idea. In our case, since we are the center of the evacuation point for our city, there are a lot of low-lying areas in our city with a lot of front, for example. They're supposed to evacuate. They have a siren that goes off and head to the nearest evacuation point. We have evacuation maps laid out that are handed out. Most of the people in the city are aware of one thing. We are a tourist town, and we have to identify our police officers. We have to realize that a lot of people don't even know what a tsunami is. That information, getting that out. The students take it pretty seriously at the same time. They know that a tsunami is not a real threat to them at this point. Your school would be a place where people would come if there were a warning. Exactly. It would be one of the gathering places. Exactly. We have high schools, middle schools, and grade schools. It's about a 10-acre campus and a pretty close proximity. We use the gyms and the canvatures as shelter for people who would have a tsunami. In the process of working this out, you've obviously worked with folks to designate your buildings. Correct. This is where anybody else can jump in as well. What are we going to do with the students while this is going on? In our case, since that is the evacuation point, they will remain at the school. We may not be in session having lessons going on at the time, but they will remain on the school grounds as instructed. They would stay there. They're sheltered. We can go from there. Alfred, I want to come to you. Tornadoes. They're usually pretty quick. We may not get a lot of warning. So what do we specifically need to look at doing? What are the actions that folks need to consider if they're in that hazard area? Well, fortunately, we've not had one to hit our school district, but the planning is extremely important. For example, our central control security office functions as the alert position or station. And the principals have weather radios as well as other supervisors. And so hopefully they will have those radios on so that they can hear the signals. And then, of course, they watch the weather channels as well as they're plugged into some of the email situations at Give Alerts. So the key is the warning system. And once the warning is given, well, if it's a tornado watch, then persons know it's a possibility that it might hit that way. And if it's a tornado warning, then one knows to go ahead and perhaps go into shelter. Our schools had a weather drill, all 218 of them approximately a month ago. They had to go through the procedure. And one of the critical things is finding the safe areas within a building. Some of our buildings are aesthetically pleasing but are very unsafe. So the schools, the crisis teams identify what areas to assemble the kids. And in high school, it's a little more difficult because you don't put them into the kneeling position unless the actual emergency is there. But the key is having the safe areas and knowing what to do in case the tornadoes hit it your way. How do we define a safe area for a high wind event like this? What do we need to look at? Well, you try to look at your inner walls, your load bearing walls, I'm told. You try to stay away from the open areas such as gyms and cafeterias, auditoriums because they're probably going to collapse under the strength of the wind. We do use our maintenance department, structural engineers, we even use the National Weather Service as well as emergency preparedness officers to help us locate those safe areas because we want to be prepared to save every life that we can in case we have an emergency. At good point, outside resources to help us identify where the safe areas are. Sounds like a good idea? Absolutely. Linda, does that fit in with planning because you've been talking about partnerships. That sounds like a possibility. And the partnerships from the state perspective is that we work with the local units of government at the county level, at the city level. In the state of Arizona, schools are considered a jurisdiction as well. And so we're heavily involved in acting as a liaison between many of these agencies. And especially in the school program that we're teaching the multi-hazard program for schools in the state of Arizona, we bring a multitude of agencies into the classroom and integrate that classroom so that we start out by encouraging them to work together in the classroom. And once they leave that classroom, they go back to their local facilities and continue that work through the planning process and address areas that they may not have thought of addressing before. If I might add something about, you might wonder, well what is the connection, the fire department and the school? And it has so many facets and we've found that it's absolutely natural. We're in there doing inspections, fire inspections. So we're walking the building with the leaders of the school, looking at the building and talking about that thing, that part of their safety. And then we do mentoring. We have firefighters in the schools doing mentoring. We have fire and life safety programs throughout the curriculum. And we're just, it's sort of a natural part of the community. We're nearby, kids come to us, we go to them. And so they tend to rely on us and when they find out that we're willing to do more, that emergency preparedness is part of it, they're surprised and quite relieved. And to piggyback on what Melanie is saying, I mean, many of them have a vested interest. They have children in those schools or they have spouses teaching in those schools. So it brings it home. It makes it personal. And that's important. Leroy, from a police perspective, I imagine you've also got connections other than emergency connections with the schools. Right. In our particular city, we have school resource officers and those are uniformed officers that are assigned to a given school. And their primary focus is not making arrests or not what we initially term as basic law enforcement. But they're there to partner with the educators there to inform the kids and the staff what policing is all about, why we do what we do. And a follow-on job that those officers have is enforcement. So that's secondary. And while they're in the schools, they do things like threat assessments. You know, if we have a critical incident occurs, whether it's a severe storm like in the Denver area, we can have blizzards in the winter. What are some things that they can offer to the schools, evacuation points for the kids? If we have a immediate need to deploy more police officers because we may have, excuse me, an active shooter in the schools, we're able to get with that school resource officer who is connected with the schools to give us an idea of how to rapidly respond, how can we stop the problem from getting worse. So the police in this regard are critical stakeholders along with fire school folks and other person in the government. Go ahead. Our SRO officer, this is the second year that he's been in the school. A lot of us community and public relations, the police chief and our SRO officer have a weight lifting program in the morning before school and a lot of troubled kids will turn into education kids, go to those weight lifting and it's given a new perspective for the kids, for the police officers. Our SRO officer, we also use him on field trips as a supervisor. He's dressed in shorts and we took him on a senior trip to Calton and went down San Francisco. And the relationship that the kids see with the police officer is totally different than a uniformed officer. And I think it's been a huge benefit for our community as well as the school. It sounds like a lot of connections going on here. I might add to that that we have seen it that not only the faculty but the students begin to look at the police officer as a friend. And a lot of times the only time the police officer comes in contact with folks is usually during a critical incident. That's not a happy time. So kids come away saying, hey, these people are just like everyone else, they're friendly. When we have an incident, whether it's a suicide that maybe affects a member of the school system, police officers there and they're not there just as that. There's that cop there. There is a friend, someone that can help them and they feel much better. If the disaster is larger again, the officer is there as a resource. When other officers bring in, people are viewing those police officers as helpers that want to help solve their problems as opposed to the old adage, cops here must be a problem. Right. And our R-S-R officer also started an Explorer post on our campus where we have about ten students involved. And it's been a great program. The seniors graduate and certain students move up and it gives the students a buy-in to the safety of their school and what's going on in their school. And it's an excellent program. Mike, that's an interesting point. Do students have to buy-in to safety? Oh, absolutely. Go ahead. In fact, one of our directives has been to try to get things into the curriculum. This isn't something we don't ask students to follow the teacher on a fire drill. We want to teach them that if they were alone in that room, that they would know to look for their exit and go out. And so we're trying to put life safety lessons into the curriculum and make students aware throughout that this is something used throughout life. And also buy-in, even on things like the lockdown drills or the preparedness, we have students that are learning CERT, community emergency response teams, and learning first aid and CPR, bringing them into the process. So it's life skills. Absolutely. One thing that I've noticed is the seriousness of the students with the high media profile of the school students. When we do our evacuation drills or our fire drills or our lockdown drills, you don't see the commotion or the screwing around that we used to in the past. The kids know that we're doing this for their safety. And the student buy-in area, I'm not going to word that it continues that. But I think by educating the kids and letting them have a say, and we're a smaller school and we have more control at the same time that the students know the threat of violence or an evacuation procedure that we're serious when I'm messing around. Alfred, are you seeing something similar to that in the larger schools? Yes. And I think this course is very important because I've been in education over 30 years and in none of my courses at the undergraduate or graduate level have I had a class in how to deal with emergencies and the basic elements that we've gotten in the course. I think the course is critically important and should be part of the curriculum. And I need to put in a point that our schools are the safest places, even though our communities, if you will look at the statistics, many of our kids come from very violent situations, but our schools are very safe. So in terms of that, there's another important aspect. The curriculum must teach them critical skills of decision making, anger management, trust. And then the adults in a situation also must value the kids because in some situations some of the youngsters are not valued and that's why they may act out in the way that they do. So in terms of the violence that's created within the schools, we have a tremendous responsibility to try to look for signals that may tell us that violence may occur. So in the larger situations, the students are critically important because they will assume a sense of responsibility and when there is danger in many instances, will report that danger. Often it's done through an anonymous type of hotline situation. But they have an outlet where they can't. Right, they do have an outlet. I was just going to say that you can only prepare for a natural disaster, but in cases where the SROs are working in the firefighters, you can prevent some of the violence that we're talking about. It's good for people to know that we are working at that level as well, not just responding. It sounds like mitigation is an important part of that. Yes, very much. We've seen that in our setting where students have enough rapport with the students and that the students can either approach an administrator or a school secretary, whoever they need to, as an outlet, hey, I heard such and such. And we take all threats, everything's here. There's an investigation that goes on either by the vice-principal or myself or whoever the school counselor gets involved. It's a great process to eliminate, you know, instead of keeping a bottle up inside, it's not a, you know, we try to eliminate the, I'm not going to rat on my friends type of thing. And we've seen that in our setting where it's been a very positive benefit for our staff and students and our community. Have you seen that in some of your schools? Well, I teach the school systems, you know, the course and things like that. But as far as getting into discussions with the schools that I've been involved with, I totally support and have heard support for the comments. You know, it sounds like the school resource officer is also an important part is another connection for the students. And I think that's what I'm hearing you saying. We need to make sure the students are connected with somebody if there's a problem. Is that a safe way of saying that? Most definitely. They're connected. Matter of fact, we have seen that on days where the school resource officer may not be in his or her school because of some outside training, the kids talk about that. Hey, where's the school resource officer? You know, whether that's just want to chitchat or they have a problem at home that they can't deal with. They have valued being able to go to the school resource officer to unburden them. And very eloquently, the school resource officers either get them into some other network to help them overcome their problem, whatever. They don't feel like they're ratted out. If there's a problem in the school, an allegation of a weapon being in the school, these people come forth and they seek out the school resource officer. Where in the past, they may not have done that, and they didn't do that. And that helps. They're getting actively involved in keeping their school safe. So they're key to this whole planning process. Well, I want to actually now move into the planning process. And Linda, you had mentioned that early on we need to do a risk assessment. Yes. Internal and external. So where do we go after we've identified the risks? What's our next step? Okay, then you need to work with maybe the architect of the school to identify areas. The engineers located in their community to review maybe building codes, things of that nature. We have a lot of older schools still in the United States, and we have a lot of ultra-modern schools in the United States. And those are issues that, at the local level, working with their emergency management director to help coordinate maybe those assets and the local units of government, they can identify people in their community and within state agencies that can help them address those. Okay, so we need to start identifying safe areas. We need to look at our buildings. We need to get folks involved from the outside. We've identified our safe areas. Now what do we do? We need to evaluate and exercise our plans. I'm reminded of a quote that General Eisenhower said, that plans are nothing, planning is everything and talking about the process. And I think we've all probably been there some time in our career where something has occurred and we've reacted to it and then we go back and say, you know we had plans for these, but we never really exercised those plans. So a key ingredient is the plans that we have in place, are they effective? And maybe they're effective today, but they may not be effective years from now. And are the right people involved in those plans? Do we have too many people, not enough people? So it's very critical. And the exercise of those plans can take a multitude of stages from around-table discussions such as this to an actual full-blown scenario. And they don't have to happen once a month. They can happen, you know, once a year, once every 18 months, something like that. But that's critical. I want to come back to planning here, to the plans. Who's responsible for developing these? Who do you get involved in the planning process? Well, in our district it starts at the superintendent and the superintendent's a very hands-on type of guy and it's ultimately the school principal's responsibility for the building. At the same time we have a district-wide plan where pretty much the nucleus of the plan, they're all the same. And we just customize it for our building and our staff and how many students we have. And the bus evacuation drills and everything. We try to prepare for everything you can think of. But at the same time, the nucleus of the plan, everything's basically the same. Just altered for different disasters or if you have an intruder or whatever you have, the nucleus. Is that district-wide plan? I think you look at what is it that we're looking at and what we're planning for. And then from that saying, who are those people within the community that are affected by this plan and the problem? And you really need to make sure that key people in those respective disciplines are involved. The fire department, police department, other areas of local government. Key people within the community. And they start formulating and being part of the process of putting the plan together. If we try to put a plan together by ourselves, it may be very effective for us, but not for anyone else. In the years that I've been in law enforcement, I've had many classes I've gone to that were 100% law enforcement. And we dealt with a problem, we looked at from a law enforcement standpoint and never considered, or at least through the class, well, how does it affect other people? The value that I've seen of this class that I'm going through right now is I'm seeing concerns and issues that affect my peers outside of law enforcement that I thought, I never considered that. I need this thing done. I didn't realize they have all these stunning blocks and it makes me look at things a little more broad-based. An example for us that I think is very descriptive was where we had a drill, a mock drill, a bus accident, and fire department responded and the school district responded. We were kind of operating in these separate little pods and then we realized that during the triage process, and we did have injuries and some deaths that were staged, but during the triage process, we were sending one patient, one patient, two patient, three patient, four to the hospital. That's the way we do it. It's very organized and we know just who we sent where. And the school district was saying, I've got parents that need to know who these kids are. And we went, oh, we never do names. We don't do names. And then we realized we have to back up and we've got to start doing names. So we actually designated a position that will stand right next to the triage officer that will begin to try to identify kids. We're using a school counselor. We may even grab a yearbook and try to do that because names is crucial for those school people and it's not something we ever did. Linda? Yes, getting back to the planning process and a natural in the community to assist the schools in writing plans or your local emergency management coordinator or director. That person is already charged with putting together a community emergency plan and should be heavily involved in making sure that contact is made with the schools within the area to access the information in the school's plans so that it complements the community plan just as the local community plan should complement and work with the state plan and the state plan complements and works with the federal emergency management plan. So we're all in this game together and the more that we learn to work together the better off the whole nation is going to be. How often do we have to look at these plans? Oh, frequently. At least annually. If not more often. Well, we review ours annually and before school my staff may go over all procedures and as incidents occur we evaluate what we're doing and is it effective? Do we need this? What do we need to add? Having an SRO officer, having another idea or perspective of what's going on is great because usually more times than not the different perspective will help you reevaluate your plan to make sure that you are working together and that things run smoothly in case of an emergency. And we're all here for the kids' safety we're not involved with who takes credit for what we want to make sure our schools are safe and that if we do have an emergency to let our community know that we're planned well in advance of what we're going to do we have confidence in ourselves to be able to handle any situation that pops up at our school. Alfred, you have a huge school district how do you manage this process with all these schools? I think Linda gave a good overview. We've gotten with the persons from the city and they obviously have linked up with the persons from the state and linked into federal. The district has a plan that's kind of a template for the schools but then each school has to develop its own plan and implement its own plan each school has a crisis team and I think in terms of the planning and implementation that's very critical because on the team we have the support staff represented we obviously have the administration represented we have the nurse, we have the custodian our building engineer we have the community person the community liaison if there's a security person we have that person we have the cafeteria managers so everyone that would be affected in the upper grades we will use students as part of the crisis team as well so each school has a crisis plan and has to test that plan and upgrade it as needed during the school year. I'm glad you brought up testing because we've mentioned drills and exercises but how should we go about that I assume that most of the schools have a monthly drill requirement if nothing else for an evacuation drill but what else should we do about drills and exercises? Make them realistic. Ah, okay, run with it. Okay, first of all I would encourage individuals to refer back to your vulnerability analysis and what you have identified are your risk you're going to prioritize those risks and deal with it and extract part of the plan that might be applicable to that risk and exercise possibly that portion of the plan you don't have to bite off the whole chunk and try and swallow it at once you can take parts of your plan and exercise your plan and set goals for your exercises that are reachable goals and not goals that are going to set people up to fail and those are just some considerations that you need to look at when you're exercising so we're thinking we don't start off with the full blown tornado hit the building we have hundreds of casualties you all come that's probably not a good place to start what kind of exercise are you talking about that basis for your plan and nucleus for most of our evacuation drills everything we do is the same if it's a tornado, a fire, whatever we're doing it's the same and getting that nucleus so it's well versed and everybody knows what's going on is the key to your evacuation plan your safety plan if you don't have that in place and you're in big trouble because you can't predict the weather you can't predict if an intruder and you have to be ready for anything so I think that's a key piece how do you say a norm in your school that oh we're doing evacuation you want everybody to realize the importance of what's going on and that they take it seriously so those actually, those monthly drills can be the basis for a larger exercise program what I would suggest is for instance taking a small chunk would be just the communications portion that's where our school district found they were the weakest they were calling everybody in the district and so they exercised just simply didn't even name the event but there's something that goes on where do you call, who reports to whom and they just exercised that communication portion which is a critical piece obviously schools have hundreds of students and that means hundreds of parents that want to know what's going on absolutely when you involve parents and that's kind of when the hysteria starts that's when you earn your money right then and there it's a key piece we rely on computers but if you have a disaster the power could be out and you need to make sure that you have hard copies of everything you have on the computer and sometimes relax with that because of the modern era and I feel that in an emergency you can't rely on computers so you're going to have to be prepared Leroy you mentioned just the idea of tabletop discussions is that another good place to bring folks together to get our plan out on the table and see what happens with it you bet and one of the perfect times to do that is we may have a situation happen in some place in the United States that doesn't immediately affect us and that may coincide with the weekly or monthly staff meeting and you say you know we don't want to take any extra time let's take a half hour and say we had this incident happen in X city are we prepared today that if this would occur in our city tomorrow would we be able to deal with that and through a discussion like this we can say you know you think I haven't looked at the plan yet and say I think we are or I think we're not and that discussion there will grow it may take 15 minutes or 30 minutes the most and it starts you thinking it starts that process and maybe the next staff meeting you say let's spend the next staff meeting doing an analysis of this particular plans we'll prepare it's kind of an ongoing event and it's critical that if you're going to go into an exercise make sure you have objectives and people know what you're trying to accomplish and then leave them at the end with some level of success because if you always find the negative is which is one of the intent of an exercise so you can work those up but you leave it with 100% negative people will feel we're never going to succeed in these things we're human so we want to feel some successes Mike piece that I like to do is after every drill I have 20 teachers on staff as to personally thank the teachers for going through the time and taking it seriously and once in a while I have a teacher forget the role book or something and don't turn it to big huge things but stress the importance and positive feedback with I think positive feedback to the staff and to the students we always if things go very very well we thank the students in our daily bulletin and let them know that the positive feedback that they were that this is important to us so when we're finishing up we don't just finish the drill or exercise there's actually another step isn't there you don't just walk away from it and reassessing you reassess that was the planning that we had prior to this up to snuff where do we need to tweak it to make it good again that's part of that long term strategic planning we always dust it off and make sure it's timely and relevant if we don't do that as best we try we always seem to miss something and fix it so we have to plan the exercise we ought to pick the pieces that we may be vulnerable to or we're not sure it will work we need to make sure when it's over that we know what worked and what didn't work and we need to make sure people understand that it did have a positive impact because it sounds like part of the positive impact is we found something that wasn't workable we can change it we go back re-evaluate, reassess re-write the plan if necessary retrain the plan and then re-exercise the plan so it's circular ongoing process I think Mike that's an important part what I've been hearing you all say is that even though the plan is a document it's really the process I think that's kind of what you were saying I think the process is where we come together true and build our community connections I want to deal with an issue here that actually formalizes our community connections and a lot of times at incidents and Melanie you brought it up the school district's over here and the fire department's over here and I suspect there's times when the police department's over here and we're not we're not all working together on this so incident command is this something we need to start looking at in a circle incident command gives us a process that we put the key components together to make sure that we resolve our problem you have a ton of people out there and if everyone's doing their own little thing we all have the same objective and the same goal but we're all running in different directions trying to accomplish our objective of working against each other incident command pulls that together under a unified structure assigns various personnel to various responsibility to make it flow and to make it go basically so incident command is critical and everybody who's involved shares a piece of that incident command system it's not it may be a fire and we don't say well that's up to the fire department police we're just going to guard the streets and go home it doesn't work that way and the school obviously has to be involved in this and in the course the multi hazard program for schools course we have an introduction to the incident command system but schools already have a system in place and we have just offered this information to make them aware that the first responder agencies also have a system in place and when we can unify the system so that everyone is reading from the same sheet of music that an event will be maybe handled much more cooperatively if the structure is used Melanie in your instance you mentioned the triage and we're kind of doing separate things incident command sounds like that might help resolve that it would resolve it fully the other thing is that people do what they think is right when for lack of information otherwise and so everyone has good intentions but this kind of formalizes those good intentions with one specific area and also people are overwhelmed by too much to do and that's another beauty of the system is that it gives you a small area you own that and you don't have to worry about being overwhelmed for us it is the way to go and it puts us on the same page as you say we're speaking the same language there's another little area that it helps work on and that is turf you've got school superintendent and a fire chief and a police chief and that's a realistic human thing we're looking at turf and this is a way to put those positions together in a unified command as it's called and to kind of work through some of those jurisdictional problems so we get to bring the decision makers together an incident command to make sure we're making good decisions together doesn't mean anybody's giving up their turf means we're coordinating our turf from the sounds of it doing what they do best and in a large school system it may operate in a different way the principal is in charge of the incident command center and the principal by nature of his responsibilities her responsibilities has to coordinate where the kids are and whether they're safe and whether the media is being taken care of but it's important that the principal be in the command center or have a representative to carry on the communications and a large system the principal would work with his supervisors and may request the activation of the emergency operations center which is a major operation with all of the key people maintenance facilities communications at the central office level so that all those key persons are in touch with the incident so the communications is very important and the principal and I talk with some of the persons from fire and from the police departments there and I'm interested in coming in and taking over the responsibilities of the principal but it's critical that they coordinate with the principal in the operations that are going on Alfred it seems to me although I'd like to think it's obvious that even if there is some sort of critical incident going on to school the school district is still responsible for the children that's correct so we can't leave them out of the loop because they have to fulfill their responsibilities for example what happens to lunch periods the bus schedules all of that still has to go on it has to continue as we as we wrap this up I'm going to throw you a little curveball here go around the table here if you were speaking to other professionals in your arena what would be the one message that you think they absolutely positively have to get from your experiences both in the street and here in the class what's that one message that if you were going to look them in the eye and tell them that you would want your colleagues to hear from you now there's lots of messages but if you had to pick one what would it need to be and Alfred I'm going to start with you we got to start somewhere what's that one message for your colleagues throughout the nation as we are quite aware student achievement has perhaps been the focus principals have extreme accountability in fact I was reading yesterday about the principals in Maryland some of them are being retired involuntarily because the test scores didn't go up or whatever so it seems to be the key focus is student achievement I'm not saying that it should not be but I would say to principals and others that student achievement is critically important but also the other part of a student's life is also important the social development I'll call it a kid needs to know how to get along with other persons needs to know how to protect himself or herself during an emergency and this extends into the homes when the emergencies on the street and the homes I think if they're taught well how to deal with emergencies in school this will carry over to the homes I guess the simple message would be student achievement should not be the only focus because if my kids are not safe and if they're not alive we can't deal with student achievement good point thank you Linda from the emergency management perspective well I definitely have told my colleagues throughout the United States that it is really critical that we look at the schools as another customer and that we not only need to make courses available not just the school course but there's a lot of supporting courses such as emergency planning courses the incident command course other courses that we offer to the local first response agencies and other government officials that are quite applicable for the school systems as well and if we're going to integrate the classroom to include all of these agencies and school systems in the classroom we need to make sure to put our schools on our mailing lists when we announce our courses for those communities that aren't doing it it's critically important in my opinion that the senior executive officers of the agencies the police chiefs the fire chief the school district personnel or school district representative superintendent need to meet at least annually to discuss issues that affect the school and how that contacts and impacts the other agencies police fire and such and how it affects our community they need to meet to know each other face to face to get that particular rapport once that occurs they will send the orders down to the people who do the work and they'll carry the task but if those folks who are the ultimate decision makers don't meet then a lot of work that may be done below may not have the credibility may not get to where it's supposed to go so I think it's vitally important that the ultimate bosses get together every so often we realize they're extremely busy to talk about issues that are affecting the schools and how they affect the community and everything good point Melody I'm sorry I have to echo it we have SWAT teams and high tech communications and high tech firefighting techniques it still comes down to interpersonal relations and unless you are face to face with people that you're going to be in a crisis with and understand each other's language and how to share information you can have all the tools in the world and it won't be successful Mike we started with an educator we're going to end with an educator My number one message would be to not be naive enough to think that it won't happen in your school because it will and it could be sooner or later but always I know it takes a lot of time to go through your emergency plan to educate all your teachers and your staff but it'll be worth it in the end if you can save one life or keep a kid out of harm's way it's worth it and we're all we're all in the test scores we're all in achievement and that's what makes the newspapers but the safety plan is absolutely critical and to communicate with your staff and the fire department, police department and just to make sure that you're prepared when it does happen to you because it will and they're ready to go good points well as we've seen school safety is not simply a matter of the school working it's the community working together and I want to thank all of our participants for being here and thank you for joining us on Around the Table at Emmitsburg