We never know when an emergency situation will arise. It’s particularly scary to ponder something like that happening at a school, where hardworking teachers and innocent students could find themselves in danger.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to improve school safety so that kids and educators can go in every day with one thing on their minds: learning. Here are six ways to boost school security.
1. Improve Communication
How will your team communicate in the face of an emergency? Curating a strong emergency alert system will make everyone safer. Ensuring it’s subtle will help keep your students as calm as possible, too.
2. Bolster Your Classrooms
Some school emergencies might require teachers to close doors to the exterior, as well as the entryways to their classrooms. Installing a door barricade for schools can instantly lock doors and even alert authorities that you and your students need them.
3. Give Everyone a Job
You should prepare your staff for an emergency situation, and the best way to do so is to assign them with roles to take on when such a situation arises. For instance, have a group who can helm First Aid, another who will contact the authorities, and someone else who can turn off the utilities, if needed. That way, no one is unnecessarily scrambling around — and potentially putting themselves in danger.
4. Vary Your Fire Drills
Having your students practice fire drills is such a valuable use of everyone’s time that you probably do so at least once a month. However, you can make fire drills even more worthwhile by mixing them up.
For starters, you can ring the bell at different points in the day. That way, kids can practice evacuating from different areas of the school. You might close off a particular exit so that teachers can learn the alternative safe routes out of the building, too.
And, if you have monthly fire drills penciled in, you could also try swapping one out for another type of drill. For instance, if your school is somewhere prone to tornadoes, you may want to do a few practice runs of the tornado drill, too.
5. Involve the Students
You won’t depend on your children to diffuse emergency situations. However, they can be empowered to help prevent them in the first place. Open up communication with students — they should know that if they see or hear something, they can share it without getting into trouble.
6. Keep Parents Informed
As scary as it is, parents should know what they need to do in case of a school emergency, too. You may want to send students home with information for parents to read so they know where to go and how to pick their children up if the school has to be evacuated.
Improve School Safety for Everyone
School safety is vital in this day and age. Any steps you take toward securing a school will make a big difference — and in the future, they may come to save lives.
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