Schools Urged to Improve Crisis Plans

In a conference at UC Irvine, Orange County educators and parents are told that maps and response teams could blunt any tragic toll. - By Joel Rubin, Times Staff Writer

Schools need to better prepare for emergencies by providing detailed maps of their facilities and forming crisis response teams to quickly assume control in campus crises, Orange County educators were told Monday.

While state law mandates that schools devise and update safety plans every March, security experts implored administrators during a conference at UC Irvine to do even more.

Orange County schools Supt. William H. Habermehl said the county's 577 schools are fairly well-prepared but cautioned that more work remained at each one.

"I'd be a fool if I took [current preparedness] for granted," he told about 100 teachers, administrators and parents attending the meeting. "Something can and will happen, and when it does, we do not want to say 'We should have and could have.' "

For instance, he said, school officials must not only evacuate students from classrooms during an earthquake but also plan for providing water and dealing with panicked parents searching for their children.

"We do not practice the hard situations, and we need to because they are important," he said.

Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona encouraged school districts to follow Capistrano Unified's lead in filing blueprints and 360-degree photographic documentation of its schools on a computer network.

The maps and images, Carona said, would allow emergency personnel to save crucial minutes as they come up with response plans during a crisis.

Alon Stivi, a member of a school safety task force formed six months ago by UCI's Center for Unconventional Security Affairs, noted that many school districts have not established crisis response teams to react to campus emergencies. Such teams, he said, would establish detailed evacuation or barricade plans based on crisis scenarios, organize schoolwide drills and serve as liaisons with emergency officials.

A school's specially trained emergency responders, he said, would supplement school safety manuals.

"You can have the fanciest manuals," Stivi said of state-mandated safety plans, "but if you look at them once a year, you're not ready." Stivi proposed that local businesses or individuals pay the estimated $5 to $10 per child the teams would cost each year.

In an interview, Habermehl agreed that documents do only so much. While his office has developed a thick file of school safety planning materials, the focus now must be on helping school districts to implement such plans, he said.

But that is hard to achieve because of a lack of funding, and time on the part of school employees, said Kellie Duran, who as a mother of three Capistrano district students has studied emergency preparedness.

"People say planning is important and want it done," she said. "But down in the trenches, there is nobody there to do it."

Law enforcement officials touted the accomplishments of the Sheriff Department's School Mobile Assessment Resource Team, which was developed after the 1999 rampage at Colorado's Columbine High School to deter - and respond to - school violence.

But Carona said budget cuts threaten such programs.

Orange County Sheriff's Capt. Catherine Zurn, who commands the county's emergency management system, said the county is expected to receive $13 million in emergency response funding from the federal Department of Homeland Security.

 

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