August 4, 2020

Resource: Blog

Tags: K12 Education, Safety

Ensuring the safety and health of your school community has never been more important or more complex. Many school officials are concerned about how to adjust their school safety/security and emergency preparedness plans to address COVID-19.

While COVID-19 has created many new challenges, requiring rapid adaptations, there are steps that schools can take now to plan, evaluate, implement, and test efforts before re-opening. These steps will help schools be better prepared to make adjustments, should adjustments be required after students return to school for in-person classes.

Strategies to Help Ensure School Safety

Michael Dorn, SafeSchools Training author and international school safety expert, offers the following strategies to help schools reopen safely this fall:

• Develop and/or improve safety communications and channels. The ability to rapidly communicate with a school community (staff, students, parents, etc.) is increasingly important.
• Create policies that allow the superintendent/board members to deviate from pre-established board policies to specifically address COVID-19 health risks. Similarly, review all school safety/security and emergency procedures/policies to see if any conflict with COVID-19 prevention measures. Identifying challenges now can provide districts/schools with more time to address those conflicts.
• Conduct pre-mortem exercises to detect issues that could arise in the fall. These types of exercises help to spot opportunities for improvement, before an issue occurs. Internal personnel often have insider knowledge that outside experts may miss.

How SafeSchools Can Help

The SafeSchools Online Training System offers a suite of COVID-19 courses for both staff and students. You can also easily customize any of the staff or student courses with your own state, local, or district-specific information and resources. Do you have new COVID-19 or re-entry policies you need to distribute to your staff? Upload your policies to our system, and assign them to staff. The system automatically documents users’ review and acceptance.

Interested in learning more about our COVID-19 courses, or how SafeSchools Training can help your school or district distribute important COVID-19 policies and/or procedures? Fill out our Free Trial form.