Evacuation, reunification strategies suggested for school emergency plans

Bill Gordon, the Hot Springs County Emergency Management coordinator, addressed the Hot Springs County School District Board of Trustees on Feb. 16, to suggest two items for inclusion in the school district’s upcoming emergency plan that’s currently under development.

“Those items are off-site evacuation and reunification,” Gordon said. “Often, shelter-in-place is the proper action to take, as a safe and appropriate response to certain emergencies. Occasionally, however, off-site evacuation is necessary, (and) this would be evacuations to different buildings.”

Among the examples Gordon cited requiring off-site evacuations were fires, explosions, “credible and strong” bomb threats, earthquakes, a long-term hazardous material spill, a “sudden” poisoning, a dam collapse, “and sadly, in the immediate aftermath of a violent attack, the school is a crime scene, (and) requires a careful, controlled, organized evacuation, to protect and preserve evidence.”

Such off-site evacuations necessarily require subsequent reunifications to be arranged, and as Gordon pointed out, sending parents to the schools to collect their children in the wake of such incidents is potentially “dangerous, hindering and interfering with responders,” and even in the best-case scenarios, it disrupts and congests street traffic.

Gordon has spoken via Zoom with a firm in Chicago that’s developing reunification plans, and they warned that “public knowledge of the reunification site potentially makes it another target,” so they instead recommended notifying parents “where to go to pick up their children after the emergency, (but) by then, I’m personally pretty sure it’s too late, and the incoming parents are already on their way.”

Gordon’s own counter-suggestion for reunification is to determine the reunification location beforehand, store the necessary supplies there, also in advance, and conduct annual exercises there for each individual school.

Gordon cited Worland school exercises for which “it was announced that, on a certain day at a certain time, students would be bused from the (school to) the community center,” where parents were required to have proper ID to pick them up, thereby confirming students were being retrieved by those who had legal custody.

Gordon sees a properly conducted reunification as providing “calm and order, in what will be a very stressful time (during) a real-world event.”

By ensuring reunification has a “practiced familiarity” for its participants, Gordon anticipated the school district could reduce that stress, as well as the challenges the district might face in coordinating so many parents on short notice at once.

Gordon called for the district’s off-site evacuation and reunification plans to be as “transparent,” widely distributed and rigorously tested as possible, preferably annually.

“Students will practice their actions in the process, and parents will feel a much better sense of comfort in not just knowing, but actually having participated,” said Gordon who noted the need to design specific plans tailored to each individual school.

Gordon concluded by dropping off a copy of a reunification planning workbook “out of Polk County, which is Des Moines,” which he rated as “fabulous” and among “the best I’ve ever seen (for) preparedness,” in addition to volunteering to assist the district personally, “any way I can.”