Emergency response to our schools

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Permalink Reply by Joe McClelland on July 29, 2008 at 8:29am

I have gone to them. They are still in the stone age in how they do things. Our High School is the most problematic. We did a fire drill last month and we found 6 kids 'hiding' in the bathrooms, their teachers had no idea they were missing. Most teachers have radios, but not all. But if they don't know who is missing, having a radio does no good.

I am aware that is a problem they need to fix, but we want to make a policy/plan, hand it to them and make it law. They are fine with this. There are over 3,000 students and staff, so we would like an easier way to keep track of all of them. So any policys that are working for others is what I am interested in.

Thanks Brent.

Joe

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Permalink Reply by Erron Kinney on July 30, 2008 at 10:10am

Just before I left my old department we worked on a plan with the county emergency management agency, State division of children's services, and the school board to develop a system that gave the department access to daily attendance every morning this also included all day cares and mother's day out programs in the city. We had to have cooperation between these agencies to insure security and safety for the students and school staff and to overcome any obstacles with accessibility to vital information. The system was developed in response to issues following tornadoes. We already knew evacuation plans but we had no way of accounting for all the students. So EMA is now dispatched to any fire, HazMat, or disaster response at a school to act as a incident command liaison for school staff and student accountability. We did not have any tag type system. The system was still in the developmental stages. On paper and in theory it seemed like a good fix to our problem.

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Permalink Reply by Bob Roth on July 31, 2008 at 5:52am

Joe
In June we had a fire drill in the elementary school in our district. We have been working on the structure for schools for the past 8 months. I must say the last drill went exceptionally well. 250 kids evacuated the school in 2:18 min. We used the red/green card system and when I looked out into the field I saw two red cards being held up by the class teacher. The office staff was right there to check the sign out list of children who left the school that day. We also have a list of all visitors time in and time out for accountability. ALSO...we smoked out the hallway and had the two first in engine companys respond for this drill.

We also have 4 special needs schools in our district. I am in class at the National Fire Academy. One of our group projects was frire drills in schools....guess what??? No information exists!!!

Keep in touch on my e-mail and I will be happy to keep you informed on our progress and we can keep the other informed on this site

Bob Roth
Newcastle Fire ProtectionDistrict
Newcastle, CA 95658
Station 41 ph# 916-663-9369
Prevention20@yahoo.com

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Permalink Reply by Drew Smith on August 1, 2008 at 12:14am

I like the red/green card system. We have been trying to get our elementary schools to use it. Our neighboring FD got a grant an did a huge planning for all schools in thier town. The schools bought in because with the grant the FD paid for the training and materials and did all the planning and delivery. A few features include a guide similar to the haz mat ERG. I think it has 7 plans and the IC (school's IC-not FD or PD) can just state use plan "3". Also, each classroom has a radio and emergency backpack that is like a CERT/survival pack and can be used to evan the kids to another site/handle emergencies/etc.

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Permalink Reply by Todd McKee on August 11, 2008 at 11:13am

Joe _ Our schools have their own system set up for accountability, we train with them and their liaison provides us with the information. We are in the schools more than once a month to be visible and train monthly on fire drills at different times throughout the day. With that being said usually it takes 1:30 minutes to remove the students and another 3 to 5 minutes to have an accurate count of students to our IC. They have their own radios to communitcate with and a meeting place. Hope this helps! Todd

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