Pandemic Response and Preparing to Return to School

Hello everyone and thank you for taking the time to join us today. I'm Greg Peterson Content Manager for CrisisGo. We're happy to once again have Jeff Kaye here with us to share his school safety knowledge. He's going to introduce himself in just a minute, but I want to go over some quick information. We're going to have a Q&A session with Jeff at the conclusion of the presentation. Everyone can submit questions via the questions panel on the GoToWebinar menu. You can submit your questions throughout the presentation or during the Q&A. And we will address as many questions as we have time for. So I'll let Jeff take it from here. Thank you.

Thanks Greg. Good morning everybody from San Diego. Good afternoon. If you're in the central or eastern time zones. Thanks again for joining us. This is Phase 2 in our webinar series. We're with you for phase one 11 days ago and a whole lot has changed since then. This is a rapidly changing incident which most emergency incidents are but we're in the mode right now where we can take the time to plan and train and get ready for getting back to school, getting back to work, and getting back to operations and that's what the presentations about today.

Continuity planning work on our pandemic plans in with it. I want to first thank CrisisGo for hosting us. It's a great thing you're doing to help out education safety and get us all on the same page before I start this just want to tell you all this information in this presentation is up on my website. I'll give you that information at the end of the webinar. It's password-protected. I'll give you that. Last week. I had a bunch of questions but password wasn't working. The information wasn't updated yet. I've been assured that it's updated now.

So all this will be on there. There's a couple of slides I've put in here that are new information based on this morning. They're not going to be in hand out and I'll let you know what they are a couple of websites. I'll be referring to that you can write down. We get going on this, you know, COOP planning. It's something, continuity of operation we called COOPs when I say that that's what it is. It's something that we just haven't been that involved in, in the education industry or any other industry, whether it's law enforcement or hospitals or whatever.

None of our plans really that were in place prepared us for what we’re going through today. We're just in place we've never been before not just with the pandemic, we might have been here before the pandemic we just didn't know it. We’ve never shutdown the country before and this is something that I don't think anyone could have been prepared to work through. Someone asked the question last week saying they felt like their building the plane in flight and that's pretty good description. We're all kind of run on the fly with this but now is our time to put together what we're doing now that's working. What we're doing now that’s not working what we're doing now that’s causing us concern and address that in our future plans because I don't think we can see a worst-case scenario with continuity of operations planning and I liking this too and don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this was a bioterrorism attack. I liken this to training that we do for bioterrorism attack so that can pretty much shut down a country based on airborne pathogens, but you know your bioterrorism drills that we do or pretty much localized.

With this one here we're all in this together all shut down pretty much as a country and education, so we'll talk about some of that stuff that we're going through right now. Again, my disclaimer. This is not a medical webinar and I'm not in the medical profession by any means. I’m an emergency management professional and CrisisGo is hosting this webinar, but I'm not affiliated in any way with them other than we're working in collaboration on this and a couple other projects and its very good collaboration. You know, I have my own plan and training programs, CrisisGo has products and technology. This is not a sales webinar. By all means if you want to contact us about any of our services the information will be there, but we're not going to try and sell you anything this morning. We're just we're just here to try and get everybody together and move forward in education safety.

So, I'm not a doctor, but a little bit about my background. After I retire from law enforcement. I got into school emergency management by taking position in Southern California as a Director of Public Safety Emergency Manager, and I was blindsided my first year with H1N1 and I will tell you in law enforcement I had Idea, what a pandemic was, no idea what the operations in the school where based on my law enforcement training. Talk about building a plane in flight, that was me I was in highland sea with nothing around me and I learned a couple things going to the next five pandemics as I went through. That hopefully I can share with you this morning and I will tell you I'm still learning every pandemic and continuity of operations plan written in the last 10 years has to be updated right now and that's in the process of doing.

I write some pretty good plans and I'm sure some of you districts out there are some good ones too. But if we're not updating and now based on this, we're not doing ourselves any type of service. We have to learn from this we're stumbling in we got to come out walking out we can't stumble out again. So I started my own business 2010 and I've been working with school districts in the US and Canada ever since doing emergency management planning the training. So I'm pretty familiar with what's out there. What's out there with school districts. What's not out there. What's being done. What’s not being done. What's being copied off the internet. What’s functional what’s factual.

But the first thing we have to do here is I think we all have to agree that based on this definition. We are still in a crisis response code and it's my opinion right now we're going to be in a crisis response mode for this for another two to four years based on what we're seeing now and we'll get in some of the psychological mental health and other concerns that we have coming out of this. Continuity of operations and pandemic planning will not be over when the doors of the school is open after this. We're going to have to continue this out and we'll talk about that. But if you're planning on just putting your plans away the day we go back to school. You have to rethink that you're not going in with a good strategy because we have to learn from this. There's going to be some things we have back to we pick up on the debriefings at different levels, whether it's local state federal government. That doesn't really concern us in education. How this started is not my concern. How we're dealing with this in education safety and culture and climate is my concern because I'm education safety professional and so are you if you're listening to this. So we have to make sure that if this was the only thing we could have done, then by all means we shut it down. Safety has got to be our first concern. If there were things that could have been done differently on the education side. We can't control government city state local or federal people could have done things different on the education side. That's we need to adapt our continuity plans for and that's where you need to stay focus.

And our continuity plans have got to be a part of our school emergency operations plans. It's federal law and state law in all 50 states. You have to have an emergency operation plan and I review a lot of them. I'm sure there's some districts out there with some very good ones. Very good emergency operations plans, emergency managers, people are very knowledgeable. But those are not the types of districts that call me. I'm kind of like a triple A and nobody calls until your car's broken down on the side of the road. So when I review a plan it's typically one that an emergency management professionals is not comfortable with and I see a lot out there see a lot of plans are copied from each other. If your emergency management plan has not been updated since 2013, it needs to be. It's out of compliance and compliance is important also or discrepancy compliance issues here for you and this will be a something you can refer to in the FEMA guide. It changed, it changed based on presidential policy directive 8, it changed July 1st, 2013 and the FEMA guide is what your plans have to be in compliance with. A new companion guide came out September 2019. So if you haven't gone through and updated your plans since September 2019, now's a good time to do it. If you can do it in-house fine, if you can’t it's perfectly acceptable to bring somebody in with an emergency management background specific to schools. I will tell you as a law enforcement emergency manager, I had no idea what went on inside of the school. I had no what a lockdown was even because we have different ways of looking at things. I was looking at from the outside, you're looking at it from the inside. So these are open source documents FEMA guide and the companion guide you can take a look at them and every statue from FEMA and US Department of Education every statute codes and in that guide but again, it's just a template on what you need to do and compliance is important and here you are going to come in to funding.

I think I put this information in the handout this one of the things I updated this morning, but there's some good grants out there right now this top grant, the Bureau of Justice Administration, Stop School Violence Grant that's just open March 11, and it's open till June 9. So you can as a school district, private school, charter school, whatever you can put in for this funding and there's a lot of money in it, seventy-one million dollars for three-year grant. It's all based on mental health and behavioral threat assessment through some money in there for technology to help track the stuff, help download it, communicate. The grand instructions are at that site, but I will tell you if you're listening, I sat in on a webinar for that grant yesterday and it's my opinion that after this and that about a hundred percent of the districts that make it through the first step will make it through to peer review and get some funding. So for school districts is about a million and a half in that grant over three years and they're 71 million. So if you do the map, there's a lot of grants they're going to get put out.

This grant was funded in FY 2019 and they had very few people put in for it. So they had an extra ten million dollars at the end of the grant period that could have been awarded. So I encourage you to take a look at that. I also encourage you to take a look at the Department of Justice COPS grants. There’s one out there right now, they extended until April the 29 because of COVID pandemic and that's all for target market and fences, locks, door locks, whatever. It's a good grant for that, and you're eligible for that. The caveat is if you're not in compliance with your plans and you haven't had an independent subject matter expert do an assessment for recommendations for your funding justification. You're probably not going to make it through the first phase to get the peer review. That's how important compliance. The grant reviewers want to see that you have a compliant plan that you're going to use the money to build onto you have a compliant program you going to build onto and not start out with that money.

It's up to us and education to take that on. A lot of buzzwords out there that these grants use. I don't even get caught up in that. That's some dot gov stuff. The new buzzword this year is innovation. That's what they want to see. They don't want to see you spending money on somebody else's plan that's been in place for years or training program or "can" presentations. They want to see how your program is going to address the threat level we're seeing right now. It's all about mental health. We have to be tracking our student mental health at least for the next four years based on what's going on right now because right now we have culture and climate are afraid of each other. That's going to affect our safe school culture and climate come back. So I encourage you to take a look at them. There's anything I can do to point you in the right direction. I do not write grants. I recommend having a grant writer do this stuff and then you work with them. For you're funding justification, I do write justification for projects based on our assessment so I could help you out with that and point you in the right direction, but you always stand better chance at having a professional grant writer unless you have somebody in-house.

So we got to take a look where we are today. We're still in the crisis response mode, but we're in that what we call Phase 2, level two instant stabilization where there's no really direct threat to the school's right now. The schools are closed, our students our home. It's really not that we have to do to protect student safety. So it's all about continuity and getting things moving again getting things back to some semblance of normalcy. And I don't know what normal is going to look like moving on from here. I really don't I don't think anybody does because we are working through this day to day. I know it's an abnormal thing for me right now to be locked down. It's abnormal thing for me to walk into a grocery store and see hundreds of people with masks on. As police officer, that's very uncomfortable for me. But I know it's something we have to be doing, then there's a lot of stuff we're doing right now that we never ever thought we do in the United States.

So the I guess the term "new normal" is what I hear. I'm hoping this is not going to be the new normal, but we might be back here again shortly. Right. So when we're talking about COOP planning, we have to talk about pandemic planning. Even through your COOP can be used for anything. Right now we're talking about pandemic will talk about how the two plans have to be interactive a lot. But before you can talk about it, we have an understanding. I use this analogy last week and I'll use it again because the best visual I can think of it's a road map to get to the end and we took a couple of different turns last week with a road map to get to the end. We've got some information this week. We didn't have last week. We're seeing some what I considered kind of positive information. I don't pay too much attention to what's on the TV news. I look at the websites for CDC and Johns Hopkins and I listened to some inform people. No matter what news you listen to their jobs put a spin on it one way or the other and we're seeing some mixed messaging coming out to from well, I’ll leave it at that, we’re seeing some mixed message, I'll talk about that when we get to the PO part of this. So we really have to look at factual information, but I'm more positive this week then I was last week and I'm hoping you are too because now we can actually look towards the light at the end of the tunnel and build our goals. So the important thing to understand about the COOP the most important thing for education is nobody's going to do this for you and we'll talk about that here.

No other agency is going to write your COOP plan and when I was in law enforcement your essential functions in education did not matter to me in my planning. What mattered to me was your direct safety of course. If there was a direct and imminent criminal threat, but how you got back to constitution of operations did not enter into my COOP plan that's on you. Just like my COOP planning in law enforcement should not have been a concern in education. It's up to that individual agency. So individual schools are responsible for doing this. And I have to understand what the with the plan is. It’s so important. Like I said, we've never been here in education before so.

We know we have to end this journey somewhere. It's how we get there how we create that road map and how we get to the end is so important. There are just some things we have to include in pandemic response plans, COOP plans that are specific to education and no other industry. We got it mitigate this stuff. There are things we can do in education that can mitigate the effects in schools. Even though we can't mitigate the effect of the virus and it doesn't matter where the virus starts or how it starts, What the contagions are. We just got to figure every flu season and every pandemic is going to be contagious and it's going to affect our operations. So the sooner we start our mitigation efforts the better for us. I don't think we'll ever be able to end mitigation efforts in schools. After this one. I think there's things we can be doing different on a daily basis, there’s things we can work into curriculum. There are things we can do infrastructure to create more space. There are things we can do in our activities. This is something we really have to learn from, and it's given us a wake-up call. So, we got to look at the good with the bad.

So when you're doing your pandemic plan and you can do this in-house. Educators are some of the most brilliant people I've ever met but when we start talking about emergency plan and I think we've got to get a little taken aback because we're not breaking it down to something simple. If you can write a lesson plan for calculus. You can write a pandemic plan for your school. We can get some help like I say with some templates for filling out the information you can do it, especially if you have nurses, counselors and to help people in your school local mental health agencies.

You have to be careful when you're dealing with your partner agencies because they might not understand what your needs are inside the school until you let them know. So including them in the planning process is huge. But the biggest assumption we have what we're going to be back here again, we might be back here again with COVID-19 in the winter. COVID-19 or any other pandemics not going to be gone until we get a vaccine so we don't know how close we are. We have to depend on our medical scientists. We got some of the best in the world working on this and I know they're going to come up something but it's up to us to figure out how to work with this until they do. So what we do in pre-incident mitigation, what we do in plan, what we do in our everyday activities in the school's we have controlled that we have a hundred percent control over that and I talked to a lot of people now that say they feel helpless because we're trying to deal with stuff we have no control over and that's where the helpless feelings come in. If you're under a governmental order to stay close and shut down, you have no control over that whatsoever.

You have control over how you deal with them and that's where you take back the control. We have no control at all over when schools are going to open. We do have control over what we're going to do when they open and that's how we stay in control and such an important aspect especially to mental health of our staff and ourselves our families and our students that we just concentrate on what we can control and don't get jammed up won't we can't control. Right now, I can't control the fact that I can see the ocean from my window, and I can't walk on the beach. I just have to deal with that. It like makes no sense to me but it is what it is.

So what can we do. We got to stay focused on all the other threats. We had a wake-up call in the last two weeks, two of them. We had an earthquake in Idaho on March 31, and my house shook pretty good here in San Diego just this past Friday with two pretty big earthquakes. So when you're doing a COOP plan and we can't just say focused on COVID-19, we got to stay focused on everything.

If there is a major natural disaster right now, no matter what it is, schools are probably going to be used as shelters. Every school district out there has a shelter agreement in place with the Red Cross. What's that look like when our schools are closed and when we can't have people together. I don't know. I honestly don't know but it's something we're kicking around in emergency management. What are we going to do? So these are good plan of things to talk about in a COOP plan. If I throw a question out there, and I don't know the answer is just something we're talking about now, and you should be too.

Those are the assumptions and what is continuity? What is our pandemic plan? What the heck are we doing right now?

These are actions that we should be taken right at the start. Social distancing, I don't think we'll ever stop right now. I don't mean shutting everything down not going to near each other what I mean is taking a look at your facility right now and seeing how we can spread kids out seeing how we can eliminate some of the clutter in the classrooms to make more room for desks. Sometimes I go through an assessment in the school and I can't even open the door all the way because of bookcases and bookshelves with all these knickknacks and stuff around. What can we clear out of classrooms and spread the kids out that's social distance.

Which essential staff right now, we identified it can work from home because only reconstitute do we want to bring everybody back and I'm asking you this because you need to ask yourselves is we want to keep some people working from home to make more office space if more people are sharing cubicles and one office and three of them can be working remotely. We just did some pretty good social distancing. What are we doing now?

In my grocery store and probably your grocery store, too. There's plexiglass shields up at the pharmacy at the checks and stuff. And I was talking to one of the managers the other day. I said just leave these up. You know, it's a good idea to have any way. We look at that in schools. When we do assessments. If you have an open office with an open counter and your office staff is exposed first off the threat level of somebody jumping over that counter can be mitigated with the plexiglass shield if it's the right kind of plexiglass, right kind of glasses can also be shatter resistant and it's also the germ prevent your office staff and do on one on one with a lot of people what actions do we need to take for continuity learning now to mitigate this. That we can just keep in place to mitigate future ones. I can't say enough we will be here again. We can mitigate the effects of this stuff.

Four steps in the collaborative planning process. Forming your collaborative team. If you have not done that yet you're behind the curve if you have not we've been out of school for a while now. If you had not formed your planning team you should have but you can start you can start that today and who's going to be the members of your team will talk about that. If you have to understand the situation determine goals and objectives and do all these other things. It's the planning process and planning process we use but your first step is a team. No person including myself can do this on their own. We have some very well educated people and very talented people in the education system and bringing them in to help with the planning process is a way to do it. And that's why the FEMA and Readiness Emergency Manager in Schools this is their recommendations not mine, you can take this right out of the FEMA guide. So if you haven't had your team, let's get it going today. We've got some down time. There's only so many times a day we walk our dogs when working from home.

We got some down time and you can do all this stuff on a conference call, webinars and get it going and sign everybody something to do and once you start moving forward, trust me your mindset will change and you'll start feeling good about what we're doing now. When you form your team, these are the sections of break down your COOP plan. We can do this if you try doing it all at once you’re going to get overwhelmed.

So these are the three sections of your COOP plan for your continuity of learning, you know, we're in the education business. We got some pretty good Educators out there. So if I'm breaking this down in my school district, I'm going to take my assistant superintendent in charge of Education Services, and I going to say to her or him, this is your section. Whoever you want to figure this out break it down the team break it down in your team. You don't want you to plan a team to be too big you pretty want much more than one person representative from each area of the district because you know what happens when you get too many people in a room, nothing gets done.

So your education services assistant superintendent or whoever's running that in your district takes section number one and you break it down. You have your own meetings and we'll come back to this weekly meeting with the plan you need to plan for a remote learning. This is tough, especially now we got people zoom bombing and we've got people doing all this other stuff. We got people hacking, hackers are going to figure out get into these things. This is tough. So your head services people will probably be working with your IT people on how to get this done. We're just stumbling in here. We'll talk about some data gathering at the end we're going to do if something is working. We need to share that something's not working me to share that to giving kids devices getting a wireless access remote learning is definitely a fallback plan. That's not a plan a we don't want to go to that. Continuity of payroll. I'm going to give this to my finance section person my finance director, whoever's in charge of finances. They do this. They pay the bills. They know what gets done. We'll give them a list of objectives for the continuity plan and a little breakdown in teams and do it. Your continuity of core operations that's where I would be using emergency manager. Who will probably be directing this whole team because you need somebody with emergency management background to run the team but your goals and objectives for core operations going to break down into several different areas, whether it's transportation, maintenance and operation, health, you definitely want your pandemic planning. You definitely want your nursing staff in there. Not the whole staff one person representative and then they break it down. So breaking it down and these three things makes it manageable. And it can be done, I’ve seen it.

Who do you want to be on your planning team? Want is a big word. You can't just say to somebody because you're Director of Transportation, you're on the planning team. They may be too busy to participate and they may want to assign somebody to it. These are the discussions you have. You have to have people with diverse backgrounds on this team. There's the degree term called scotoma a means a partial blind spot. So if you're in education or any industry and you've always been an industry, you may just be seeing things have always been done that way. You may have a blind spot to outside ways of doing things.

New Innovative words your that buzz word again the fans like to see that innovative ways to getting things done right now. I don't know if Chino Valley on this call are not but there is a high school teacher up there named Mike Collins and I know him through mutual acquaintances, but Mike came into education from an outside the business where he was doing global business at an upper level of business were all he decided to be a classroom teacher and a couple years ago. So I've been talking to Mike lot about his ideas and continuity. That's a applied to the global aspect in the business world with his ideas of continuity of education now is a relate to being a classroom teacher and the combination of the global aspect with the school aspect is very interesting to me. I don't know everything so I listen to everybody but in your district, you probably have somebody with that type of experience who is either an emergency management business somewhere else. And those are the type of people you really want to use for a sounding board and get on your team. Because we can't have blind spots just because we've always done it this way. It's kind of like my write books, but I can't proofread my own words because I'm reading what my brain tells me I wrote so I missed typos. You've probably seen some typos in this presentation so far, it's human. So how the brain works. So a proofreader will look at stuff and see things differently. Proof reader for your COOP planning and your pandemic planning that has outside experience may look at things differently and that's why we do a collaborative effort. That's why you bring in your local emergency management folks, your health department folks, that's what we bring everybody to the table. Not for every planning meeting but to get some input on that and regular job titles don't matter.

My first superintendent, I worked with her for years when I first took this job. In every emergency, we were joined at the hip figuratively not literally if we weren't in the same room together. We were talking several times a day because she wanted to be making the decisions as the superintendent. But those decisions were based on a lot of my information to her in the emergency management, I'm very good with that, very good that relationship and work very well. My next superintendent didn't want to be hands-on, he wanted to be in the back in his office making policy decisions based on what's going on. He wanted me to run the thing and I was fine with that too. So it's important to know that your job title doesn't matter when it comes to emergency response. The superintendent is always in charged but you got to bring people in with expertise. The worst case scenario is we have someone that thinks because of your title, they can run an incident and emergency incident without taking any direction and we all can put a face with that description right there. No matter what industry you're in.

Because that's when things don't get done you have to rely on the expertise that your staff and you have to know who's who in that and once you have your team, it isn't just a cycle. That's why I use this diagram here. It's it never stops. We have to assess a situation, set goals and objectives, create the plan, implement the plan, and then test it and modify it. When you're doing your testing there cannot be any egos involved just because you wrote the plan doesn't mean it's a good plan. I told you at the onset of this. I am rewriting every COOP and pandemic plan that I've ever written. That's my job for my client school districts. It's my job to make sure they're up to date if they're not then I'm not doing my job. So everything has to be updated its tough and it's time-consuming and sometimes you have to pull in help and like I said, it's perfectly acceptable to bring in somebody with that type of background to give you a hand.

But before we even do a good plan, we have to understand what makes a bad one. These are the pitfalls and I talked about this borrowing plans doesn't work. Whether it's from the internet, if there's a plan on the internet,, I mentioned this it shouldn't be there. We have confidentiality rules and all 50 states on school emergency operations plans, they cannot be released outside of the district other than to law enforcement or emergency management. They cannot be released without the superintendent's approval. So the plan is on the internet just disregarded that shouldn't be there. So it was probably written by someone who doesn't know that. I review the plan review, I review them all the time. Typical somebody in Wisconsin will take a plan from somebody Oregon who took the plan from somebody in Illinois and then the final person will just do a word check for the last agency to use it and they'll miss Illinois and the other state. So I see a lot of this stuff in plans when reviewing them and nothing to do with what they're doing and I mentioned the liability aspect it's there.

So if you're going to take this on, taking on properly.  A template is not a plan, but it's good to have a template to get you through your planning process. My plan in the La Quinta, California would not do you any good in Springfield, Illinois. The titles might be the same but the content is going to be a hundred percent different. If we get a snowstorm in La Quinta, California it's a bad day. I can tell you that right now. If you get a hundred twenty degree heat in Springfield, Illinois that's probably bad day for you. So you have different things for your COOP planning. The COOP plan for a tornado is going to look different than a COOP plan for pandemic. So it's got to be specific.

People ask me for templates. Like I said, there's a couple of good ones for COOP and these websites are in the handout in my attendee section.

I was on the REMS site and they have some pretty good infectious disease planning information. There's a whole section for that. It's worth taking a look at REMS is Readiness Emergency Manager for Schools or technical assistance site has some good information and they're keeping it updated. I did not see anything on there, that I thought was non factual information or unimportant information so it's a good one to take care of. The FEMA COOP template will confuse the heck out of you. Trust me on that. It's written for government entities. You can take a look at it if you want.

It's there. It's open source, and the attending handout that I put up is up there that might help you out a little bit. There's some realistic stuff in there. I cannot put a plan up there. I can't give you one of my plans for liability reasons. But this right here is your template. This is your real template. And again, all is stuff is in the handout section.

As long as you're addressing these core operations, you're doing good with your COOP plan. Each one of these has to be done. I get a lot of questions between number 3 Delegation of Authority and number nine Devolution of Control and Direction and I'll sum that up for you right now based on current events. Delegation of Authority the superintendent's going on vacation and he or she says you know, the assistant superintendent you got the ball till I get back but here's my number. I'm available. I can be back in two hours on the flight. Give me a call if something comes up.

He delegated authority, but he's not giving up control Devolution of Authority comes out there in England right now. The prime minister got the bug while he was in office quarantined. He was still running things over the phone or whatever. He took a turn for the worse and now he's in the ICU. He could no longer control. He's no longer functional. So Devolution of Authority went to the next command and I don't know who that was, I don't follow it all it too much, but the prime minister no longer has any control. If the prime minister picks up the phone right now and said I want to do a B and C or D, nobody's gonna listen to him because Devolution of Control and Direction went to his next in command. Once the prime minister is well again, and hopefully he will be, he takes that control. So if your superintendent is sick and in the hospital with a 105 degree fever or whatever, he really don't want him or her making decisions. The control goes over to the next in command that has to be in place pre-incident. They can't be done. Well, it can be done but not effectively once it happens. So that's the important distinction between number three and number nine. Number three the superintendent's on vacation and picks up the phone and says I want this, this, and this done. Number nine the superintendents in the ICU picks up the phone and says I want this, this, and this done. This time and they're going to get told no disrespect but you've done Devolution of Control, so the next in command. By all all means we'll keep you advised and please get better soon. That's a difference between the two and very important in your COOP planning because both of them have to be in place pre-incident.

And this is the next thing for your COOP template, vital function capabilities. Continuity learning is a big one for pandemic. So if you take those three slides and the information there and put that together, you make your own template. My colleague Mia in Illinois and fusion center sent this stuff out yesterday and some pretty good resources here. But again, they are not plans. They are also included in the handout. If Mia put something out to her group, that's usually pretty good. Always good information very factual and I looked all this take a look at them we get time to help you out with your continuity and pandemic plans. Don't worry about writing that down it's in the handout.

Once you get your team together, here's your principles. And again I mentioned you're responsible for your own education has to take the lead on this. Nobody's going to do it for him. And we have to make sure everything possible done in the future to make sure this doesn't happen again. I don't mean the pandemic. I mean the response if we don't have to shut down education. Then we shouldn't have do it.

If you keep this in mind, you keep the purpose of the COOP in mind. It's going to direct you. Just please remember once you get your plan in place, please don't wait for anybody to tell you to put it in place at the first sign of an incident. We should be taking some action. It's not just for pandemics or anything that's going to interrupt your local or your school operations.

One thing you won't see in any template you're looking at unless it's a good school plan. Is these things, policy and procedures, describe, or the response to them. How do we say in HIPAA and FERPA. It's very very important. That's in your COOP plan. And again, if you're going to roll out your pandemic plan, you should roll out your COOP plan. In December when this all started is when we should have started our process for both pandemic and COOP. We can't wait to be told the superintendent and all 50 states can any schools you all 50 states can enter their rollout and activate their plan at any time they want.

Let's move to where we are today. These are some of the things you should have been doing. If you don't understand what incident command system is. ICS is incident command system. You don't know what that means. You cannot learn in a webinar or with a base class. There's a couple of good web-based classes out there, but the only way to learn incident command system is to take the basics in a classroom setting and then get your hands dirty in tabletop exercises directly specifically towards schools. You can take the FEMA classes. They're written by fire fighters for fire fighters. Sometimes, you know, cops in there too we're all required to take them, but they really don't get into school operations. You really have to have someone always recommend in-person training for ICS. You really have someone that knows the school structure or else you're going to be learning a lot of stuff that doesn't really get put in place. Your communications plan that's specific to each school district and such a huge part of both COOP and pandemic planning and we'll get into PIO here in a minute as we work through this.

So your pandemic plan should be in place right now or you should be working on it and should be updating it almost daily. Part of the incident command system structure is your planning structure and I won't get into all that but somebody should be taking notes and document everything that's going on right now. What's good? What's bad? What are we doing? Because there's going to have to be some after-action reporting. In emergency management if it's not in writing it didn't happen. So there should be documentation of every conference call, every webinar, or phone call. Everything you're doing right now. Those are all ICS concepts geared towards this the end of the game reconstitution of operations. We have to get back to some type of normalcy. We owe it to our kids. We owe it to our society. We owe it to our parents. We owe it to ourselves. We cannot be a nation living in fear and be afraid of each other and be afraid of going outside. It's going to be up to us to get that going back in school when we get back to school.

This again is a template I put out for you right now. We're still in Phase 3. We're bumping up against the first 30 days. That's an anomaly in COOP operations in schools. We're bumping up against the first 30 day period we getting ready to enter into our next 30 day period. I have never done this in school operations before school Emergency Operations is all new.

We're gonna have new goals and objectives, but at least now and we have a timeline it might not be a realistic timeline. We've begin a timeline of something. Something might change maybe at first. Even thought it's probably not a realistic date for schools going back and it might be who knows. We don't know what's going to happen on this couple of weeks. This is what we should be planning on in our COOP right now. May 1 should be our next target date everything we're doing from April 6 on should be directed towards what are we going to be doing on May 1. Because we have to have a time frame for your goals and objectives. We can always pump that, you know. If May 1, you say well maybe it's going to be May 15, whatever then we bump it back again, but working towards that time frame again. We're eliminating that feeling of helplessness. What would schools look like? What would it look like to open up schools on May 1 right now what needs to be done if we're going to do that because it's never too early to start. So what needs to be done on Mary 1 it's needless to say let's do some of the things I came up with. I don't know why we're not having discussions.

And again, I know some schools are and there might be some states that are. I don't know why we're not having more discussions about moving the end of the school year back into the summer. What's the magic trip wire that's going to say we can be in groups again. We can being in schools again. If we're saying, again here in California and you know I have the utmost respect for California Governor and every the other states Governor. In California what we're getting is its indefinite. That's not a good COOP planning term. What is indefinite mean? I don't know. It's an abstract term and in COOP we need a date. If we're saying we're going to stay closed until the fall semester fall school year 2021 full school year. What's the start date on that? If that's August 28 or some schools a year round. Is that the date of working with coming down move that back and maybe at least bring the kids back and do some semblance of in-person refresher testing knowledge check with we cannot mention this in the last week.

We I'm not comfortable in education with politicians saying just forgive you absenteeism. Give everybody the grade they had in the beginning of March because a lot of kids pick up extra credit in the end of the school year and we're taking that away from and if we're not grading we can't change that so your student with a low grade point average in March might have picked that up by June and I don't think that's being fair to the students and their we have to have some type of knowledge check. That's just my opinion.

Superintendents have a great deal of latitude with what's the end of school looks like what matriculation looks like but we have to understand that education system nobody is thinking about is the way we think about it. It's factoring into their continuity plans what I hear term, like it's indefinite before you go back to school. I need more information and I say, I mean that's me being involved in education safety, but even the superintendent needs more information too. Can we bump this back and can we get back to some type of normal with these kids. Again, I mentioned before take a look around right now. Today is the day to do this. To start who can we bring back to school? We reconstitute in May, do we want to bring back all our administrative staff? In my district, I would not. I be looking at who I can leave it home to increase that social distance. I know there's people that don't have to be at work, but we have to give them work to do when they're working remotely. But I know I can do that. Can we blend remote learning with classic learning and go to the modified schedule maybe half day maybe four day weeks. And can we give these kids a prominent graduation? I did not understand until I got into education how important the graduations were. At six high schools in my district. I was there for nine years and I went to every graduation when I first got there. We were doing middle school promotions to kindergarten graduations. I did not realize as a cop how important that was, especially in certain cultures where your high school senior today might be the only person that family to get a diploma and move on to college. It's so important and we have to be talking to our kids about this. What are we going to do? What are we doing to them by taking away that graduation? They worked 12 years for this. Even the prom, it's a big event for most kids. Some kids don't get into that whole thing, some do. Can we give them a graduation in August? Would be safe to do that even if we're not going to bring back to school. These are conversations that need to be started right now the graduations for the extended family in my school district. We were very close to the Mexican border for the extended family in the static culture. These things are huge. We had to open up auditoriums and do remotely because it was just a huge event and we're taking that away from these kids and these families. We need to be thinking about that because nobody else is but us.

We'll move onto communications planning now. If you have not at this point appointed a public information officer to this event, you should think about that. Seriously, about putting that PIO into effect. The superintendent may be the face of the event, but you need a team to be put in communication plan with local agencies putting out outreach to a websith with outreach to your families and getting those lines of communications. And an effective communications plan for your COOP should have a communications point of contact and real-time information for every agency that you might be dealing with in your community including local health, sheriff department, local emergency management, police department, whoever there, there should a communications plan specific to each one. If one person tries to do that they're going to be overloaded and there should be a voice of the incident. This is a 95/5 concept for communications and public information, 95% of your time or your work is done when there's no emergency going on. We are in that blue zone right now. We are not in the Red Zone will be in the Red Zone we go back to school or when we got to put pandemic plans in place again. Right now communication should be going out to families real-time communications from one point of contact and every release of information should be promulgated by the superintendent to make sure no non factual information is going out because there's a ton of it out there. You can look at the conspiracy theories about this and just see how over the top we're getting social media and non factual information. We can't have that happening in school. We can't control conspiracy theories and social media. We can control our own release of information because only the school PIO should be putting out, PIO that's Public Information Officer, only the school PIO should be putting out school information not the health department. Not any other agency.

And that's the responsibilities and it's so important to get some training. If you do not understand these ICS principles that's okay because you can get there through training. Most schools if you don't have a designated public information officers, usually an ancillary duty that's understandable were short-staffed, but you can you get this training and here's how. There's a couple of good, I'm not big on web-based training, but for the PIOs for schools, you can get pretty much everything you need out of this top one here. IS-0029.a: Public Information Officer Awareness is a very basic course, I don't recommend school public information officers taking the higher level courses, there in person and you usually have to go to Maryland to the FEMA institute to do that. It's more geared towards local emergency management or Federal Emergency Management. But this online course, you'll take about six hours to get through but you can break it up into different sections. It's not timed out. The 20 test questions is timed out.

I tried I've been to the upper-level courses and I went right to the test and took the test and not taking the course and I failed so it's worthwhile taking a course. You can take it again and the directing Social Media in Emergency Management to and it's pretty good course too. These are things we can be doing now while we're home. Like I said treat this time as a gift not something again.

And again, if you don't understand ICS, this is the time to schedule your training. This is the time to start thinking about training not going to get too far into it here because you can't you just can't but you can schedule it. There's a quote. I used last week by a guy named Michael Dorn who wrote a book called Terra bezel and if a school administrator tried working through an emergency incident without understanding the incident command system, they will fail and that's his book. I agree with that. You have to understand how to break it down.

You have to understand how to break down a realistic goals and objectives just like I understood I explain how to break down your COOP plan into those three sections and assign it to people who are skilled in those areas and get things done without getting overloaded and then testing the plan. How are we going to test it? How are we going to do tabletop exercises training? You can put a tabletop exercise together to address pandemic response and make it fun for everybody involved is no reason why you can't.

In FEMA we do the zombie apocalypse drill in 2011 and addressed everything we do it now, even though I know there's not gonna be a zombie apocalypse. I hope, never know now I guess. But there's no reason you can't put something fun together invisible aliens are going to affect you if they breathe on you in the public and make that your scenario training doesn't have to be you know, black and white.

This will be due every time you can just get you know, throw something out there and roundtable it and get everybody just thinking modulest terms and what we would do because that's what we're doing that. We're dealing with an invisible alien. If you need help on putting together a table top exercises there's some on the REMS site, some on the TEX site, or I can make you want to give me a call. I'll work with you. The biggest thing we have to do is different now with data collection, and I'm going to just go through this real quick and I'll ask CrisisGo to go jump in on this because we're starting a pretty unique project here that lets you move it forward to something important. I'm going to do a mental health because we have to learn our goal here with this programs put together some open source data that we can use for all school districts on what's working. And what's not working.

We're going to come out of this with recommended best practices when it come out of this with things that aren't working too well, but I would tell you going back a grant writing right now if I'm writing a grant and I put in there that we're involved in a data collection project to identify mental health and behavior problems in our students based on this pandemic COVID-19 shut down we're going to play this out for four years to try and improve health related mental health related behavior related violent behavioral related programs suicide depression teen addiction. And this is the data collection. We're going to be using to identify with training. We need to be bringing in for the money that they're going to give us.

I'm going to get that grant because grant the people that review these grants they want to see what you're doing and I'll throw the I word out again. What you doing Innovative? Not what we did before this. We're going to do move in the future. So there's the ways you can get involved in a data collection the ways you can do it on your own but when you're thinking about writing these grants they want to see you moving forward not moving backwards. So I'm gonna ask, I'm not going to ask Jim from CrisisGo is always going to go up in here and talk a little bit about this.

Hey, thanks Jeff. I'm Jim Spicuzza the Chief Product Officer at CrisisGo and after Jeff's last webinar a week ago. It was evident that school districts around the country. Wanted to learn more what other districts were doing to deal with the challenges caused by this pandemic. Well normally post event and an after action review process would begin, you know, the people would create presentations invite everybody to attend a conference review the findings but obviously today that's not going to work, for many reasons. Number one the pandemic here might last multiple months maybe even a year out and remember clearly the challenges that we face three to twelve months back will be difficult. We can't gather together for shared experiences today. So this going to have to be digital or virtual to get the job done and last district leaders across the country need these best practices now and so they want to get back to school as safe as possible, so we need everybody's help. For this reason CrisisGo unveiling the school district COVID-19 pandemic crowd-sourced project. The goal is an action after review of challenges already faced by schools, like e-learning meal distribution social-emotional programs and their pathway and plans to reopen school. But in order to return to school, we also have to face the reality that we probably will not be going back to school as normal therefore with Jeff and CrisisGO we're going to be also sending out scenarios to actually have you think through what are we going to do if we have to return back to school and less than ideal situations?

Like thinking about having to continue the use of social distancing or if we were to have an incident of COVID-19 and our building. Now this project depends on everybody participating and we're inviting every school district in the country. The project will last a month and working with Jeff each week. We will provide a weekly findings and a summary report as we go through this process. Will be asking you to tell us what were your challenges and where were your anxiety and sticking points within your organization. So please join us as we go and create this project and get started next Monday and Jeff if you go to the next slide. You can register here at covid9.crisisgo.com.

Please share this information with other districts in your community. Remember your district only represents part of the population of the community and getting everybody on the same page will be valuable. So I'm going to pass this back to Jeff. Remember we start April 13. You can sign up today here and be part of this data collection process to help everybody in schools across the country. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Jim.

And so important I've said this several times. I can't say enough. So important we learn from this we can't be going back to how we do this before because none of us including me was prepared for something of this magnitude not the pandemic itself the shutdown of the country. We never had that happen before in the history of our country you might happen again. I'm hoping this doesn't become a new norm, but one thing to look at now, if you're with your staff is how your plans were downloaded and I retrievable they were at start of this. Ask your staff of they were able to access and use the plans with your existing programs and platforms at the answer to that is no you need some help and I got to give a shout out to CrisisGo here since they have put this thing on I'm using their products and a whole lot of my school's, my clients school districts. It does more than I understand it does. They can talk to you about that, but I'm using it specifically for prep plan download and retrieval because it works so it really doesn't matter whose technology use long as you're happy with it you to the end user. If your current system whether it's Google Docs, binder on the principals bookshelf or whatever if that's not working for you. You need some help with that. In this grant, there's some money for technology in the BGA grant that can be used to probably not to fund the whole thing that probably get you pointed in the right direction. So take a look at that coming out of this because we have to debrief this on our own.

Just to summarize, nobody knows how long it's going to take to get back home from this. We need to understand that we're in for a long haul. Education going to be around forever. We're not going away. But understand that one important concept that education emergency management is on us. People are there to help us if we need it, but they won't be there to do this for us. So we don't step up we're doing a disservice to our students our families our communities and to ourselves. So that's how important it is to take this on. Every one of us is considered a disaster service worker under certain conditions. And this is one of those conditions. So if we become part of the solution, we are no longer part of the problem. That one's on us. I got to give a shout out for conference here to in October. This was scheduled to do this our seventh year. We do it every year. It's in Reno Nevada this year. We will probably be the first decent sized conference to come back after to come back from shut down after this is over so I can pretty guarantee everyone of my presenters going to be talking about something pertinent to this pertains a school safety.

There's a website if you want to go to it for the information. Again, my websites up there the password did a little box at the upper right hand corner the homepage COVID-19 forward slash Survivor. It's case sensitive. So make sure you got the capitals are all that done. It's up there. If you have problems with it, you know, just email me and I'll email you the handouts. Everything is up there and I put some decent stuff up there from time to time when they come across and I want to again thank CrisisGo before you open this up to Q&A. The programs that we're putting together are spear headed by CrisisGo they came up with this crowd source idea, I do not. I think it's a fantastic idea and I think its innovative. That's what I put in grant requests because they want to see that I word and we're going to do good coming out of this. We're going to come out better than we went in. We're going to make it through this because we always do and we'll learn from this.

And what we're doing Q&A, I'm gonna leave my information up there. I answer every email and phone call and I told you I don't charge for email or phone call advise, I'm not an attorney. No offense to the attorneys. I'm not on the clock. So did we have any questions come in? I want to thank you for your participation. That's all I haven't see if we got any questions come in if we don't have time for all the Q&A firing off to CrisisGo and we'll put it on another Q&A document.

Hi everyone. This is Cari. Looks like Greg might be having a little bit of technical difficulty. So I'll go ahead and facilitate the Q&A for you guys. So we do have a couple questions. It looks like the first one is: Should it be mandatory hospitals and nursing homes to keep a half year's supplies and stock at all times? Also since the Virginia Tech incident we put all the training into active shooter intruder how should we look at this now?

You know as far as, was the first one supplies in hospitals was that what that was? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think anybody who's had adequate supplies for this. We never been here. I know hospitals and City local Federal Emergency Management. They're dealing with all that I don't get too involved in that do some stuff with FEMA, but I haven't been invited into this one because they got plenty of experts there.

I think we're all going to see deficiencies in stock supplies coming out of this we need what we need to do now is look inside of the schools the school district to see what kind of supplies we have, like as we have and you will identify deficiencies. I don't know how long it's going to be till we can get n95 masks again, but there should be a stock of them in schools put on the sick kids. Not the not the healthy ones those far as those supplies. I would be looking at what you have on hand right now as for cleaning supplies, and you really don't need food and water for a pandemic, but we need to have PPE for your custodial staff need to have cleaning supplies to get things back meet that PPE for your bus driver. And again, are we going to bring bus transportation back right away? I don't know. Buses have to be sanitized. The second part of the question that was saying and if you've heard me present, I've been saying this for years we put too much emphasis on active assailant not just since Virginia Tech but Virginia Tech definitely a big turning point. I think Sandy Hook was our most catastrophic event because we lost babies at day.

But I think since then there's been a lot of emphasis put on active assailant and I say active assailant not active shooter for the matter weapon but a lot of that comes from marketing now, there's a lot of people out there selling products and training programs specifically geared towards this and I would mention the a marketing technique don't agree with fear-based marketing's and we scare you and sell you a product to make you not afraid anymore. You'll buy it. So yeah this should be an eye-opener. Our training programs have been going into all hazards approach since we started in the 2010 and maybe schools the school district will see how there's something else out there. So a lot of the especially when it comes to COOP continuity of operations. It's the same planning for an act of violence that is for pandemic. Just your act of violence going to be localized probably one school or two schools. But excellent question and excellent observation.

I think we can never ever stopped training for active assailant but we have to take a more holistic look at the realistic threat level. Active assailant, we call that high impact low probability I can guarantee in next year there is going to be a flu season not a pandemic and the preparation and response are the same for both. So what are we planning for? Thank you.

Alright, the next question is: How does a COOP plan differ from a regular school safety plan that's required to be updated every March in California?

It supplements the emergency operations plan. Your COOP plans should be in annex to the emergency operations plan and if you get into the REMS guide, The guide for high quality school emergency operations plan. It'll show you the recommendations for annex and support so your COOP plan itself is something you would bring out when something like this happens and it's going to clarify staff roles responsibilities and response actions. Were your emergency operations plans will say we need to have a COOP plan in place for continuity of operations and needs to address these specific areas. Your COOP plan annex is where those areas are address so it's going to have response roles or realistic emergency operations plan for school. If it's a good one will be about 250 pages and you're not going to have time to pull that out a COOP plan itself is a very manageable document that can be actually broken down into different sections and given out to each section for their goals and objectives and response actions, but those listed there should be an annex in the minimum for you. In California at the minimum, you should have annex for active assailant lockdown that includes lockdown and lockout. You should have an annex for earthquake response. You should have an annex for COOP. You should have an annex for student family reunification and annex for pandemic response. And that's a minimum. They just supplement the EOP. Great question.

Alright, it looks like we have time for one more question. How can school nurses improved health office operations when we return? Where can we go for planning templates for ideas?

You know, you're only limited by your imagination. You should have PPE, personal protective equipment, available to you when you go back. But what what are you stocking there? That should come a hundred percent from you to the school administration on what you feel you need. I don't know your business as well as you do. You're going to know right now. So somebody asked that question, you know what's already concerning you whatever your concerns are, they should be written down and forward it to the COOP planning committee and you should have a nurse at least one of the lead nurses from the district on that planning committee to address these sanitary efforts throughout the whole school was especially in a nurse's office should be improved hand-washing stations and again different states have different regulations on which non-water, you know hand sanitizer you can use some states have you can't be alcohol-based. It might be all states. I don't know. So getting that stuff implemented and the n95 masks for the sick kids and for you to use in your dealing with sick kids, very important and training I think training is a biggest thing that nurses can get going right now.

Most of this stuff you can do in house through what you already know on the hygiene training and I think we kind of lost that somewhere along line. So I see nurses and nursing staff and mental health staff is integral to the pandemic respond and the COOP response to the pandemic. Hopefully I answered that properly. Thank you.

Thanks Jeff. Well, it looks like that's all the more time we have for questions today. So if we didn't get to your question, we'll go ahead and collaborate with Jeff on getting that answer and we'll send it out in a follow-up email. If you do have any additional questions, you can email those to marketing@crisisgo.com, and we'll be sending out a summary in the coming days, so please look out for that. Thanks again for joining us. Stay safe and good luck out there.