Regional School Crisis Analysis

The thought of having a crisis at a school is a genuine concern for society. With the trend of the increasing number of school shootings, suicides, and family violence it is critical to have a plan in place at the school level. A crisis management plan is a part of a school district’s approach to facilitate a problem-focused intervention to identify, confront and resolve the crisis while restoring equilibrium and support to student and faculty members. One of the first school crises to have national attention occurred in California in 1976, where a bus full of children were kidnapped. This incident occurred at Chowchilla on a school bus where the children were buried underground and missing for 27 hours before escaping from kidnappers. …show more content…
The goals are to; develop a systematic organizational protocol to respond to school crisis, train school staff to deliver crisis intervention services, and increase collaboration between schools and community mental health and social services providers (Newgass & Schonfeld, 2000). In 2000, the Regional School Crisis Prevention and Response Program, had trained more than 7,000 schools and community staff. They also consulted more than 300 district-and school-level crisis response team, and provided technical assistance to schools during more than 175 crisis (Newgass & Schonfeld, 2000). This is an encouraging trend that is going in a positive direction for more schools and communities to use the resources that are available. With the limited empirical evidence documenting the effectiveness of school crisis intervention programs. The establishment of evidence-based procedures is critical and the evaluation procedures need to be included in the crisis response model. This will help school officials to improve the planning and the intervention at the different …show more content…
There are three tiers; primary preventions, secondary interventions, and the tertiary interventions. The primary activities should include conflict resolution, alcohol and drug prevention programs, and suicide prevention programs. The main step in the primary prevention prepare and enforce preventative procedures into the school to try to reduce the frequency of the undesired behaviors. The school level preventative procedures should include; emergency and evacuation plans and drills, support services and the creation and usage of the crisis intervention team. The school district should have frequent drills to practice the requirements of the administration, faculty and students. The frequent drills will allow for the crisis team to identify problems that may arise if there was an actual emergency. There also needs to be district wide bully-prevention, suicide prevention and zero-policy for drugs, alcohol and tobacco. The next step of secondary intervention was created to minimize the effects of the aftermath of a