Day 1: Alan Steinberg, Ph.D., associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, speaks about the steps that schools and communities can take to help prepare for a crisis:

"The first step is to have a well thought out disaster plan that can be incorporated into part of an overall school safety plan. The disaster plan should be focused on ensuring the safety of faculty, students and school personnel. I'll sketch out for you a couple of categories that should be included in any sound disaster plan. If we can look at the Graphic Number 5, there are some standard categories that people use. First there needs to be preparation of emergency supplies. A really important one is familiarization with the types of disasters likely to occur in the geographical area. So, for example, in Los Angeles we are very aware, and our disaster plans reflect an awareness of, the potential for earthquakes, for fires and floods. In other areas of the country, there are risks for hurricanes, tornadoes, and industrial disasters, and, of course, sadly, we're having to include in our planning consideration of catastrophic school violence, terrorism, mass casualty events. Disaster plans should include teaching methods of physical self-protection to be engaged during a catastrophic event. There needs to well-rehearsed evacuation protocols for schools. There needs to be a system for tracking the location and safe dissemination of children. One of the things that we've found consistently is that the longer you separate children from their families, the greater the impact of that kind of traumatic situation. Schools need to know where the children are sent when they are sent to medical care and have a method for bringing children and families together. There has to be a plan for the restoration of the school facility, including the removal of trauma-evoking imagery. It's a very important one. After an earthquake, to leave a school with cracks -- it's really going to make it difficult for children to pay attention and concentrate in classrooms where they are being reminded about a very frightening event. And also a mechanism for directing media responses to a disaster."

Day 2: Deborah Prothrow-Stith, M.D., director of the Division of Public Health Practice, Harvard School of Public Health, describes a key way to make your school safety plan relevant and useful:

"One of the important aspects is to look at settings where they are in fact using it as a living plan rather than it sitting on a shelf. I suspect that, in that context, everybody put the plan together across disciplines, everybody feels some ownership of the plan, and in fact everybody has a part to play. I suspect that it's that interdisciplinary piece that's the most complicated and the most difficult. I guess, to get the school nurse as part of the crisis response team, to get the security personnel talking with the school psychologist, to get the teachers involved. Everybody understanding that they have a little bit of a role that steps out of their traditional professional responsibility and allows them to interact with other professionals."

Day 3: Mark Weist, Ph.D., director of the Center for School Mental Health Assistance, University of Maryland, explains the importance of a positive school climate for student well-being:

"It matters in a huge way. A recent really impressive study, the longitudinal study in adolescent health, documents that one of the most important things for youth to do well is to feel connected to school. There are a lot of things that a school can do to promote that sense of connectedness. Again, the teachers reaching out, teachers forming a relationship with every student, classrooms being managed well, hallways being monitored, students having the opportunity to develop friendships and participate in extracurricular activities. These are all really important things to help with a sense of connectedness, and when youth feel connected to school, they're less likely to involve themselves in risk behavior, less likely to have mental health issues, more likely to do well in school, so we're learning that the sense of connectedness is really, really important."

Source

U.S. Department of Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program; The Harvard School of Public Health; Education Development Center, Inc., and Prevention Institute (April 23, 2002). The Three R's for Dealing with Trauma in Schools (satellite broadcast). Retrieved August, 2002, from www.walcoff.com/prevention/. (Copyright 2002: U.S. Department of Education and Harvard School of Public Health, Division of Public Health Practice.)