Safety first – LWSD staff, community members and emergency personnel practice incident response

The top priority in Lake Washington School District (LWSD) is the health and safety of our students and staff. During their monthly meeting on February 12, members of the LWSD Safety Advisory Council, which includes district leaders, parent representatives and local emergency personnel, performed a tabletop exercise to focus on emergency preparedness. LWSD maintains the Safety Advisory Council to provide district-wide guidance with our community partners in safety, security and emergency preparedness and to set overall direction of district-wide safety and security measures.

In the exercise, groups of about 10 people simulated an emergency situation in which students were already on campus before a snowstorm was to hit the region. Representatives from the City of Kirkland’s Emergency Management team were the facilitators. Everyone was broken up into three groups and each represented a different district school. Each group had to assess and coordinate the risk and safety associated with sending students home early. There is an abundance of coordination that is needed in order to get students home safely. Each table had a giant map of the campus they were focused on with figurines representing where staff should be located to assist with a reunification plan. Coordinating the process of getting students home when parents might be at work and unreachable, buses may or may not be available, and each student needs to be accounted for is a massive task. And, as what might happen in a real life scenario, the facilitators inserted surprise challenges and obstacles that would pop up as the day unfolded; which provided a good opportunity for each group to practice handling unforeseen situations.

Throughout the exercise, teams would have a check in with the rest of the group to see how everyone was handling the emergency. This provided an opportunity for brainstorming, information sharing and solution building that could be applied in a real life event. Incidentally, these exercises were somewhat put to the test just a couple of weeks later when several schools had to close due to power outages from a windstorm after students had already arrived on campus. Having the opportunity to proactively test out these situations puts LWSD in a better position to effectively handle anything that may arise at our schools.