Article Summary

I s my child safe ? This is the primary

question parents want school leaders

to answer, and the answer better be yes.

We have all seen tense moments caught

on TV cameras and cellphones of parents

anxiously waiting behind police barricades

for word that no harm has come to their

children. The explosion of emotions as they

reunite with their loved ones touches the

viewer in a very visceral way.

Each time we see a shooting scene like

Sandy Hook or a tornado disaster li ke

Moore, Oklahoma, we ref lect on whether

our schools are ready to respond. Each time

we see the devastating effects of bullying,

racism or intolerance, we wonder if that is

happening in our schools. We ask ourselves,

“Could that have been me, in my town, at

my school, involving my kids?”

Safety is THE priority for parents

When I ask parents to tell me what they

expect most from their public schools, in

almost every survey, focus group, or con-

versation, the first thing they say is safety.

Keeping children safe is a concern that

trumps academic performance, financial

accountability, targeted student services,

or quality personnel. While politicians, the

public and the press clamor to see improved

test scores, parents care first and foremost

about whether their classrooms and cam-

puses are safe places to learn.

Over my 40 years as a school communi-

cations professional, I have been involved

in almost every imaginable type of public

school controversy, disaster, emergency or

critical incident. I have advised more than

400 California public school districts and

handled communication and messaging in

high profile situations for most of them.

From shootings at Columbine and Lind-

hurst high schools to floods and fires in the

Central Valley, one common denominator

sticks out for these school clients – com-

munication is the crucial element of any

school safety plan. You might be mobilizing

By Tom DeLapp

8 Leadership

SCHOOL SAFETY

PLANS When student safety and

district reputations are on

the line, communication

will be the most important

aspect of your school or

district response.

your response plan pretty well, but if nobody

knows about it, it isn’t happening for them.

As communities across California wres-

tle with tough decisions on how best to al-

locate renewed funding, the safety question

fights to take a priority seat at the decision-

making table. The LCAP (Local Control

Accountability Plan) is a state prerequisite

under the Local Control Funding Formula.

It requires districts to listen to affected par-

ents, educators and citizens.

Public engagement was written into the

law to help ensure that targeted monies

would indeed meet the unique needs of stu-

dents from poverty or with limited English

skills. Those targeted groups share two pri-

mary characteristics: they have educational

disadvantages and, sadly, they most often

face safety concerns in their schools and

neighborhoods. Underlying all the discus-

sion about applying Common Core State

Standards, LCFF and LCAP is the deeper

concern of parents about safe schools.

California school leaders have been doing

strategic listening using a wide array of civic

engagement techniques, including online

surveys, advisory committees, focus groups,

public forums, roundtables, partnerships,

awareness campaigns, and outreach dia-

logue with interest groups and leaders in

their communities.

These efforts aren’t just to gather feed-

back and input, they are “teachable mo-

ments” to educate a communit y and its

leadership infrastructure about the pressing

needs of the schools, including the impera-

tive to sustain a safe, secure and nurturing

school culture. The two-way message is

clear: Keeping schools safe is a community

priority and a shared responsibility.

A crisis is a true high-stakes test

Your response in a high profile situation

may be your finest hour or your worst night-

mare. In a real sense, a district’s emergency

response is high-stakes testing at its most

dramatic. A crisis is a test of your school

safety plans and of you as a professional.

A crisis also puts an intense magnifying

glass on your school district, exposing every

nuance and fault line in your communica-

tion systems, personal leadership, relation-

ships, district reputation, community con-

nections and management effectiveness.

The whole world could be watching your

every move, which means you need to be

prepared for high-definition transparency.

Here are some tips and techniques to meet

that challenge.

Hope for the best, but plan for the worst

The best school safety plans have three

key elements:

• Well-defined action steps that advance core values for cultivating a safe school cul-

ture free from violence, drugs, gangs, crime,

intolerance, indifference, isolation, tribing,

faulty facilities and interpersonal conflict.

• A proactive, tactical response mecha- nism that examines reactions to specif ic scenarios, emergencies and situations. This

plan then can be rehearsed and internalized

by every employee, parent leader and first-

responder. You might be performing on a

world stage, so you better make sure all the

actors know their parts, perform their roles,

and hit their marks.

• A comprehensive communication strat- egy for reaching stakeholders with timely, accurate and complete information and di-

rections to guide their own behaviors and

expectations before, during and after the

event. We have a wide array of lightning-fast

devices and modes of communication at our

disposal these days, and they need to be in-

tegrated and managed well during a crisis to

get the word out.

Keep in mind that these school site plans

need to be compliant with state and federal

requirements and fully integrated with a

district-level safety plan. My experience is

that most safety plans talk about culture and

lock-down procedures, but are not nearly

specific enough on other aspects of emer-

gency response or communication strate-

gies. In some cases, districts assume they

will know how to respond and leave it to the

sites to have written plans. The district needs

to operate as an umbrella that can be opened

to shelter a school site during a tragedy or in-

cident. Instinct can only get you so far when

the adrenaline of an emergency kicks in and

the rapid pace of events takes over.

“Self-activating” emergency plans

Do not gather to plan in a crisis, gather

to act!

Who makes the call or connects with the

response team members to activate them?

Does your team have two-deep leadership?

Are there alternates if someone is gone? How

long can you wait for people to arrive or be in

place? Is the site in lock-down or being evac-

uated? Do we have a public statement we can

make to the press and parents? Did the gas

get turned off?

These are all questions that demand im-

mediate answers. Responders need to know

what they are supposed to do as they’re

driving to the command center, not find

out when they get there. By then it may too

May/June 2014 9

10 Leadership

late. I recommend that every employee in a

school district carry a card that tells them

exactly what they are supposed to do dur-

ing the first few hours of a crisis, even if they

are not members of the response team. This

could even include a personal reminder to

call their child care center to let them know

they might be late picking up their own child

after school.

The reason for this simple communica-

tion tool is that frequently in an emergency,

especially where there are horrendous im-

ages of injury or death, people will freeze

or shut down in shock and grief. Having a

written action script breaks that inertia and

gives them some tangible things to do im-

mediately to kick-start their response.

The first 30 minutes are crucial in a mixed media world

Much like in the Old West, where every-

one carried a sidearm on their hip, in today’s

digital world everyone is carrying a personal

WMD (weapon of mass distraction) called

a smartphone. This device not only ensures

that they can get instantaneous access to in-

formation and news, but also that they can

deliver real-time reporting of unfolding

events as citizen journalists.

The story of the modern-day crisis is

largely delivered by amateur reporters who

capture and post images, video and testi-

mony from sources at the scene far sooner

than any traditional media. The only cover-

age in the initial hours after natural disasters

like tsunamis and earthquakes comes from

social media. In fact, we are starting to see

posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social

media even as events are still occurring. This

happened as the tornado hit the Moore Pub-

lic Schools in 2013.

To compete in this media frenzy, you

need to have your arsenal of social media

and Internet tools ready to deploy at a mo-

ment’s notice to tell your story and inform

your stakeholders. The webmaster or IT

professional becomes a key player in your

emergency response team. He or she needs

to move within minutes to light up your dis-

trict’s Internet, email and phone communi-

cation systems.

To do t hat well, you should have an Emergency Response Web Page already cre-

ated, but invisible on your website. It should

contain fact sheets, protocols, parent in-

structions, templates for notices, resources,

general media statements, auto-dial phone

scripts, and referral contacts in place that

can be tailored quickly and easily to fit the

situation. Within 30 minutes that site can be

activated and ready to serve as your clearing-

house and point of contact with the world.

If people cannot get information from their

schools, they will get it from other, less reli-

able sources.

Be your own wire service

If your district is moving to create an app

that translates your website to more user-

friendly access on smartphones and mobile

devices, be sure to include an Emergency

Response Plan button in the menu. Since

most people are now using handheld devices

to access websites anyway, this will be your

lifeline to parents, staff and the media, who

may be locked out or locked down. To be

that point of reference you need to become

the district wire service for the event. Here

are some tips to do that well:

• Try to get people to channel their social

media information gathering to you. Use

parents and staff as “stringers” to give you

intelligence and reports from the field. They

can become very important eyes and ears

at the scene. Set up a “What We’ve Heard”

and “What We Know for Sure” board in the

command center to categorize this input.

• Create and post a rolling public state-

ment. Update it or verify it every 30 minutes

in the first six hours after the incident. You

can refer callers to that statement to free up

time in the command center. This also en-

sures message discipline so your story is con-

sistent and fact-based.

• Publish on your website and regularly

update FAQs (answers to frequently asked

questions) to enable the command center

to have a self-service capacity. People can go

online to your website and search for answers

themselves instead of needing to call in.

• Schedule your f irst news conference

within the first hour in partnership with

law enforcement and other first-responders.

You may decide to let law enforcement or

the fire department take the lead, but do not

let them speak for your schools. Be a visible

presence at their side to interject if needed.

• Begin to manage the rumor mills by

creating a “Setting the Record Straight,”

“Rumor Control” or “Media Watch” page

on your website. You can refute rumors or

misinformation here. By having this avail-

able, you can calm people down and keep

the news media speculation to a minimum.

A rumor is like water running downhill;

you can’t stop it but you can channel it so it

doesn’t erode your reputation. Rumors win

on speed and quantity; load them with qual-

ity information and they can become power-

ful interpersonal networks communicating

on your behalf.

• Designate a Media Center both at the

scene and at the district command center.

The district off ice media center is where

staff field calls and emails from regional, na-

tional and international media. The district

spokesperson needs to be at the media cen-

ter at the scene to work directly with local

The LCAP process of public

engagement is a teachable

moment to discuss school

safety and campus culture.

Use it to gain community

buy-in for funding your

safe schools initiatives.

Safe schools contribute to

student achievement.

May/June 2014 11

and pool reporters. But a caution: don’t get

caught up with the cachet of talking to the

“Today Show” if you haven’t kept your local

media well connected. When Matt Lauer

is gone, your local newspaper will still be

there, smarting from being overshadowed.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

People in crisis often are reluctant to in-

volve outsiders in their situation. It might

feel like too much work to manage a cadre of

volunteers, or they may not want to expose

their district’s internal operations to strang-

ers from outside of the area. The true test of

leadership is to perceive how quickly events

can get away from you and when you need

outside expertise to help you navigate a dif-

ficult situation.

There are resources that stand ready to

assist troubled school districts. Use your

ACSA connections to help you weather the

storm. You also can call on the directors of

communication in county offices of educa-

tion who can pool local help.

There is also the network of professionals

in the California School Public Relations As-

sociation (www.calspra.org) and its national

affiliate (www.nspra.org) that you can rely

on. Within a few hours, they can help staff

parent phones lines, write news releases,

deal with routine media calls, and a host of

other time-consuming tasks. They can pro-

vide knowledgeable experts who can coach

the team. I am part of that state and national

response network. You need to open the

door to your command center and ask these

professionals to stand beside you during the

crisis.

A positive story about leadership

These days, it isn’t a question of if you will

face a high-profile, media-driven incident,

but when. School leaders need to fully inter-

nalize that when student safety and district

reputations are on the line, communication

will be the most important aspect of your

organizational response. The LCAP process

of public engagement is a teachable moment

to discuss school safety and campus culture.

Use it to gain community buy-in for fund-

ing your safe schools initiatives. Safe schools

contribute to student achievement.

Time and again leaders in industry fail

when they circle the wagons and stifle com-

munication with stockholders and stake-

holders after an embarrassing incident or

catastrophe. They usually lose their jobs

and the value of their company drops. Learn

from these leadership failures. A crisis is an

opportunity to show your community what

you stand for and who you stand up for as

educators. Since you have the public’s atten-

tion anyway in a crisis, use the opportunity

to provide a positive story about leadership

in the face of adversity. n

Tom DeLapp is president of Communication Resources for Schools (www.tomdelapp.com). He served as ACSA’s assistant executive director for

communications from 1988 to 1996.

What educators can do to help traumatized students

The following tips for educators who are helping students who have been traumatized were devel- oped by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network,

established by Congress in 2000 as a collaborative ef-

fort of academic and community-based service centers:

• Maintain usual routines. A return to “normalcy”

will communicate the message that the child is safe and

life will go on.

• Give children choices. Often traumatic events

involve loss of control and/or chaos, so you can help

children feel safe by providing them with some choices or control when appropriate.

• Increase the level of support and encouragement given to the traumatized child.

Designate an adult who can provide additional support if needed.

• Set clear, firm limits for inappropriate behavior and develop logical – rather than

punitive – consequences.

• Recognize that behavioral problems may be tran-

sient and related to trauma. Remember that even the

most disruptive behaviors can be driven by trauma-re-

lated anxiety.

• Provide a safe place for the child to talk about what

happened. Set aside a designated time and place for shar-

ing to help the child know it is okay to talk about what

happened.

• Give simple and realistic answers to the child’s questions about traumatic events.

Clarify distortions and misconceptions. If it isn’t an appropriate time, be sure to give

the child a time and place to talk and ask questions.

• Be sensitive to the cues in the environment that may cause a reaction in the trau-

matized child. For example, victims of natural storm-related disasters might react

very badly to threatening weather or storm warnings. Children may increase problem

behaviors near an anniversary of a traumatic event.

• Anticipate difficult times and provide additional support. Many kinds of situa-

tions may be reminders. If you are able to identify reminders, you can help by prepar-

ing the child for the situation. For instance, for the child who doesn’t like being alone,

provide a partner to accompany him or her to the restroom.

• Warn children if you will be doing something out of the ordinary, such as turning

off the lights or making a sudden loud noise.

Source: “Child Trauma Toolkit for Educators,” from the National Child Traumatic

Stress Network (www.NCTSN.org). – Susan Davis

Recognize that

behavioral

problems may be

transient and

related to trauma.

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