Our emergency operations plan is a document that runs almost 100 pages and covers almost every contingency that you can think of. Developed years ago, the responsibility for maintaining the plan falls to our school safety official, Mr. Bell. He takes this responsibility very seriously, and I think we are all glad that he does. Along with providing contingencies for a plethora of emergency situations, the plan also requires the district conduct a series of drills over the course of the school year. You may be familiar with some from your own time as a child in a school, primarily among them the fire and tornado drill. A more recent addition to the plan is a full evacuation and reunification drill, which is designated part of our ALICE response in the event of a dangerous situation.
While outlined in Iowa Code, how we conduct those drills is determined locally. Since tornado and fire drills have been part of our lexicon for decades, conducting them is a routine order of business. But conducting full evacuation drills with reunification have never been executed for a whole host of reasons. Among the reasons cited include the logistics of doing so, and the fact that we anticipated running a drill like this might be pretty traumatic for our younger students. (Indeed, one of the lessons learned from this episode is that it was quite upsetting for many of our young students.) So, these type of drills were conducted through 'tabletop simulations' and by holding our annual 'safety week' with students.
Safety week is an opportunity for classroom teachers and Mr. Bell to walk all of our students through our safety plans in an age appropriate manner. They learn about ALICE and what the acronym means: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate and how we apply those principles in our school. We even have a 'kid friendly' book (I'm Not Scared...I'm Prepared) that teachers read to them. They talk about what to do in the event of an emergency and how we are going to keep them safe.
The trouble with this exercise and conducting simulations, is that we didn't know if they would actually work in a real emergency. I mean, in theory we had a good plan. A detailed plan. A voluminous plan. But would it work? Over the course of many years we debated about whether or not we should take it to the next step and run a full evacuation drill, but it always came back to the reasons listed above.
We found out last week that, for the most part the plan does work. I want to take a few minutes today and walk you through some of the thinking that went into the development of the plan and how decisions were made while the evacuation was unfolding. For starters, the 'cat is out of the bag' as far as our relocation sites are concerned. Those sites were considered confidential and not publicly disclosed for multiple reasons. In fact, much of the emergency operations plan remains confidential and is not considered a public document, so I won't be able to get into too many details as to what is included in the plan. But I can provide a behind the scenes look at how that incident unfolded.
As luck would have it, the entire district leadership team was in a meeting that morning, discussing of all things the statewide review of social studies standards and the implications for curriculum adoption and alignment in Hudson Schools. The first call that I received was from the public works director, which I didn't pick up, thinking I could call him back later. Not a minute later, I received a call from SRO Husidic, which I will always answer. He informed me that a contractor had hit a main gas line on the corner of Wood and School. It had caused a rupture and they were recommending we evacuate the high school. That set our emergency operations plan in motion. Mr. Dieken headed to the high school to assess the situation while the balance of the team started moving students off the playground and into the building. I hurried to the site of the leak so I could get a more detailed report as to what exactly was going on. During my walk over, Mr. Dieken called and informed me they were beginning the evacuation and headed to our first designated fallback site: Community Church of Hudson. Upon receiving a briefing from the City of Hudson, it was then recommended we evacuate the entire campus. I called the other principals and told them to begin the evacuation. I then called Mrs. Petry, who was off work that day and asked her to alert the bus drivers and have them begin staging at Community Church.
When we order an evacuation, our teachers are instructed to grab their 'safety bucket' and get the students to the Community Church of Hudson as quickly as possible. Both Mr. Dieken and Mr. Bell were among the first to arrive at the church, and as such assumed the role of incident commanders. There main responsibility at that point included directing traffic and begin accounting for all our students as they arrived at the site. In the meantime, Dr. Zellmer and Mrs. Betts stayed onsite completing a building sweep to ensure all our students had in fact evacuated and were enroute. I was gathering information from the scene of the leak and crafting the first, of what would be many statements to our parents and community.
I was among the last to arrive at Community Church and upon doing so asked for reports from administrators as to whether or not we had accounted for everyone. We convened in a small conference room to determine our next steps once we learned it would be several hours before we could return to campus. The decision was made at that point to move to our designated reunification site, Prairie Lakes Church in Cedar Falls.
Now, you may be wondering why we have two separate sites for our students. Good question, as they both serve different functions. The Community Church of Hudson is our first fallback position and is used as a collection site where students have been instructed to report to in the case of an emergency. It gives us a chance to gather information and take stock of what is occurring on campus. We use it as our first accountability checkpoint, and it is close enough to return to campus if it is deemed safe to do so. It is also far enough away that students are removed from any potential hazard.
Prairie Lakes is our designated reunification site because it is large enough and far enough away to accommodate the reunification of students with families. If you were in Community Church during this evacuation, you would have noticed that, while we were able to get everyone in the building it was very tight. There would have been no way we could have successfully executed a secure and safe reunification at Community Church.
So, we started loading the buses and moving to reunification. Over the course of the next several hours, we were able to feed all of our elementary and middle school students and reunify students with parents in a safe and orderly fashion. For the most part, our plan operated as designed due to the planning and preparation of our team. Everyone remained calm and simply completed their assigned task, whether it was supervising a class of students, acting as a 'runner' or helping families fill out the verification paperwork. That's not to say there aren't areas where the process can be improved, which is why we are currently conducting a debrief with our staff.
I could not be prouder of how our staff operated on a day when theory met practice.
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