School Safety Month: Breaking Down Emergency Drills
A core part of keeping our schools safe is the regular conduction of safety drills. All schools in Ohio are required to organize and complete rapid dismissal, safety and tornado drills. These are currently mandated by House Bill 123 of the 133rd General Assembly. FHSD complies with all legally required exercises and enhances its emergency preparedness through ALICE training. The district also coordinates Emergency Management Tests in collaboration with law enforcement and other agencies.
As we observe School Safety Month in Ohio, it is important to take a moment to recognize the procedures that FHSD implements to create a suitable and secure learning environment for all its students.
Fire drills, also referred to as rapid dismissal drills, prepare all school staff and students in the building to leave as efficiently as possible. These drills are important to help students and staff familiarize themselves with the process so that evacuations can be done in a safe and orderly fashion.
Ohio law also mandates that schools conduct safety drills. Similar to fire drills, these follow emergency evacuation protocol. However, they respond to a safety threat, such as an active aggressor. Every school must complete three safety drills during the school year. One additional school safety drill is required each year to practice when a safety threat requires all school staff and students to remain in the building.
At least one emergency evacuation drill—whether a fire drill or safety drill—must be completed each month. Additionally, one must be conducted within the first 10 days of a new school year. Schools in Ohio are also required to hold tornado drills once per month during tornado season (April 1-July 31).
To supplement the state of Ohio’s required safety drills, FHSD has implemented ALICE into its procedures. ALICE is the leading active aggressor response program in the nation. Created by a police officer, it prepares individuals to handle the threat of an active aggressor. FHSD students and staff in all buildings are trained three times each year in this emergency response process.
On a district level, FHSD also conducts Emergency Management Tests each year in coordination with law enforcement, fire/EMS personnel, emergency management, TSA and other agencies. These involve three different types of tests that are conducted on a three-year rotating cycle.
A tabletop exercise is an Emergency Management Test that involves walking through a response to a simulated, hypothetical scenario. A functional exercise is designed to see how policies and procedures work in a realistic, but still simulated setting. The functional exercise may include changes in the situation that management must respond to through quick adjustments. The final type of Emergency Management Test is a full-scale exercise that would include participation from district officials and a wide-variety of local agencies. This drill would simulate a major emergency situation and require participants to replicate their response in real-time while dealing with realistic and fluid circumstances. FHSD conducted a full-scale exercise simulating a bleacher collapse in spring 2022, which you can watch here via a news report from WCPO.
