As the leader of a high school or even the head teacher of a primary school, you have a big job and it’s to make sure that everybody is safe. When you are leaving at school, you’re in charge of the pupils, the teachers, the maintenance staff – but you’re also in charge of the building and the site itself. You may not be the site owner, your local government may be the owner, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be the best leader of the school you are responsible for. Emergencies happen and they’re not always straightforward. You have to be ready at any time, and while you can never be completely 100% safe, and you cannot be immune from every situation, there are things that you can do to make sure that you’re still on top of the safety of your school.
Being the leader, principal, or owner of the school is a big deal. It’s up to you to make sure that you are in charge of everybody around you and that you are ensuring that all of your students have a safe experience every single day. You don’t want anybody to be in danger, which is why you need to make sure that you are ensuring the school is a safe place for all. You wouldn’t just leave the school grounds broken, cracked and a danger to everybody in the school. Instead, you would hire McConnell and Associates to ensure that the school grounds are well maintained. School safety is important but it goes so far beyond just ensuring that intruders don’t come in. If you don’t maintain the safety of the people in your building and on your property, there is a chance you could open yourself up to liability. Being a principal of the school is one thing, but being a safety ally? That’s a whole other ballgame.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can lead your school safely, making sure that everybody within the premises of the building is able to do their jobs and learn as effectively as possible.
- Practice communicating. One of the best ways to make sure that everybody on your school premises is safe is with the correct communication. This isn’t just about communicating things like dangerous incidents happening on school grounds in real time. Those are necessary, and the chances are that you have systems in place to give timely and accurate information to as many people as possible within your school community. Communication also has to go beyond your school and into the local government. For example, we talked about broken and cracked playground areas earlier on. Your actual site needs to be well-maintained, and while you may have a janitor on site to help with that, sometimes it goes beyond that. Sometimes you need to make sure that your local government is willing to give you the funding that you need to maintain the grounds, the buildings, and all of the electrical and plumbing work that goes into school. With the right communication, you can get the support you need.
- Get everybody involved. Safety is up to you to lead, but not up to you to be the only one involved in it. Involving the parents in the operations of the school is a smart thing to do as a leader. During any emergency on any school grounds, the parents play a massive role here. It’s your responsibility to look after their children while they’re on site, but it’s a parents responsibility to know what to do during the crisis and if you can understand that, it can make a big difference. Sending out the right information and holding meetings with parents to help them to understand your school procedures and how they should be followed will help. When you’re running drills for any kind of safety incident, parents need to be involved.
- Don’t be afraid to involve your students. To be able to safely go to school, your students have to be a big part in understanding safety procedures. Of course, students are there when you’re running drills for breaking into the school or fire drills or water safety drills – but they need to understand the realities of policy. The students are also a fountain of ideas, so if your buildings in your school are becoming rundown, or the grounds are becoming terrible to play on, you need to hear from the students using them. Do they feel safe in the building? Are they feeling safe at play? These are questions that you can ask the students and give them the power to be part of a solution.
- Practice for different emergencies. You’re not going to practice for the playground cracking underfoot; you’re going to be keeping an eye on that. But when it comes to scheduling fire drills and other kinds of emergencies you can practice for these regularly.
- Collaborate with local governments. Did you know that there are free alert services from local public safety departments that you can download? These are an effective method to receive notifications of emergencies in the local area, which can help you to better protect your school and your students. You could even be notified about natural disasters, which will help you to know how to protect your property. You also need to make sure that your insurance companies are aware of these types of emergencies – especially if you’re in flooding areas.
- Get to know the campus. As a leader of the school, it stands to reason that you’ll know where the gas, water, HVAC system shut offs and even the electrical shut offs are. You need to have keys for every classroom, every emergency shed and you also need to know who carries a copy of those keys. What would you do if they weren’t there in an emergency? You need to know that you have the right supplies for emergencies, and that’s part of ensuring that your school is safe and compliant with government restrictions.
- Always have a contingency plan. To be able to lead your school safely as possible, you need to have plans for the day activities for non-school days. Field trips, sports days, extended care days, and every other campus event that could possibly come up, there has to be a contingency plan for emergencies that happen at those times. When emergencies happen outside school hours, this can cause some serious chaos. If you have procedures and practices to cover these, however, you can ensure that your school is safe.
- Make sure you do your research. Speak to those in local government and find out what you need to know about your school; it can make a difference if they’re changing procedures that you are unaware of. You need to be prepared as possible for any kind of emergencies, and safety is a battle that you can only win if you are prepared.
- Make time for training. To be able to reinforce your procedures, identify any gaps in training knowledge, and address any new emergency issues that could come up, you need to allot some time training with your staff. The faculty are your eyes and your ears, and if there are witnesses in your school, they are the ones to tell you. You need a few hours per year of dedicated emergency response training.
- Assign responsibility. One of the best ways that you can make sure that your school is safe, is to make sure that you are not alone in doing this. Every single person has to be involved so assign responsibility for emergencies among your staff. Doing this can make your safety procedures more efficient.