5 Strategies for Response That Can Help Prevent Tragedy

Everyone needs to be prepared for an emergency, especially those working in our schools. But what exactly are you preparing for? And, if you are preparing for emergencies, are you preparing sufficiently to respond confidently?

The vast majority of the conversation is centered around acts of violence. Why? Frankly, violence is the least probable emergency you will face. That being said, there are two primary reasons you should focus your efforts on acts of violence. First, you need to get this right. If you have an event on one of your campuses, it will become national news. Violence strikes at the core of people’s safety, and they expect us to keep their children safe while they are in our care. No one cares if we are trained in preventing violent acts or if it is not part of our job. You have their children, and they have three expectations every day: their children get to school safely, they are provided with a safe, secure, and supported environment, and are returned home safely. Second, acts of violence touch on all four emergency response and management phases. They tend to be challenging and complex. If we can respond confidently to these events, other emergencies will likely be much easier to handle.

So, what are you preparing for? Preparing for an emergency starts with understanding your risks and their failure points. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a response as an answer or reaction. As mentioned in earlier blogs and podcasts, like the Pathway to Violence, there is a pathway to every emergency. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says there are four phases of emergency management: Prevention/Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. If we look at both the pathways and the four phases of emergency management, we look at them sequentially. This means you start at the first step and then progress through the following steps. All of our emergencies will inevitably follow the pathways from beginning to end. However, this is not the case, at least not how we currently address emergency response and management. Hear me out on this. While we understand that school safety is a shared responsibility, we tend to categorize those responsibilities to only those who need to know particular aspects of the emergency: teachers need to know the Standard Response Protocols, administrators need to know how to respond, threat assessment teams need to understand how to prevent violence, the police need to know how to respond to acts of violence, counselors are responsible for the recovery and trauma reduction from an incident, etc.

Our culture encourages us to delegate tasks to those with expertise in a particular area. However, we rely on the only person with knowledge in a specific area to resolve every issue during an emergency. In that case, we will be putting ourselves behind the prevention curve. You might be thinking, wait a minute, isn’t prevention before the emergency? It is unless you fail to prevent it from occurring. If you fail to prevent it from occurring, then you have to prepare to respond. If you don’t prepare to respond to the failure to avoid confidently, you put your school at risk for catastrophic results. You see, prevention is not only the first step in all the pathways and FEMA guidelines but also the first step in the emergency.

So, what are we preparing for? We should be preparing for prevention and response should our prevention efforts fail. How do we do that? Prevention is a continual process that needs attention 24/7. If we understand what we are attempting to prevent, we can identify what we must prepare for should our efforts fail.

Here are a few things that might help:

Identify the pathways to the risks you will most likely face.
1. Start with the risk, then put it on the timeline, and go all the way to the left before it is a risk.
2. From that point forward, identify the steps necessary to transition from zero risk to emergency, including the trigger point (the point that delineates the risk from emergency).
Create your response plans.
Identify the earliest points of prevention and the steps necessary to intervene.
Identify the points where you operationalize your plans.
Train your staff on how to respond to the pathways as soon as possible and how to respond in the event the risk escalates to an emergency.

While it is impractical to educate everyone in all aspects of prevention, we can train our staff to recognize the warning signs and how to respond to them. The good news is that many of the warning signs for academic risks are the same for those at risk of violence. We just have to look at those warning signs from a different perspective. Additionally, suppose we are looking for the warning signs. In that case, we are also more prepared to respond confidently to an emergency should that happen because we are anticipating “what would happen if…". Responding with confidence starts with understanding the potential of the risk. If you understand what could happen, you will know how to respond.