Planning and Drilling For a School Lockdown
Is Your School Prepared?

Posted on Prepare Now Store Facebook - 2/28/15

The constant stream of school shootings highlights the need for well thought out school lockdown procedures.

Prepare for a variety of school emergency situations. Lockdown training and drills focused only on active shooter situations are more likely to fail when faced with non-shooter scenarios. While school crisis planning should be kept simple and focused, over focus on active shooter situations is more likely to resulting in missing early warning signs of non-shooter events because these situations are perceived as minor. This can allow a relatively minor event to escalate into a major crisis because an early opportunity to lock down the school was missed. Schools should drill for lower level or soft lockdowns to build awareness since most lockdown situations do not involve weapons. 

Keep the alert codes simple and constantly train teachers and staff on them. If your school has three alert codes (Red, Orange, Blue) there is no excuse for every teacher and staff member not to know what they represent. The danger of not knowing the codes was highlighted by a recent school district security assessment where over 20% of the administrators mistakenly ordered a lockdown instead of a sheltering procedure in response to a tornado warning alert code. This lack of training could have resulted in a massive loss of life. Keep the number of codes to a minimum and train on them. All school employees should participate in staff development and lockdown drills. Physically practicing lockdown procedures before a crisis is absolutely critical. A plan without drills is useless!  ...........................

Read more on Prepare Now Store Facebook.