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Published on 11/17/1999 All articles from this issue

Schools' safety tested

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By Joan Passarelli

Special to the Town Crier

Elementary school district gets organized for emergencies

If the big earthquake strikes during a school day, the Los Altos School District will be ready.

That was the object of the district's Nov. 3 emergency preparedness drill. Teachers, staff, parents and community volunteers converged on each of the six district elementary schools and practiced their roles for a real disaster.

Going far beyond monthly fire drills, this drill simulated an emergency so large that the schools might have to care for the students for up to 48 hours afterward. The schools stock radios, first-aid supplies, safety equipment, food and water. The drill tested the "first response" to the disaster, with the goal of discovering how long it takes to find and account for every student on the campus.

At Springer School in Mountain View the drill began when Principal Bob Celeste announced over the public address system that an earthquake was occurring, telling children to duck, cover and hold for the duration of the imaginary temblor.

When the fake shake was over, each teacher opened a sealed envelope containing a scenario for the class. Some classrooms had doors that were blocked or stuck. Some had students who were unconscious, bleeding or in shock. The teachers had to respond accordingly and get their classes out of the buildings and to the meeting place as quickly as possible.

Columns of students emerged, walking quietly and calmly to their designated places on the lawn. Each class held up a color-coded card to convey its status. A green card indicated everything was fine. Yellow meant some minor injuries, while red meant serious injuries and/or someone left in the classroom.

Runners collected each class status report and took them to the command center, where Celeste kept track of all the students. Search and rescue volunteers combed the school looking for remaining students.

The runners were sixth grade students, who also served as first-aid assistants and aides for each of the younger classes. The sixth-graders paid close attention as the drill workers trained them on the job and were serious and helpful.

At Springer's first aid station, teachers and sixth-graders checked students with simulated injuries and taped splints. They also handled a "hysterical parent" volunteer, calmly but firmly, directing her back to the check-in table.

Tom Smith, of the Los Altos Amateur Radio Responders, hauled out the on-site antenna and began transmitting at once. In a real emergency, he would have been relaying information to and from the district offices about Springer's situation. Volunteers from the group staffed every school in the district.

Julie McFarland, chairwoman of the LASD Emergency Preparedness Committee and a parent at Oak School, said the LASD is grateful for their help in emergency drills. "It's a great relationship," McFarland said.

Besides chairing the committee and heading up preparations at Oak, McFarland has spent thousands of hours writing a teaching module about search and rescue procedures. "School districts are required by the state to have this, but I couldn't find one anywhere," she said.

McFarland worked with the Menlo Park Fire Department and other sources to compile the information she needed. "I have 27 inches in my file cabinet on anything ever written on urban search and rescue," she said. Molly Malone, an emergency committee volunteer from Santa Rita School, did the desktop publishing to pull it together. Now every school in the district has a copy of the procedures.

Springer volunteers staffed a check-out table at which parents had to show identification to take their children home. Several parents tested the system by trying to take out children who weren't theirs or their own children without identification.

Celeste said of the procedure, "It seems hard to a concerned parent, but imagine if a child wasn't checked out properly and was missing. The child might be playing at someone's house, but we'd be sending the search team back into dangerous buildings to look for him or her, putting their lives in danger unnecessarily. That would be a catastrophe."

The test was valuable because it revealed problems with the procedure.

"We found it bottlenecked really quickly," said Connie Ingram, administrative secretary for Springer and command coordinator for the school's drill. "We streamlined it so it'll go faster next time."

Finding problems and fixing them is an important part of the drill. Afterwards, the volunteers held an evaluation session, and all the school principals met with LASD Superintendent Marge Gratiot to share suggestions for improvement.

The earthquake drill and regular fire drills aren't the only ways the district looks out for its students' safety, Gratiot said. The district has also taken physical precautions. "We have covered all the high windows with plastic coating so they won't break into pieces - arrows, really - and hurt the children in an earthquake," she said. "With Measure H money, we'll soon be replacing them with new earthquake-safe glass."

The district has also placed restraining rails on high shelves and bolted file cabinets and other heavy objects to the walls. "The school buildings are some of the safest places to be in an earthquake," Gratiot said.

But Gratiot doesn't let the district take the credit for these measures. "Even though the district has paid for these things, they've all been spearheaded by the PTA's," she said. "They provide the energy that makes these things happen." In fact, it was a concerned Loyola parent who started the annual earthquake drill about 15 years ago.

Gratiot said the drill went well. "We've been improving it every year. Now we are about the best- prepared district I know of."