By Dr. Kevin Kupietz
Faculty Member, Emergency and Disaster Management, School of Security and Global Studies
Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a series advocating the new idea of an annual National Learn at Home Day. The concept of this day is to strengthen the resiliency from emergencies, disasters and unplanned events that interfere with traditional classroom operations.
Society understands the value of a solid educational system, but sometimes ideas or problems seem to slip through the cracks or are acknowledged as the price of doing business. For example, missed days from school due to weather, emergencies, illness and other unexpected events has become so commonplace that most school systems build “make-up” days into their annual calendars.
In other circumstances, these missed days are just lost to the student’s educational process. But educational resiliency could be improved through at-home drills, even when students cannot make it to their normal educational campus for whatever reason.
Conducting Drills in Schools
In the emergency management world, practice drills are meant to test how well policies, procedures, equipment and stakeholders respond to an emergency. For a properly run drill, the organizers plan it and collect data in order to appropriately evaluate the response system and to find strengths and weaknesses in emergency response.
The analyzed data is then put into an after-action report. That report contains conclusions to help leaders determine the best course of future action in order to provide better protection for students, teachers and administrators during future emergency events.
Drills are not a new concept to school systems. For example, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) states that school systems should run at least one fire/egress drill for every month that students are on campus.
A typical fire drill, for example, is planned by organizers and a policy/procedure is in place, explaining the actions to be taken in the event of a fire. Students, staff, and faculty are also trained on their actions and responsibilities if a fire should occur on campus. On the day of the drill, evaluators are ready to take notes on the event, evaluating factors such as benchmarks, strengths, weaknesses, training deficiencies, and equipment problems.
Start an Emergency and Disaster Management degree |
When the drill is completed, the evaluators compile a report. The report goes to leadership and other key team members so they can look for areas that need improvement and promote an efficient response should a real evacuation ever be needed. This practice and evaluation procedure is a circular, never-ending process, because each new drill provides new opportunities to improve emergency response.
A learn from home drill would work in a similar manner. The process of conducting such a drill would look like other emergency drills a school might run, such as a fire drill, a severe weather drill or even an active shooter drill. The learn from home drill would include training prior to the drill based on the system’s policy/procedures, would set benchmarks and would include an after-action process.
A simplified version of a learn from home drill would include selecting a date, reviewing procedures/policies, conducting training, planning the drill and conducting the drill. Other aspects would include evaluating the drill and writing an after-action report.
Selecting a Date for a Learn from Home Drill
Prior to the new academic year, a school system would determine and publish a date(s) for the learn at home drill. The date would be distributed to all stakeholders in much the same way that a teacher’s workday might be communicated to everyone, including the parents.
Ideally, the date would be at the beginning of the school year to give students early preparation for potential disasters, especially students located in hurricane-prone areas. September would be a particularly good month for a drill, since it aligns with National Preparedness Month, an event advocated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In addition, drill organizers could form partnerships, distribute educational material and create ads to make National Learn from Home Day correspond to National Preparedness Month.
Reviewing Local Learn from Home Policies and Procedures
Prior to running the drill, a school system should review its learn from home policy and procedures to ensure that they are up to date, accessible, and usable by all stakeholders. If National Learn from Home Day catches on nationally, there may be many school systems that find that they must rewrite these plans/procedures and adopt them as part of their process.
Some school systems may choose to write these plans up in a similar format to emergency action plans created by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). Other school systems may choose to write their plans to resemble FEMA’s Business Continuity Plan. Ideally, the school system would look at both approaches, taking the best of both designs as applicable to ensure the desired outcomes for the drill.
Training for Emergency Drills
For a successful drill, all stakeholders need to be trained in their responsibilities prior to the event. This training might be done through simple written communications or with more involved training. At first, some drill concepts might be so new to different stakeholders that more involved training might be needed.
For example, if the Learn from Home plan included a particular learning management system (LMS), the school may choose to offer basic training to students, faculty, and parents on basics such as how to access the school’s LMS, log in, and turn in assignments. One of the issues that has seen in alternative learning during COVID-19 lockdowns was that many parents or caregivers were not able to help students with simple technology issues, especially when troubleshooting was needed.
Planning the Drill
FEMA’s Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) is a great tool for school systems to use with each of the drill phases, including planning, implementation and analysis. Key concepts in the drill plan would be to set goals and objectives as well as to determine implementation and evaluation points.
Overall, the best drill plans are those that are formed with a diverse group of stakeholders who have different perspectives. This holistic approach tends to result in a greater level of success.
Holding the Emergency Drill
Ideally, all the stakeholders will have been made aware of the drill and their role in it by the day the drill occurs. Parents should make arrangements in advance for their children, just as they would for a school holiday or teacher’s workday. Faculty members would know their roles and have lessons ready as they would any other school day, and students would understand what was expected of them.
A drill day commonly has many variables that could occur, depending on the objectives of the drill as set forth by the school system. A school system might continue with normal lessons, or it may decide to utilize pre-made lessons that review and reinforce grade-specific competencies.
A school system could also utilize specialized programs. For example, if the drill day is in conjunction with National Preparedness Month, generic lessons like those in the Student Tools for Emergency Planning (STEP) curriculum or other similar programs could be utilized.
The drill day phase is when the drill program can really get creative. There is a proverb that it takes a village to raise a child, so other local organizations could become involved in the drill. Additional partnerships can be created through the school to help educate students outside of the classroom.
For example, neighborhood groups could be formed, allowing students to come together in small groups to learn under the supervision of local volunteers. Another great idea might be to collaborate with local colleges and universities, who could provide students to serve as volunteer educators.
The Department of Education’s Federal Work-Study Program already allows for and encourages universities to utilize some of their work-study funds to pay college students to help in nonprofit community services, including tutoring. There are many different ideas that have been developed through COVID-19 educational transitions that could be utilized as best practices to help schools be prepared for future emergencies resulting in school closings.
Evaluating the Drill
It is important to remember that drills and exercises are meant to train and test people. There is almost always room for improvement in any system.
As part of the planning process, each learn at home drill would have a general goal but also specific, measurable objectives that the drill would test. These objectives might range widely.
For instance, one objective would be to determine the percentage of students who were able to login and successfully participate in the school’s LMS. Another objective could be to test the effectiveness of faculty lessons for learn at home events or even factors outside the immediate control of the school, such as the internet access and capability of the community. The evaluation should clearly identify who is evaluating what objective and how that objective is judged.
Another form of useful evaluation could be a self-evaluation. For instance, stakeholders could be asked how they thought the drill went and to provide their perspective. What challenges did they face and/or what things worked well? The evaluation is often the most overlooked but critical piece of the puzzle to find and fix gaps in an emergency response system.
Writing After-Action Reports
With the evaluations and data collected from a drill, organizers can draw conclusions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the educational system’s learn from home program. Typically, the after-action report serves as a roadmap for understanding the past and present and improving future emergency responses.
To make the most of the data collected from a drill, a detailed report should be written and shared with all stakeholders on the drill’s results. This report would identify key strategies for the school system to make in order to improve emergency response capabilities, identify responsible parties and create suggested timelines. With such detail, it will become easier to track the progress of desired changes so they are not forgotten, and the school system would then use that information for future drills or real-world events.
Repeating the Drill Process
The drill process should be continually repeated each year and build upon the success of the drills from previous years. The findings of the after-action report (AAR) would be used to plan for the next year’s drill.
After each success, the drill’s objectives would hopefully change, so that organizers would improve new areas or even test new challenges to school outages. For example, after a school has a good handle on using technology to continue the educational process out of the classroom, a new version of the drill may test what happens when internet service is down. This situation occurred after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico where internet service was out in most areas for weeks. By looking at different challenges and training for worst-case scenarios, a school system can more efficiently deal with a real disaster incident when it occurs.
We Must Ensure That Disasters Can’t Interfere with Our Children’s Education
In today’s global economy, it is more important than ever to ensure that our children stay competitive, and the best way to do that is ensure those children receive a solid education. Each day that a student is out of school results in a loss of learning.
While we cannot prevent all of the different events that keep children out of the classroom, we can create mitigation plans that seamlessly transition students from normal, in-person learning to alternative learning methods. The only way to achieve this kind of efficiency though is through practice and learning from past experiences.
Note to reader: Please leave comments of your ideas on how this could be best be implemented or examples that you have seen, heard, or read about that could be beneficial and further the idea of a National Learn at Home Day.
Comments are closed.