Lesson Overview

After your plan is developed, you need to ensure staff and students are familiar with emergency procedures and have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the tasks in the plan. You also need to keep your plan up to date.

This lesson addresses processes to ensure you train, exercise, and maintain your plan. At the completion of this lesson you should be able to:

Explain the benefits of training and exercising the school emergency operations plan (EOP).
Identify the types of exercises available to exercise the school’s plan.
Describe steps for developing effective exercises.
Describe how exercise results are used to improve school preparedness efforts.

Implement and Maintain the Plan

The CPG planning process contributes to overall preparedness for your school as part of a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, equipping, training, exercising, evaluating, and improving.

Earlier lessons introduced the first five steps of the CPG planning process. This lesson reviews step 6, implement and maintain the plan. This step includes:

Training,
Exercising, and
Reviewing, revising, and maintaining the plan.

Benefits of Training

Once the school plan has been approved, the next step is training. Training provides staff, students, parents, and other stakeholders with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to perform procedures and critical tasks to respond during an emergency.

Benefits of training on the school EOP include:

Enabling school personnel and students to respond rapidly and effectively in times of stress.
Enhancing the school’s preparedness capabilities.
Familiarizing staff, students, parents, and other stakeholders with processes, policies, and procedures.
Allowing staff, students, parents, and other stakeholders to acquire and retain the knowledge and skills needed to implement the school’s EOP.

Types of Training

Because time and budgets are tight at schools, it may not be possible to provide all training in a traditional classroom environment. Consider delivering training in different ways depending on what needs to be conveyed:

Briefings: Short meetings that provide information about a specific topic (e.g., new evacuation sites, tips on how to use the student information system to find student contact information, new district contact information).
Seminars/classroom training: Used to introduce new programs, policies, or procedures. Provide information to students and staff on roles and responsibilities. This may also include training presented outside of the school (e.g., first aid, CERT).
Workshops: Resemble a seminar but are employed to build specific products, such as a draft plan or policy.

Training, Then Exercising

Once you have conducted training, then you can begin to conduct exercises on the procedures in the EOP.

Exercises build on the knowledge acquired in the training to:

Allow testing of emergency policies, plans, and procedures.
Provide a safe environment to practice procedures using equipment and resources.
Build relationships that result in better coordination and communication during an incident.

Benefits of Exercising the Plan

You’ve trained everyone. Now how do you know if the procedures in your EOP will work? Conduct exercises to . . .

Assess and validate policies, plans, procedures, training, equipment, assumptions, and partnerships in a safe and controlled environment.
Raise awareness of potential crisis situations.
Clarify roles and responsibilities.
Improve partnerships, coordination, and communication.
Identify gaps in resources.
Measure performance.
Identify opportunities for improvement.

Planning Exercises

Your school planning team needs to identify what exercises to conduct and when.

Begin with exercises that focus on a small part of the EOP, or on one specific procedure. Later add more complex exercises.
Conduct exercises whenever new equipment is purchased or installed, or when new policies or procedures are developed.

Exercises determine how the plan worked, and do not focus on the performance of individuals.

Selecting Exercises

There are two main categories of exercises:

Discussion-based exercises, which are used to familiarize personnel with procedures and policies. Facilitators lead the discussion and keep participants on track.
Operations-based exercises, which are used to validate the plan. These exercises help clarify roles and responsibilities, identify gaps in resources, and improve performance. They include drills, functional exercises, and full-scale exercises.

Your school planning team selects the type of exercise based on what is to be validated, the training and exercises that have already been conducted, and available resources.

Tabletop Exercises

A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based activity in which a simulated scenario is presented and participants in the exercise respond as if the scenario were really happening. Tabletop scenarios are often based on actual incidents at the school or recent events in the news, particularly from neighboring communities or nearby States.

Tabletops:

Involve key personnel and emergency responders.
Allow participants to assess the plan and response procedures.
Encourage participant discussions, problem solving, and decision-making in a low-stress environment.

Full-Scale Exercise

A full-scale exercise is a multiagency, multijurisdictional, multidiscipline operations-based exercise involving functional (e.g., Joint Field Office, emergency operations center) and “boots on the ground” response (e.g., firefighters decontaminating mock victims).

To test the EOP using functional or full-scale exercises, schools may wish to inquire about upcoming community-wide exercises. In addition to exercising specific procedures and policies, these large-scale exercises can provide schools with an opportunity to test how their school EOP fits into the community EOP.

Drills

Drills are operations-based exercises that usually test a single specific operation or function within a single entity. Conducted in a realistic environment, drills are often used to test new policies or equipment, practice current skills, or prepare for larger scale exercises.

Conducting Drills

To successfully conduct a drill:

Plans, policies, and procedures must be clearly defined and personnel must be familiar with them.
Personnel must be trained on the processes and procedures to be drilled.
It must be clear that a drill is being conducted, and that the situation is not an actual emergency.
Evaluation and feedback must be included in the drill process.
First responders should be included.

Using Drills for Simulated Emergencies

Drills can test how well faculty, staff, and students respond to simulated emergencies including:

Bomb threats.
Fire and/or explosion.
Severe weather, such as a tornado.
Intruder.
HazMat incident, either originating inside or outside the school.
Other incidents identified as hazards in your school EOP.

Using Drills To Exercise Procedures

Your school may conduct drills involving the entire population or just a classroom. Drills are used to test response procedures to ensure that students and staff understand what they are supposed to do—and can do it quickly in a simulated emergency. The following procedures can be exercised with a drill:

Evacuation
Reverse evacuation
Bus evacuation
Lockdown
Shelter-in-place
Drop, cover, and hold

Evacuation

Evacuation Drills