In Part 1 of this two-part series, we discussed important questions school safety leaders must ask when assessing their school safety plans. These questions can help schools evaluate the thoroughness of their emergency plans and can be executed as the school starts back up.
Here is a quick summary of those questions. The full article can be read here.
- Do you have an effective process for getting students inside quickly in an emergency?
- e.g. if students are on the playground during inclement weather
- Is your school community prepared if an emergency occurs while students and staff are outside their normal classrooms or workspaces?
- e.g. cafeterias and bathrooms
- Can all your classrooms be quickly and completely secured by all your staff?
- e.g. substitute teachers
Here are two additional questions to help shore up those emergency plans.
1. Do your staff know how to use your school’s emergency tools, supplies, and command language?
There are some items in life that are not often used, but when you need them, you’ll really need them. This is true for emergency tools and supplies that many schools utilize. The problem is that because these tools are not often needed, their proper use, capability, and even location can be forgotten.
Emergency Tools
Many schools use visitor vetting and management programs that front office staff typically operate. What is not always known about these programs is that some of them come with a built-in panic button, providing the ability to surreptitiously alert staff on-site that help is needed. I’ve also seen situations where panic alarms were sent to an unoccupied room, making it so no one received it. Panic buttons are a great tool to have at the front office in the event of an escalating situation. Still, these systems must be identified and tested to ensure the initiator knows where and how to activate them, and the receiver can receive them and respond effectively.
I’ve also noticed that many schools now have lockdown buttons located in the vicinity of the front office. While these buttons are self-evident in how to use them, staff may not always be aware of their full downstream effects once the button is pressed. For example, will the button notify law enforcement? Will it issue a campus-wide alert to your school? Will it lock interior or exterior doors, including the main entry doors if they happen to be unlocked?
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This last question is important because front office staff may be tasked with manually locking the main entry doors in a lockdown. Having the ability to electronically lock the main entry doors is a much safer and more efficient way of accomplishing this task. To make sure your staff have a full understanding of the capabilities of your lockdown button, contact the vendor and your IT personnel, and most importantly, test the button.
Speaking of initiating lockdowns, who at your campus has been trained, empowered, and equipped to call one out? Do you have a single point of failure whereby only the front office can issue a lockdown call, or can all staff do so from their rooms? The latter is a best practice and there are a variety of ways this can happen, along with some considerations.
Some schools’ classroom phones can tap into the other phones or PA system on campus to issue a campus-wide alert. This is commonly activated by entering an emergency code into the phone. This code is often not displayed for public consumption to prevent its misuse, which can cause the code to get lost or forgotten. Trying to memorize and remember a code during high-stress situations or digging through emails to find it is not recommended.
To strike a balance between accessibility and security of these emergency codes, schools should consider placing them on the back of staff badges or the underside of their phone’s receiver. If placed on badges, stickers should be used as pen ink will rub off over time. In addition, if your district has multiple schools and staff that travel between schools frequently (e.g., support staff), one district-wide code should be used to avoid confusion.
Emergency Command Language
Suppose all your staff are empowered and equipped to call out a lockdown and a situation arises where this is necessary. Is your lockdown command language simple and in plain language, or does it require an abstruse code word or lengthy phrase? There was a school shooting in my state in 2021 where both the lockdown language and staff who were trained and empowered to initiate one were important factors.
During the incident, multiple staff saw or heard the shooting and knew a lockdown needed to be called; however, they were not trained nor empowered to call it out from their rooms and attempted to contact the front office. The front office was short-staffed and busy at the time and did not immediately answer when called, resulting in a delay in transmission. Several key staff were out that day and the school’s vice principal was the one who had to call the lockdown. At the time, the school used a lengthy code phrase that the vice principal could not immediately recall, so they used plain language instead.
As plain language wasn’t the normal method, not all staff and students responded and a second lockdown call had to be issued. Lockdown commands should be simple, clear, and easy to articulate. Because stress can negatively impact our brains, reference materials should be posted near areas/tools where lockdowns may be called to help staff remember what to say, and a variety of staff should practice doing so during drills.
Finally, when I speak with classroom teachers during vulnerability assessments about lockdowns, I typically ask them what they would use as a self-defense implement if they needed to defend themselves and their students. Not having a pre-identified and strategically placed self-defense implement that is adequate to do what it needs to do – incapacitate a threat as quickly as possible – increases the vulnerability of the occupants in that room. Staff scrambling to locate an item on the fly can lengthen response times and limit options for effective defensive implements. Baseball bats, golf clubs or other similarly impactful implements are good items to consider.
Emergency Supplies
When a lockdown occurs, movement stops. Accordingly, all classroom spaces should be equipped with emergency kits sufficient to meet the needs of those in the room for the duration of the lockdown. First aid supplies, water, flashlights, batteries, and other items are commonly included in such kits. However, what about other needs that might arise during a lockdown? For example, how does your school address bathroom needs during these situations? People cannot travel down the hall to use the restroom, so schools may want to consider keeping emergency buckets in classrooms. These can be used to tote the classroom’s emergency supplies around and can also double as an impromptu toilet if necessary.
Or, what happens if you have a diabetic student whose blood sugar is low? They won’t be able to go to the nurse’s office, so consider keeping sugary substances (e.g., honey, cake frosting, glucose tabs) on hand as part of the emergency kit.
Other emergency supplies, including eye wash stations, fire extinguishers, AEDs, etc., are rarely used by most staff and their location and availability can be easy to forget. It’s important for staff to have an active awareness of these items even if they don’t normally use them as they might be unexpectedly needed in an emergency. For example, I had a Geology teacher tell me that one of his students got a piece of a rock stuck in their eye but had trouble accessing an eye wash station as they never needed one before.
To increase awareness of where key safety items are amongst staff, schools should memorialize the location of these items on a map and include the maps as part of the classroom emergency supply kits. Schools may also want to consider having a campus safety scavenger hunt, where staff members must find different safety items in and around their rooms (e.g., the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, AED, eye wash station, first aid kit, their defensive implement, etc.) to help keep their availability and location front of mind.
2. Can first responders quickly orient themselves to the layout of your school if they respond during an emergency?
In the event of a large-scale emergency, first responders from near and far will descend on your school – many of whom will not know the layout of your campus. Because seconds count in an emergency, you will want to make sure first responders can become quickly oriented to your campus so they can respond to areas of need swiftly and effectively. This can be achieved using thoughtful wayfinding. Not only will wayfinding assist responders with getting their bearings, but it will also help them coordinate and get on the same page quicker during their response.
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To assist in your wayfinding efforts, take stock of your campus and see if any of the suggestions below would be helpful to incorporate into your wayfinding system:
- Campus buildings. Many campus footprints consist of multiple buildings. If an emergency occurs in a space within one of your multiple buildings, does your school have exterior signage identifying each building to make it easy for responders to determine which building they need to respond to? In addition to labeling academic buildings, make sure to affix exterior labels on other commonly detached buildings, such as portables, gymnasiums, and ag shops.
- Exterior-facing window placards. Because first responders may approach an area from the exterior, schools should consider affixing exterior-facing window placards identifying the room number or function that are large enough to see from the nearest roadway or parking lot. As room numbers can change over time, make sure the window placard matches the hallway-side identification. Also, ensure the identification contrasts with its background. For example, if your exterior-facing window labeling is done via white lettering on a window that uses white blinds that are often down, this will be difficult to see. Finally, as a former child protective service worker, I don’t think it’s a good idea to put teacher names or any specific identifier (e.g., “1st grade”) on exterior-facing labeling to avoid the potential of custody or domestic issues impacting your campus.
- Exterior doors that provide interior access. During an emergency, responders inside a building may need to coordinate with responders outside the same building. Because a responder who is inside a building telling another who is outside that they are “exiting the fourth door on the left in the cafeteria” may be difficult to conceptualize, it would be more effective to label each exterior door that provides interior access on both sides of the door. There are a variety of ways schools can do this, and a recommendation for doing so can be found here. Ultimately, you will want to come to a consensus with your local first responders about how you label and what makes the most sense.
- Hallway signage. Most school hallways have hallway-side labeling for their classroom doors. However, many cannot be seen from down the hall because they are either flush against the wall or in an alcove. I’ve had SROs tell me that it would be very helpful to have hallway-side room labeling that can be seen from down the hall, whether through signage that juts out from the wall or hangs down from the ceiling, to help them pinpoint the exact room they are responding to. While purchasing signage that juts out from the wall might cost resources that you don’t have, many schools in my state have enacted cheap, homemade solutions like putting the room number on a standard sheet of paper and hanging it from the ceiling. One school nearby also utilized their high school metal cutting lab to make their own signs that were also branded with the school’s logo. In addition to classroom doors, don’t forget to label all your other hallway-side doors (e.g., equipment room doors) so first responders know what’s on the other side.
- Interior room labeling. It can be difficult to remember what room number you are in due to stress, being an irregular user of the room, or because the room is only known as “Mrs. Smith’s class.” Schools may want to consider posting conspicuous door markings on the interior side of each room indicating the room number or function. This signage can be posted on a standard sheet of paper above the interior hallway doorframe facing inside the classroom. Doing so will help users of a room identify the room they are in if they need to call for help without having to open the door.
- Stairwells. Stairwells may act as ingress and egress routes during an emergency. If your school has multiple stairwells, consider identifying each one.
- Main entry. The main entry at schools isn’t always obvious, whether due to the orientation of the campus, the school having multiple doors or buildings that could be mistaken for an entrance, or because not everyone knows that the flagpole typically indicates the location of the main entry. As it relates to emergency response, some schools leave a law enforcement emergency binder in their main entry area that includes important supplies and information. As such, clear exterior signage should indicate the location of your school’s main entry.
While these questions aren’t exhaustive, getting into the weeds and thinking critically about your school’s emergency plans will help eliminate blind spots and provide for a more effective response when an emergency occurs.
Check out Part 1 for additional questions to ask when testing your emergency response plans
Elliot Cox is a School Safety Analyst for the Idaho School Safety and Security Program. He can be reached at [email protected].
Note: The views expressed by guest bloggers and contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Campus Safety.
