The Best Plan for the Worst-Case Scenarios
The nine school districts in Clark County, Washington, collaborate with local emergency response agencies to create a comprehensive, all-hazards approach to school safety.
CLARK COUNTY, Washington—In the paramilitary jargon of emergency responders it’s called an “active shooter scenario” and a possible “mass casualty incident.” It might also be called every school’s nightmare: A school shooting in progress at a local high school. Several victims lie face down and motionless along a narrow hallway. The shooter is holed up in a classroom full of students. Every second counts.
The first police officers and EMTs on the scene set up an incident command system and access a digital map of the school. Within minutes a SWAT team has arrived, studied the situation, and is inside the school. Dressed in black combat gear and gripping assault rifles, they move with clinical precision toward the classroom while securing the hallway for medical personnel. Things happen fast and with controlled force.
Off to one side, Lori Williams, deputy director of school and agency operations for Educational Service District (ESD) 112, stands next to a principal who is visibly shaking.
Fortunately, this is only a training exercise. No students are present, and the roles of casualties, students, and shooter are played by administrators and trainers from across Clark County, Washington. The SWAT team and other emergency responders, however, are very real. And as the shaken principal attests, the training—one of several summits coordinated by the Clark County Safe Schools Task Force during the past decade—is played out with an emotionally jarring authenticity. No one present will forget what they have learned.
The Safe Schools Task Force began quietly, in 1998, with a phone call between then–Vancouver School District Superintendent Jim Parsley and Clark County Sheriff Garry Lucas. Truancy had become a major problem, and the district was looking for support from local law enforcement. That initial phone call prompted further dialogue with ESD 112 Associate Superintendent Jada Rupley and Washington State Representative Val Ogden, leading to a collaboration that soon included all nine school districts in Clark County. Truancy, however, proved to be only the tip of the iceberg.
On May 21st of that year, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel opened fire at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, killing two students and wounding 25. The incident made headlines across the country and added to the growing public alarm about school violence. Beginning in the fall of the 1997–1998 school year, fatal school-related shootings in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, had turned the issue of school safety into something like a national crisis—one that would peak the following year with the Columbine tragedy. Administrators across the country began to ask themselves, as never before: Could it happen here? Are we prepared to deal with it?
Mike Bjur, a veteran educator in Clark County’s Evergreen School District, recalls a similar conversation. “The superintendent at the time called me into his office and said, ’I’m worried that our schools are not well prepared to respond to a situation like Springfield. Would you be willing to help move them in a direction that would make them safer?’”
Bjur’s superintendent was not alone in his urgency. As op-ed pages and talk radio stations debated the cause of this apparent upswing in school violence, many districts, counties, and states scrambled to put school safety—and emergency preparedness in particular—at the top of their priority lists. And for many, it fell just as quickly back down the list as the media glare shifted to another issue. In Clark County that did not happen. Although its genesis was similarly reactionary, the task force’s collaborative approach and long-term commitment have resulted, almost a decade later, in one of the most comprehensive school safety programs in the region, if not the country.
First Step: First Responders
How did a casual phone call and an informal, nameless collaboration lead to such a successful and sustained project? At the beginning, says Bjur, it was a matter of district leadership. “After the Springfield shooting, everything jelled around the idea that we needed to get going on emergency preparedness,” he says. “Each superintendent designated one staff member to be a representative on the task force, and that commitment really gave it legitimacy and got things moving.”
Bjur quickly found himself not only representing the Evergreen district, but acting as chairman for the entire task force—a role he would fill for the next eight years.
As chairman, Bjur’s approach was to expand the existing collaboration between the districts and the police by inviting all relevant emergency response agencies to participate: city and county fire departments, city police, the emergency management staff at the 911 center, the American Red Cross, the Clark County Department of Health, the local chapter of the Trauma Intervention Program, even the SWAT team.
Getting all those agencies to send a representative to a monthly meeting was easier than it might sound, says Bjur. “They were very open to it. They particularly liked the idea of meeting with all of the school districts in the county at once, rather than one at a time. That’s what really moved this forward—we had all nine districts in the county, plus the two state schools [Washington School for the Deaf and Washington State School for the Blind—both located in Clark County] at the table and ready to go.”
A major reason those schools and districts were already at the table was the involvement of ESD 112. Located on a sprawling, single-story campus a few miles east of downtown Vancouver, ESD 112 serves all the schools in Clark County as well as those in five other Southwest Washington counties. Organizing multi-district and multi-county trainings, collaborations, and services is central to their work. One of those services includes managing a multi-district insurance cooperative, which naturally puts them right in the middle of all school safety and risk management issues in the county. Peggy Sandberg, the ESD’s director of risk management, oversees that program and has been a major player on the task force for most of its existence.
According to Sandberg, getting all the relevant emergency response agencies to commit to the task force may have been surprisingly easy, but it’s also extremely rare. “I don’t know of any other county or municipality in the Northwest that has a safe schools task force that is countywide, that involves all of the key players on a consistent basis, and has done so since 1998,” she says. “It’s a testament to the commitment of our superintendents and to the quality of the first responder partners we have.”
Setting the Standard
Part of that commitment can be attributed to the truly collaborative nature of the task force. Each participating agency has its expertise, and each knows when to talk and when to listen. In the beginning, says Bjur, the school personnel did a lot of the latter. “We had all looked around for best practices,” he says, “but the real synergy behind getting this started was in sitting down with the professionals, the first responders, and asking them the question: What can we do to make our schools in Clark County safer places? And then we really listened and drew on their expertise.”
A crucial piece of advice they heard was that an emergency preparedness plan should take a comprehensive, all-hazards approach. Natural disasters, pandemic flu outbreaks, bomb threats, medical emergencies, school shootings, nearby chemical spills—every possibility had to be considered and addressed in clear, consistent policy.
After listening to the first responders, Bjur says, “we just brainstormed a kind of laundry list of things we felt needed to be done, and then we prioritized those.” At the top of the list were things that have since become common—and even legislated (see New Washington State Safety Legislation below) —practice across the state and beyond: school mapping; designation of both a school-based incident commander and an off-campus incident command center; documented school safety plans for each school; and the development of safety standards to guide those plans.
In nearly every case, Clark County was ahead of the curve, enacting policies that would not show up on the statewide radar for several more years. The school mapping program, for instance, (see Mapping the Future of Emergency Response) predated the statewide effort that is still in progress. When the state project began, Clark County simply adapted its own system to fit the state model, becoming one of the first counties to have all its public schools mapped.
Another trailblazing effort has been the development of a comprehensive planning process that goes far beyond that of most districts. First, the task force developed a list of school emergency preparedness standards. Next, Sandberg developed a model emergency response plan that includes everything from chain of command policies to off-campus evacuation sites to reunification between parents and students. (The model plan is available at the ESD 112 Web site: www.esd112.org/insurance/resources.html.) Sandberg and other members of the task force used the standards and the model plan as a template to help every school in all nine districts develop their own comprehensive plans. Many programs would have stopped there, but in Clark County planning is only half the process.
Putting It Into Practice
“The real beauty of this is that these plans don’t just sit on the shelf,” says Lori Williams. “It really is an active exercise that folks have to go through. Anyone can develop a plan, but if it sits on a shelf it’s not going to be of any use in an actual emergency situation.”
Or, as Bjur likes to say, “What gets practiced gets done.”
The regular, schoolwide practice of emergency procedures is therefore built into the Clark County plan. Far beyond the fire drills required by the international fire code, schools conduct mock evacuations, lockdowns, and other procedures at least once a year. Some practices include local police and fire department officials, as well as other relevant agencies. The Evergreen district has even used its entire bus system to practice taking students to the designated off-campus evacuation area.
In addition to individual school practices, the task force conducts half-day school safety summits for all administrators in the county. For the first five years of the task force the summits were held every summer. Although they’re now held every other year, the intense, real-world nature of the trainings—such as the active shooter scenario—makes a lasting impression. Past summits have covered everything from media relations during an emergency situation to a presentation by the U.S. secret service. Last summer, 275 administrators participated in the summit.
Superintendents were again the driving force behind the last major part of the Clark County approach to school safety. Realizing that a comprehensive plan can be allowed to lapse into irrelevance and that regular practice can be conducted poorly, the superintendents asked the task force to conduct annual audits of a dozen schools, roughly 10 percent of all schools in the county.
The task force audit team consists of police and fire representatives and two school personnel. Audits are based on a comprehensive checklist—tied to the safety standards—and are conducted on site, during the school year, and include interviews with the principal and others on the school-based safety team. Schools are evaluated on both their plan and their practice. “They’re actually scored separately,” says Sandberg. “We want to make sure that both pieces are fully in place, so that you don’t have a plan that never gets used or practices that are based on poor planning or simply don’t happen.”
According to Bjur, who has served on many of the audit teams, schools take the evaluations very seriously. “In some cases their practices are better than their plans,” he says, “but from my perspective, I’d rather see that. I think with the planning, just the process of putting it together is probably as valuable as the actual plan itself. But regular practice is essential.”
Always Improving
For the first eight years of its existence the task force met every month, building the foundations of the current system and getting all schools on board. While the meetings are now bimonthly, that in no way implies a slacking off. In fact, the task force continues to expand the scope of its work and to stay ahead of state and national trends. For example, the cycle of developing standards, creating a safety plan, practicing, and evaluating is now being “ramped up” to include each district campus. “We want to make sure they’re prepared for an incident at their own facility,” says Sandberg, “but also that they’re fully trained in how to coordinate with a school—how to provide the resources, the public relations support, the buses, whatever a school needs to handle an emergency.”
Threat assessment training and the preparation for pandemic flu and other mass illnesses are two other ways that the task force has expanded its work, and stayed ahead of the curve. Craig Apperson, director of the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) School Safety Center, acknowledges the groundbreaking nature of the task force’s work. “In the past, if you look at most of the safety plans, public health was not a major presence, but they are now,” he says. “Clark County, for one, has been doing that kind of work for a long time.”
In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy and new state legislation, other districts may soon be taking a closer look at the task force’s work. And Sandberg, in particular, already plays a valuable role in sharing that information with a wider audience. In addition to her work at ESD 112 and on the county task force, she also serves on the Washington State Safety Advisory Committee. “Whatever we develop in Clark County we expand out to the other 30 school districts in our service district,” she says. “And by my attending the state committee I can also share it with them. If they’d like to use the same model that works here in Clark County we can definitely offer up what we’ve learned and developed.”
Since 1998, public schools in Clark County have had police-ordered lockdowns, bomb threats, weapons violations, bullying incidents, medical emergencies, the occasional gang-related violence, and other incidents, much like any other large, fast-growing county. To date, however, there have been no major emergencies—no active shooter scenarios, no mass casualty incidents, no chemical spills or flu pandemics or natural disasters requiring mass evacuation. That, of course, is how everyone hopes it will stay. But it’s comforting to know—for students, parents, staff members, and the entire community—that if a school-related emergency does occur, Clark County is ready. “It’s pretty amazing to see how prepared these schools are to respond to an emergency,” says Bjur. “It doesn’t mean everything is going to go according to that plan, or that everything is going to go well, but it definitely makes it more likely.” 
The New Washington State Safety Legislation
On April 20, 2007, the Washington State Legislature passed Senate Bill 5097, along with a two-year $1.6 million budget allocation, to address school safety issues. The timing was no accident, coming four days after the Virginia Tech shooting and only two days before the end of the legislative session. Emotional reaction to the tragedy undeniably played a role in the passage of the bill, which had previously been stalled in a House committee. The $1.6 million two-year budget also reflects the last-minute nature of the bill. As Craig Apperson, director of OSPI’s Washington State School Safety Center, says, the budget appropriation “vastly understates the actual need in terms of the provisions of the bill.”
According to Apperson, the bill contains 23 separate but overlapping obligations for school districts, including new reporting on hazardous chemicals located on school grounds; expansion of the state’s school mapping program; a new grant program to help districts develop comprehensive safety plans; training of all principals in the use of the National Incident Management System; and an increase in the number and type of safety drills required of schools. Clark County, which has already funded and implemented many of those policies, can be a valuable asset to others in the state, says Apperson. “They’ve definitely done a lot of great work in creating a multidisciplinary, regional approach. It’s something we hope to replicate in other counties across the state.”
Web Extra: see the full interview with OSPI’s Craig Apperson regarding the senate bill and other safe schools issues in Washington state.