All Clear: Lessons From A Decade of Managing School Crises

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Chris Jaffe. Chris is the founder of Jaffe Emergency Services, where he works with more than 2,000 schools across the United States with about 650 employees in 34 states. He served as an EMS first responder, studied paramedicine at UCLA, and holds a master's in technology, business, and integrated design from the University of Southern California. And he's the author of the new book, All Clear, Lessons from a Decade Managing School Crises.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

Chris, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with you about a topic that we're never thrilled to think about, but need to, and that is when a crisis occurs. And I wonder if we could start just by having you say a little bit about how you got into this world of crisis management.

[01:07] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I mean, as you said, so I started as an EMS first responder. I was responding to 911 calls. And at the very beginning, quite frankly, I was just frustrated. That's really how this all started. I was frustrated because I would get to a scene and I would find a patient and I would find people standing around that patient.

[01:25]

But frequently, nobody had started to help. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody felt comfortable or confident. For whatever reason, people weren't actively helping the patient that needed help. And so I started a CPR and first aid training business. And I thought, okay, I'll just try to get people to help when somebody else needs help, when somebody else's safety depends on them.

[01:45]

And then over the course of time, I started training schools. And schools decided that CPR and first aid training wasn't far enough. They said, hey, can you help us with our fire drills and our earthquake drills? I'm based in Southern California, so earthquakes are our natural disaster du jour. And they said, can you help us with those two? And Over the course of time, that became then lockdown drills and crisis management and helping to respond after a crisis had occurred.

[02:08]

And so really over the last 15 years, we've just kind of found ourselves just building in concentric circles around our schools. And whereas I used to be... working in a whole other job. I used to be thinking about other industries.

[02:20]

Today, we work in two spaces. We work with schools, we work with events, and that's because that's where communities are.

[02:25] SPEAKER_00:

Right. That's where large numbers of people are and where they have to have a plan. We have to have a plan if something bad happens. Well, take us into the anatomy of a crisis. And I know your book is very well organized to help us understand kind of every phase of a crisis, even starting before one occurs. Help us think about the overall structure of a prepared approach to thinking about crises.

[02:48] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is the fun of the work. I think so often people think about crises as really unique or novel experiences, and One of the things that the book focuses on that I focus on in my work is that quite truthfully, the first few minutes of any crisis could be different, right? The impetus might be different if it's an earthquake versus if it's a lockdown or if it's a fire versus a medical emergency. Of course, those first few moments are going to look different. But as we get into the crisis response, our response is going to follow the contours at least of the same design over and over and over again. And what's great about that, I'll kind of start with the end in mind and then I'll back you through the process here, is that means that when we prepare for a fire or when we prepare for an earthquake or we prepare for a lockdown or we prepare for a medical emergency, we're preparing for all emergencies.

[03:38]

It means that our work is exponentially more valuable because of the fact that we are able to translate that work across multiple different scenarios. So let's go through this from the beginning to the end, if you're OK with it. I'll kind of start with the first seven seconds. I use seconds and then minutes and then hours. You'll follow along here. But I use this structure because I find that what we need to think about first is, what do I need every single person on my campus to do in the first seven seconds of an emergency?

[04:08]

And I have to be honest, I know it's principals who are listening, right? And folks who are deeply focused on the safety and security of their communities, folks who know every single student, every single parent in your community. We often think as principals and as leaders about how we're going to be the ones to take charge. And I have to tell you, in the first seven seconds, we don't even have time to understand sometimes the depth or breadth of the emergency. And so the first seven seconds are about just acknowledging that this thing is actually happening. bypassing denial acknowledging that this thing is happening and then maybe just maybe directing those immediately around you and getting yourself into a position of safety and so frustratingly i know for our principles this is not the time where you're like communicating and talking to families and leading the media statement this is the time where you're actively just kind of processing what is happening and getting yourself to a place where you can even begin to take leadership

[05:02]

And again, whether that's a medical emergency, a person on campus who doesn't belong there, or a fire, doesn't make a huge difference. Of course, how you get yourself to safety is going to vary very significantly, but that you need to get yourself to safety to start is not. Then we'll kind of progress through those next few minutes. The minutes become this focus of doing really what our principals do best, right? Making decisions, building communication, and getting that communication to the people in our communities who need it. That includes, of course, the people who are on campus.

[05:34]

And I think one of the places that we forget often in those first few minutes the people who aren't on campus too, right? Our families need to hear from us. Our districts need to hear from us. Our local police authorities or fire authorities or other agencies may need to hear from us depending on the circumstances. And so those are just the first two sections of the emergency. And I'll maybe for the sake of this moment, go on to the next, which I find every single principal needs to lead, regardless of whether your school is a hundred students, 10 students, a thousand students, every single principal needs to have at least the skills to get to the hours phase.

[06:07]

And the hours phase is the one that we see on the media. It's the one that parents experience the most meaningfully. It's also the one that influences, I believe, at least the most significantly, how many students are going to come back to school. And when I talk about the hours phase, what I'm really talking about is reunification. I'm talking about giving every single student back to every single family. And of course, it's our goal.

[06:33]

It's our objective that we do that. There are times when we don't have the ability to give every single student back. We'll kind of talk about that. But most importantly, it's the process of getting our community reunited, students with families. And so what I'll ask folks to do, and I love to give an action item, so I'll give you one here, is to think, are you prepared at this point to get not through just the first few seconds, those first seconds where you just get yourself to safety, not just the first few minutes where you start communicating to others, but all the way through giving students back to families? And if your answer is no, A, I want you to keep listening, but B, I want you to start to think about what you need to do to close that gap so that you can get prepared for those first few hours.

[07:15]

Your district, your other resources, other agencies can jump in. We can jump in and help you right after the few hours, but you've got to be able to navigate those first few hours on your own in most cases.

[07:25] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I'm glad you had that kind of, not necessarily the end game, but that first milestone of reunifying students with their families. And I think one of the things that's so challenging about that for school leaders is often the families show up right away, like within minutes, now that everybody has cell phones, kids are texting their parents anytime anything happens. And in some cases when nothing has happened, but certainly when there actually is an emergency, parents start showing up. They say, I want my kid now. I want to get my kid out of here.

[07:52]

And of course, if we have hundreds and hundreds of cars showing up in the middle of something, that could make things much worse. So we started with just like recognizing and acknowledging for ourselves that it's happening, that the unthinkable has occurred. Maybe this was something that we never thought would occur in our career. as school leaders, but recognizing that it is occurring. Take us through the next few phases to get us to that reunification point and talk to us about how we can do that without the chaos of everybody showing up and demanding their kids and all of the kind of drama that we're used to. I think it starts at the very beginning of the crisis.

[08:27] SPEAKER_01:

I think it starts with establishing an individual as the incident commander. And determining it in most cases, principles, that's you. I'll say, I want to be honest, it doesn't have to be you. And I think often we assume it's the principle. So I'll just take a quick side path here to talk about this, because I know there are some principles who are phenomenal in crisis, right? You are driven to this work because that's who you are.

[08:52]

But I also know there are some who are not a fan for one reason or another. Right. And maybe our own individual trauma. Right. It may be that we've had an experience that makes crises particularly or acutely challenging for us as individuals. It may be that we're just not big fans of them, that we don't like dealing with fire, police, all those other agencies with our faculty, even in these kind of high stakes, high stress moments.

[09:17]

That's OK. If you're not the best person, if it's not your best foot forward when you're managing a crisis, then give somebody else the responsibility. Assign somebody else as the, quote, incident commander. So it starts with having that incident commander, somebody who is in charge and going to be on campus at all times. Ideally, you should have three people just in case, especially if it's you, in case you're at a meeting off campus, if you're somewhere else during the day, if you have a lunch meeting, any of those sorts of things. You ideally have three folks who could step into that role.

[09:46]

And then it starts, continues to rather, actually starting to use the infrastructure of the incident command system. And I know that's kind of a federal term, a fancy term, but incident command system, the incident command system is really just a function of who's in charge and who are they communicating to. And so that brings up this challenge of, well, yeah, we are going to have to communicate. And so you mentioned this, but our families are going to hear from their students almost immediately. The reality is, unless our students don't have cell phones, which even if they have the new pouches, even if they have...

[10:20]

Our students have cell phones. They have a mechanism of communicating to our families. And so our families are going to hear. And that means that we as a school need to communicate as well. And so what we need to start to do and we should start to do quickly is get a message out to families that says, here's the situation. absolutely can be a holding message, a very simple couple sentence message, and it should go out via text, phone call, and email.

[10:44]

And it may just say, there is an emergency happening on campus. Student safety is our top priority. We will communicate again in 10 minutes. It may be that simple. And then in 10 minutes, well, in nine minutes, we'll communicate again. And we might have to send that same message, right?

[10:58]

We still may not know what's going on. But over the course of those increments of time, what we're going to get to is sending out a message that says families, we're ready for you to come pick up your children. There is always a possibility that some families, maybe even most families, will come before that. But if it's a police-involved situation, there's a good chance police will actually stop them from entering campus. If it's a natural disaster, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, wildfire, those sorts of concerns, there's a decent chance they won't be able to get to campus. And so that may take them a little bit longer But regardless, as they start to get to campus, we'll get them into a holding area where we can gather them, we can speak to them, we can share with them any updates that are taking place.

[11:41]

And then at the same time, we've got a separate team that's focused on student safety. If we're talking about one of those natural disasters, that team might actually be doing food and water distribution because kids may be on campus that long. If we're talking about something like a police-involved incident, a lockdown, an active shooter, some of those really, really fast-moving scenarios, then there's a good chance that we're going to be able to reunify kids well before that time for food and water comes up. But either way, we're trying to manage these two distinct populations. And the best tool we have is visual separation. As soon as a family sees their child, a parent, a guardian, anybody, an uncle, any of those folks, see their child, the one they're there for after an emergency.

[12:25]

For those that are parents that are listening, you know this feeling. You're running to that child. That child is running to you. You're picking them up. You're hugging them as tightly as you can. And then from there, it's a question of whether or not we can get the paperwork done.

[12:37]

But we will have lost control as a school. And so we want to run this in a really systematized manner. There are some really great models out there. The I Love You Guys Foundation has a great one. We have some tools that we use at Jaffe with our schools. It doesn't actually matter which of the protocols you use.

[12:54]

What matters is that you have one and that you practice it.

[12:57] SPEAKER_00:

So I'll pause there for just a second. Yeah, some very good points. When kids do get picked up, we need to know that they got picked up and make sure that it was okay that they got picked up by the person who picked them up because there are a lot of potential risks to the wrong person picking up a student or a student going with a friend and then the parent doesn't know that the student went with a friend. We've got to get that right or else we're going to be in trouble. hot water very quickly. Talk to us a little bit about the parent panic that is inevitable when we send out a message like, hey, we've got an emergency at the school.

[13:27]

We'll send you an update in 10 minutes. What are parents doing during that time? What are they thinking? And How do we reel that in when we have the opportunity? Because obviously, parents are going to want to know all of the details now before we have a chance to really communicate them. And people get upset when we don't share everything that we possibly could have shared as fast as they wanted.

[13:52]

I love that.

[13:52] SPEAKER_01:

I think there's a couple layers here. And again, it starts well before the emergency occurs. But let's just start with that sort of feeling, that reality, that as a parent, you get that message that says there's an emergency at school. And then you have to assume they're also getting a message from their child. And that message from their child, again, let's take a fifth grader. And let's assume that the fifth graders on campus hears everybody be told to move into a secure campus.

[14:18]

That's the message that they hear. Now, we know that a secure campus might be a tool that we use for something that happened 4, 5, 10 miles away. But that fifth grader may or may not know that. And so that fifth grader's perception of what's happened is something akin to like a zombie apocalypse. Right there. That's their perspective of what's going on.

[14:37]

The text to their family is like, you know, hey, there's a zombie apocalypse. Now, the family's reading of that text is like, I don't know what the exponential of a zombie apocalypse is, but it's that it's really, really bad. Right. That's the assumption that the family makes. And so there's a couple of ways that we can kind of manage that. And again, this is before the incident starts.

[14:58]

The first is at the beginning of the school year, I like to stand up and talk with our families across the entire network of our schools and say, everybody, this is the timeline of the disaster. This is what you can expect to hear and see. And here are some of the terms that we're going to use on campus in case your children use them. So let's define, let's articulate, let's set expectations at the very beginning of the school year. then everybody's doing these drills. You're required to do a variety of drills, depending on what state you're in, all throughout the year.

[15:27]

Use those systems again. So send out a phone call, a text message, and an email that says, we're activating our fire drill procedure. If this were a real emergency, you would receive a holding message that said, there is a fire on campus. We are evacuating all students. Student safety is our top priority. We'll text you again in 10 minutes.

[15:45]

and remind families of that. And then you can then follow up. And by the way, I know this sounds like a lot of work. It is. But you can then follow up with an email and say, families, I want you to know this is what we experienced in our fire drill today. This is what we learned from our fire drill today.

[15:57]

And this is what would have happened if it were a real emergency. You're bridging that dialogue all throughout the school year so that when you face a real emergency, you have the ability to hearken back and say, remember two weeks ago when we did our fire drill and we did exactly what we said we would do at the beginning of the school year? Well, that's what we did during this real emergency. And it gives you that power. It gives you that sort of routine even that you can then fall back to. And so you're actually doing two things with this.

[16:26]

The first is you're training your community. You're kind of setting expectations. You're giving them a foundation of what to expect. But the second is you're building your muscle memory as a leadership team. And so now you know those text messages are going to families. You know those phone calls are going out because you've tested, you've checked, and you've had the survey data back to prove that data was or was not getting out.

[16:47]

And so your systems are that much tighter as a result of just having practiced. And so I think that's the best way that schools can mitigate those moments. And by the way, you'll notice that I didn't say families aren't going to have that fear, right? Or that the text that says the zombie apocalypse is happening. I'm not saying that's not going to happen. I'm saying instead, I think we can kind of build these systems so that in parallel to that really scary text that a family receives, they're also getting something more familiar to them, something that we told them they would receive and something that reinforces our commitment to their child safety.

[17:24] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, just setting that expectation and getting people in the habit of expecting a follow-up. You know, okay, I'm getting some notification. It does not tell me everything I want to know, but I'm used to that. I'm going to get a follow-up later, so I'm not going to panic in the meantime. Or I may panic, but I'm at least not going to show up on campus banging on the door in the next 10 minutes. So there's a lot in the book about those early phases, about the initial response and through reunification.

[17:51]

Talk to us about what happens after a crisis, because we might breathe such a deep breath of relief at the end of the immediate crisis that we forget to think about what happens next. So what does need to happen next after reunification?

[18:11] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so there are a couple of analogies that I use to describe crises. And the first, everything we've talked about is it's like climbing the biggest mountain you've ever climbed in your entire life. And you get to the very top, you reunify every child, you send home your faculty and staff. And then you look up and you realize that you're just at the base of the very next mountain. And that mountain is even bigger than the one you just came over. Because the reality is, after the crisis, especially if we have students or staff who have been physically injured or worse, we're going to have this incredible burden of responsibility for our communities to care for them, to bring them back together, to build unity, to reconnect with them, to explain what happened, to do all of those different things.

[18:57]

And at the same time, these were members of our community too. And so we have to remember that as leaders, that we have our own experience and our own grief, our own response that we'll now have to manage. And so I'll use this same sort of structure where we go from the hours into the days and I'll set some milestones for folks. As we jump from reunification, as we jump to that next phase, we're looking at the seven days after the emergency. And in general, what I'll say is that by the seventh day, This sounds like another reference, but by the seventh day, we need to be in a position where we can reopen school. Students and adults benefit from routine.

[19:36]

We know that to be true. And so the faster we can bring our communities back together. Now I will say, I really don't like the word always. I also don't like the word never. So there are always opportunities. extenuating circumstances to this or circumstances that will warrant a different response.

[19:51]

But as a general rule, I like to have folks back in school at the very least in modified school days. So maybe we're not doing academics yet, but we're back on campus with counseling. Maybe we're not doing counseling even. We're just back on campus being on campus together and talking with one another. So the structure might look different, but we're back on campus. And that's a really important piece.

[20:13]

It's also really important that faculty and staff get back. Frankly, we saw this during COVID. The longer folks were away from our buildings, the more scary our buildings became. And so especially if the emergency wasn't directly on campus, we deal with these often where there's an incident off campus, a dismissal or a kidnapping or something that may have happened to a community member, but be kind of separate physically from the community itself. And so in those circumstances, even more so, we need to get back on campus so that we can all sort of recognize that campus is safe, campus is secure, campus wasn't the center of the concern. Again, of course, if that in fact is true.

[20:51]

But then as we kind of move from the days into the weeks that follow the emergency, this is where we come back to this idea of what is our, quote, new normal. And again, we've used that word a ton in the COVID response, even in the early days to COVID and the post-COVID, whatever you want to call that. It's a bit tired, that phrase. But what I'll say is I find that some school leaders, some principals have this desire to say, we're going to go back to normal. And that normal is a frame or a source of comfort for us as a leader. It's probably not the source of comfort for the community.

[21:25]

And oftentimes the solution for our community is to say, you know, we're not gonna go back to normal. We're not going to pretend that day didn't happen. We're not going to look beyond it. We're gonna allow that to become woven in as part of the texture of our community. Now, again, this ranges broadly depending on what the incident was. One of my favorite stories is we had a school that nearly burned down in a wildfire and the fire burned, I mean, basically up to the edges of campus.

[21:51]

And as the school leader evacuated and evacuated students and everybody, of course, people are now safe because in those first few seconds and minutes I was taking care of, in the next few minutes, they grabbed portraits off of the wall. Old portraits are really important to the school. And so as we entered the week's phase, there was this beautiful symbology of what remained of the school. We still weren't sure if the school was sound, actually. And so we had these beautiful sort of symbols of who the school was and what the school was that we were able to hold on to. And that's sort of the focal point of those weeks that follow.

[22:28]

What I'll say, though, is that often we think about crises into the weeks and then we forget that there are next phases. And although we won't dig deeply into them today because there's lots and lots of resources that will be at your beck and call as you get into that space as a principal, as a leader who needs them. The reality is that crises will sit with a community for months to years. And so in the book, in fact, I describe kind of what are the remnants of a major crisis seven months later, and then even seven years later. If I kind of go all the way back to the beginning, back to that very first milestone of getting back on campus, one of the things I want folks focused on is what is our attendance rate as we come back? And a measure of that, a measure of or I should say a way to influence that, is how well did we do reunification?

[23:19]

If we did reunification really, really well, really, really quickly, and parents, we essentially met parent expectations, probably going to see most of our students back on campus in that first seven days or when we first welcomed them back. The second place to measure our success along the way is our following year re-enrollment. Are we seeing markedly different attendance, markedly different enrollment, withdrawals, et cetera, as we approach that next school year? Those are two, albeit lagging indicators, but indicators nonetheless of how we're performing in our early moments of crisis.

[23:51] SPEAKER_00:

So Chris, there's a lot to think about there, both in the early hours and days and over the long term. For school leaders who wanna get a sense of where they stand currently and how prepared they are at the moment, what can they do?

[24:04] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we have a report card that we've put together that we'll share and we'll make a part of the notes if that's okay. And what I find is that this report card, it's only about 25 items, but it analyzes a cross-section of on-campus concerns and frankly, district-level concerns, to allow an individual principal to sort of see where they need to really invest time, energy, and effort. If you're finding that your leadership, there's a big bucket around leadership, and it talks about succession planning, as we just talked about. You need not just one incident commander, but a few. It talks about training. How are you actually training staff as they enter campus, as they join you?

[24:42]

How are you training your leadership team as a whole to manage crises? Buckets like that. If you're finding that that's a weak spot, then it creates almost an obvious action plan for you that you can then take either to your district team or if you're doing this on your own, you can build with your board, with your leadership team, with the right folks, your advisors, your mentors, whoever those folks are around you and say, well, this is the area we need to develop. There's a tech section. I find that so often our schools get excited about tech and our schools get excited about the safety tech that exists. And I don't think the safety tech is bad.

[25:17]

You know, if you have the option, have the ability to add a bunch more, of course, you can always add more. And I find that it can be sometimes a bandaid to that leadership work that is so, so important. And so if you don't have the systems down, it doesn't matter what our tech overlay is, it won't work. But if you do have the systems down, then even a paper and pencil will help you get there. And so I'd say analyzing this report card and using this report card as a guide to measure where your starting point is And then be gentle on yourself because the reality is you're just finding your start line. Nobody is as good at safety and security as they were before COVID.

[25:55]

Again, I don't like the word nobody, but most people, most of our schools are not as good as they were pre-COVID because for three years you were worried about a pandemic. And so we're just re-emerging. We're just coming back to some of that skill development that we were working on previously.

[26:10] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[26:10] SPEAKER_01:

So be gentle on yourself, be gentle on your leadership team. And remember that as soon as you find the starting line, you can cross it. And you'll just work your way one step at a time towards that finish line. But it's about crossing that start line to start.

[26:22] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is All Clear, Lessons from a Decade of Managing School Crises. And Chris, we'll put a link in the show notes, but if people want to access that report card and do some kind of self-assessment for their own preparedness as a school, where's the best place for them to go online and where's the best place for them to go to reach you?

[26:41] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I'm on all of the social platforms, LinkedIn, et cetera, just as Chris Jaffe at JOFFE.com. And then our website is joffeemergencyservices.com. And it's a terrible, terrible double E there. So feel free to Google it instead.

[26:56]

But we have the report card up on the website as well. It's always on social. We're resharing it constantly because we find it's probably the most valuable tool we have for leaders specifically because so many of us just need to figure out where that start line is.

[27:09] SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[27:14] SPEAKER_01:

I hope this was helpful, and I hope some principal is able to take a first step because of this conversation. Thank you.

[27:19] Announcer:

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