Schools Found Lacking in Disaster Planning

America's public schools are not as prepared as they could be to prevent and respond to disasters on campus - and rural schools are less prepared than urban schools - an Arkansas team of medical researchers concluded in a study published in today's issue of Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

More than seven years after five were shot to death at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, six years after 15 died at Columbine High School in Colorado and 15 months since terrorists took 1,181 people hostage at a school in Beslan, Russia, researchers from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute assessed the emergency preparations that have taken place in the nation's schools in the interim and found significant deficiencies.

"We found that most schools have an evacuation plan," said Dr. James Graham, professor of pediatrics at UAMS and the principal investigator of the study. "Most schools have some kind of mass casualty plan, but when you start looking at the specific details of the plan there are some deficiencies there." More than 95 percent of the 2,137 superintendents who responded to a 2004 survey on emergency preparations reported that they have written evacuation plans for their schools. And better than eight out of 10 have a plan for responding to mass casualties after a shooting, a bombing or the release of a biological hazard.

Only 30 percent said they had conducted evacuation drills. About 22 percent didn't have disaster plans for students with special health needs. Only 19.9 percent of the school chiefs said they meet regularly with local law enforcement agencies for emergency planning.

And 42.8 percent said their schools had never met with local ambulance services to do the same. Fewer than half of the responding superintendents, 42.5 percent, reported keeping a master list of students at an off-campus location in case a school's list becomes unavailable in a crisis.

The study, "Mass Casualty Events at Schools: A National Preparedness Survey," focused on public schools. But Graham said the same issues are pertinent to private schools and day-care centers. Together, public and private schools serve some 53 million children daily.

"As mass gathering places, schools are prone to mass injury in a natural disaster and may unfortunately serve as a terrorist target," the study said. "In addition, schools have special and distinct disaster planning needs because of the unique needs of children in a disaster. Children have increased susceptibility to chemical agents ... increased propensity to dehydration or shock, differing medication and/or doses of antibiotics or toxin antidotes, increased susceptibility to radiation exposure and unique psychological vulnerability." The Arkansas researchers questioned school leaders about efforts to prevent campus disasters.

Just over half of the respondents, 57.2 percent, said they had written prevention plans. But nearly three-fourths of the sample of the superintendents, 71.9 percent, said their schools do not use gates or fences to restrict vehicle access to school grounds. Two-thirds of the respondents said they do not require student identification badges or cards, and nearly half do not require teacher and staff identification badges.

The Arkansas researchers found that urban/suburban districts were better prepared than rural school districts for manmade and natural disasters.

"Everyone thinks, and they may be right, that urban schools are more at risk for a terroristic attack," Graham said. "But the Beslan, Russia, school was in a town of 30,000 people, so it was not in a large city. Westside Middle School is not in a large city. Certainly a natural disaster - a tornado or an earthquake - can hit anywhere. A train carrying chemicals can derail. Trains frequently go through rural towns." Besides Graham, others on the research team were pediatricians and UAMS faculty members Steve Shirm, Rebecca Liggin, Mary E. Aitken and Rhonda Dick. The study was financed with a grant from the Health Services and Resources Administration, Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, a part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Ken Trump, president of a private Ohio-based consulting company, National School Safety and Security Services, heartily seconded the Arkansas research.

"Their study is 100 percent on target," Trump said Monday. "Our school safety assessments nationwide repeatedly find that what is on paper is not what is in practice in school emergency planning. A majority of schools ... are not training their staffs, and they are not exercising their staffs through drills. This study has a lot of credibility with me." Cuts in school safety budgets and increasing pressure to raise student test scores have resulted in less time for emergency planning and staff training, Trump said. It is up to school leaders - school boards, superintendents and principals - to put security measures in place in addition to fulfilling academic duties, he added.

"Savvy school administrators recognize that school safety is directly related to improved academic achievement," he said.

James Best, superintendent of the Westside Consolidated School District in Jonesboro, said the system's 1,700 students do not have identification cards or badges largely because the district is small enough that an intruder could be easily identified. The district also does not conduct emergency drills beyond the state-required tornado, fire and bus evacuation drills.

"The reality is there's a tremendous amount of pressure on public schools academically now," he said, "and the school day is just absolutely packed with things we're required to do." But the district, where five were killed and 10 injured at the middle school shooting in 1998, works with the Craighead County sheriff's office as well as with neighboring districts.

"I wasn't here in 1998, so I can't speak to what it was like before," Best said. "But I can tell you that there's a heightened sense of awareness with everyone connected with the district and outside the district." The 6,000-student West Memphis School District is aggressively refining its school safety measures. In 2004, the district received an $8.7 million federal Safe Schools Healthy Students grant.

The district has revamped its emergency plan, required all students to wear identification badges and installed security cameras at secondary schools with a direct link to the city's Police Department. In coordinating with local police, fire and hospital officials, the West Memphis district has put numbers on top of each of its school buildings, so the buildings can be identified from a helicopter in the event of an emergency. "Right now we're building a crisis intervention team at each school," Cheryl Travers, the district's Safe Schools Healthy Students program director, said. "So let's just say the unforgettable, the unforgivable happens and a school shooting occurs. Our teams are getting ready to practice for drills if that were to happen." Travers agreed that districts are under a lot of pressure academically and financially.

"The first thing for me is school safety," she said, "because if a child is safe and feels safe, it's going to improve his ability to learn." The 25,000-student Little Rock School District, the state's largest, also has a crisis management team at each school to act during an emergency.

"I think it's critical that we train our staff, our students and our parents," said Sadie Mitchell, the district's associate superintendent of elementary schools. "That's why during open house and in the newsletters principals send home, they try to reiterate how important it is for even parents to sign in when they come to the school." The district does not require student IDs, Mitchell said, but it does require three drills a year that go beyond state mandates. One of those, the bullet drill, entails showing students what to do in the event of gunshots on or around the campus.

"It really does upset parents whenever we do a bullet drill because they say you're planting a seed in the minds of children," said Lillie Carter, principal of Pulaski Heights Elementary School. "I said, `No.' If someone came by the school shooting, the children need to know what to do." The Arkansas researchers initially conducted a pilot survey of Arkansas schools in 2003 on emergency preparations and followed that in January 2004 with a 23-question survey to 3,670 of the nation's 14,000 school district superintendents. The usable responses numbered 2,137, or 58.2 percent. The earlier Arkansas survey results mirrored the national results, Graham said.

Researchers didn't actually review plans.

The Arkansas research team plans to follow the preparedness study with other studies and, within the next few months, the publication of a model schoolpreparedness plan specifically for Arkansas school districts.

Graham said that the deficiencies cited in school emergency preparations are not necessarily an indictment of school leaders. He attributed emergency planning deficiencies to multiple factors, including perceptions by some districts that they aren't vulnerable, and also to a lack of funding and time to do what can be done.

"Since 2001, people have been working on this, but we aren't where we need to be," he said. "Superintendents would write comments saying, `We are working on this,' or `Your survey has given us some ideas.' I don't think it is an indictment on the schools at all. I would say, based on phone conversations with superintendents and the comments they wrote on the surveys, that they are appropriately concerned. I just think it is a matter of funding, time and the ability to get it done."

This article was published 01/03/2006

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