Personalized Emergency Preparedness for the School Professional

The biggest security threat to any organization is not a lack of cameras or access control – it’s the people. In a crisis, every school professional must engage in a specialized role. However, there may be temp employees or substitutes who may not know your crisis response plans. In this session at PRIMA 2016, Dana Henderson presented how Charleston County School District has developed innovative and inexpensive solution to these challenges.

Throughout their schools, Charleston County had nearly 5,000 cameras, strong visitor management, nearly 1,300 access control points – the “the stuff”. The largest vulnerability in a school is the people, though. You can have the “stuff”, but it fails frequently because of human error. Drilling is critical as well, but it takes a lot of resources and doesn’t take into account people who aren’t present for the training like substitute teachers and temps.

The First Five

The school district created a training program called “The First Five”. The concept is centered around the fact that, if training is more than five minutes and isn’t one of the first five things on the agenda at faculty meetings, you’ll probably lose your audience’s attention.

Using that concept, they created a series of 11 videos – all shot inexpensively with existing equipment on location starring staff and students. These five-minute videos were made the first topic of the first month’s faculty meeting with only a five-minute discussion allowed after viewing. They post all videos on an internal video site and Google Drive for future reference.

Topics included everything that requires a response – from what to do if there is inclement weather and fire alarms, to giving people building access and propping doors open, to bomb threats.