Voices of Experience: Preparing a District for Disaster
School Administrator, August 2022

Every natural disaster arrives with surprises, but there’s plenty school system leaders can do to prepare, according to those who’ve led their districts through floods, fires and storms in the recent past.

Education leaders must move fast on multiple fronts after disaster strikes, they say, so it helps to already have established a crisis management team and strong connections with other government and agency leaders. Crisis teams typically include a superintendent’s cabinet members, risk managers, financial officers, counselors and school board members.

Superintendents put these leaders in charge of critical functions such as coordinating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, securing emergency loans, coordinating do-nations, setting up trauma support teams, assessing property damage, launching repairs and communicating with students, parents and staff.

A Coordinated Response

The Boulder Valley, Colo., School District’s early preparations helped it quickly coordinate its response to the destructive Marshall Fire last December, superintendent Rob Anderson says. The district previously had met with city and government leaders for tabletop exercises about responding to a crisis. He says his crisis team established an effective chain of command.

“You can’t have everybody in charge of everything,” Anderson says. “You have to quickly coordinate and assign a chain of command and then let those folks lead.”

Within hours after the fire erupted, Tammy Lawrence, Boulder Valley’s director of student support services, was meeting with her trauma teams. And Rob Price, assistant superintendent of operational services, was watching the fire’s progress on his home computer through school security cameras. He was able remotely to close the dampers in schools to keep out smoke.

“Every school district needs an outreach coordinator,” says Annette Lane, superintendent of Pioneer Union School District in northern California. She hired someone to organize and distribute the flurry of donations and relief supplies that rolled in after a wildfire burned 400 homes and one school in her district last August. Also, Lane says, her district had established an evacuation plan before the fire that helped people in her district flee the wildfire. It appears now on the home page of the Pioneer website.

Suggestion List

School administrators have learned other practical measures in natural disaster preparation. After enduring two hurricanes, a freeze and flood in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish school system last year, Skylar Dever Fontenot, the district’s risk manager, and Wilfred Bourne, chief financial officer, developed these suggestions for school administrators:

»Put a system in place to remotely manage central-office processes such as payroll.

»Have a backup generator at your main office, a backup computer server and hard copies for critical district information, such as buildings’ floor plans and heating and ventilation systems.

»Build up cash reserves.

»Make sure you have adequate insurance and follow the company’s rules to avoid jeopardizing insurance claims.

»Set up a process for documenting damage and for recovering expenses, including funds for overtime for staff.

»Have prepositioned contracts in place for a project manager, remediation company and grant consultant familiar with FEMA.

»Move buses to high or safe ground and have staff clean out refrigerators before the disaster approaches.

»Make a master key to give remediation and other emergency workers access to all schools.

Many superintendents admit they did not study how to prepare for calamities in their academic credentialing programs. It may be time, some say, for universities to offer a course about leading through natural disasters.

—  BILL GRAVES