Iowa schools’ ‘Disasters Toolkit’ presented to national audience

Even the worst of times can be teaching moments. That’s the thinking behind a collection of advice and best practices developed and distributed by the Iowa Association of School Boards.

“Lessons Learned: Natural Disasters Toolkit for Schools” will be presented today at the annual conference of the American Association of State Policy Services in Chicago. The document and a companion video, developed in the wake of 2008 flood and tornado disasters, are designed to help school boards and districts begin to develop a workable and sustainable response plan to the unknown.

“IASB staff and representatives from Jester Insurance toured the state and talked with folks about their experiences,” IASB President Jack Hill wrote in the toolkit’s introductory letter. “The biggest lessons, which multiple people reiterated, were the importance of relationships, whether between board members and their superintendent, or between the school district and other agencies; and also that teamwork is key in emergency situations, and no one can recover alone.”

IASB Communications Director Megan Hawkins who will be one of the presenters in Chicago this week, said the project began last fall.

“The idea came about as we talked with more and more districts needing guidance after they experience a tornado or floods,” she said. “The staff fielded all sorts of questions, from what funds they could use to what kinds of policies they should have in place to handle different issues that arose. But the other thing we noticed is that these school board/superintendent teams were learning all kinds of really valuable lessons that other schools needed to hear.”

Hawkins points to the Aplington-Parkersburg district, which was devastated by tornadoes, as a good example of lessons learned.

“They learned that the areas that older, common knowledge had told them to designate as tornado shelters — a long hallway that went through the school — was torn apart. The tornado went straight through it,” she said. “Thankfully, the school was empty when the tornado went through, but it reiterated that every building is different and every school needs to have a walk-through with an engineer to determine the safest areas for shelters. Other schools need to know that.”

IASB staff members, accompanied by representatives from Jester Insurance, which insures most Iowa schools, visited school sites in the Aplington-Parkersburg, Dike-New Hartford, Cedar Rapids and Waverly-Shell Rock school districts. They also visited Grant Wood Area Education Agency, located in Cedar Rapids.

The toolkit itself, born from those visits, is broken up into roughly a dozen topics, and each topic has both how to prepare in case of disaster as well as what to when and if disaster strikes.

The practical advice is interspersed with quotations from school administrators as they looked back on what worked and what didn’t.

“Communication was part of our emergency operations,” said Jere Vyverberg, superintendent of Waverly-Shell Rock. “[Officials] met twice a day, but we didn’t know to to best get information out. Roads were still closed. I came back here to type up updates and sent them out to all staff so they knew what was going on. I found out later that those e-mails were going out everywhere. Even overseas. You can’t underestimate the need for communication. There’s a hunger for it. People crave it.”

Hawkins and Mary Gannon, IASB attorney, will present to the convention this afternoon.