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SAFETY,
HEALTH, AND RISK MANAGEMENT
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©2006
Fred Tepfer
1380
Bailey Avenue Eugene, OR 97402
non-commercial use freely granted
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TOPICS
Safety is an area of high potential costs and of large potential savings. It's
not an area to which schools have historically given much attention other than
doing fire drills and paying insurance premiums.
CONCEPTS AND APPROACHES
The underlying concept that will minimize losses and maximize savings is having
a comprehensive safety program. This need not be time consuming or burdensome,
but it must be deliberate, well-conceived, ongoing, and well-documented.
At its core are the following concepts:
- Staff - at each level an administrator is assigned to safety isses. For
example, the district has a safety administrator, and each building or site
also has a designated staff member.
- Committee - In larger buildings or organizations these people meet as a
safety committee, which should include a senior administrator such as a principal
or superintendent. It's often useful for custodial or maintenance staff to
be represented on this committee as they are in a position to notice safety
problems. Except in large districts, safety would only be a very small part
of the responsibilities of any of these people.
- Training - periodic training is provided for safety staff as well as general
staff. This may include workshops, discussions in staff meetings, specific
task-related training, and drills.
- Planning - if for no other reason, liability is reduced considerably when
a plan is in place. For example, if you have a program for identifying and
removing trip hazards (such as uneven floors and sidewalks) that is actively
making progress on these problems, you are in a better situation defending
a tripping claim than if you had none, even though you had a backlog of hazards
that hadn't been fixed yet.
- Outside expertise - free advise and technical assistance is nearly always
available. Your insurance carrier is required to offer certain assistance.
The fire prevention staff of your local fire department may also have resources.
- Record keeping - basic information is kept and reviewed at least annually.
Trends, specific incidents, and record of prevention activities can be useful
in preventing future incidents and in negotiating insurance rates.
- "Witness chair" test - In dealing with tough safety issues, it's wisest
to put yourself in the situation of imagine having to testify as a witness
in a lawsuit after the accident. Was your decision defensible? Does it make
sense now? Were your reasons documented?
FIRE AND LIFE SAFETY
This is the safety area that most schools concentrate on through
fire drills. These are very important, but it's also important
to keep records including the date of the drill, the evacuation
time, and whether people were adequately accounted for after
they left the building. Also refer to the article on Fire
Engineering and Detection and Supression Systems. Documented
implementation of these measures can reduce fire insurance
costs (although always check first to confirm this before making
choices about investing in changes).
Many prevention opportunities exist:
Fire sprinklers : Very few catastrophic fires occur in buildings with
fire sprinklers. Fire sprinklers also reduce your fire insurance rates, and
dramatically reduce the probable damage and down-time in the event of a fire.
In the long run they pay for themselves.
Fire extinguishers : Properly sized and placed fire extinguishers can
prevent small fires from becoming large fires. All areas of fire hazard should
have the appropriate fire extinguisher readily at hand (there are a number of
types), and all areas should have fire extinguishers within a twenty or thirty
second distance.
Fire extinguisher maintenance : Every year each fire extinguisher should
be taken off its bracket, have its pressure checked on its gauge, and inverted
and tapped on the bottom with a hammer if it is a dry chemical type (to fluff
up the powder). A maintenance tag on each extinguisher should record each maintenance
visit.
Emergency lighting test : Your building should have an emergency lighting
system to light the exitways should power fail. This system should be tested
annually, and for at least a couple of minutes to ensure that the power source
is still reliable. If you don't have an emergency lighting system, at a minimum
you can put glow-in-the-dark tape at regular intervals along the floor of the
corridors leading to exits.
Fume hoods and shop sawdust collection systems should be maintained
by competent professions at least annually.
There are basic fire and life safety measures that all staff should be aware
of:
- - Any room used by 50 people or more needs two separate exits. For typical
classrooms, this means rooms of more than 1000 square feet.
- Fire doors should never be locked from the inside.
- People with disabilities will often need assistance. This must be planned
for in advance if it is effective, and must be planned with the person needing
assistance. See separate article.
- No one but fire fighters should return into a building on fire.
- To prevent false alarms, fire alarm pull boxes can either be equipped
with indelible ink on the inside of the handle, or an outer pull cover can
be installed that sets off a local alarm.
ACCIDENT PREVENTION
The key to preventing accidents and decreasing accident and claim rates is research.
Each accident should be seen as a source of information about accident prevention.
All accidents should be tracked so that patterns emerge which guide prevention
efforts.
- Example: A school district was experiencing a high number of claims
from teachers who had had falls. An investigation showed that in many cases,
they were trying to reach items stored on high shelves. Often they would
put a chair on top of a table to be able to reach the highest shelves. Removal
of the shelves would restrict already limited storage. The district bought
stepladders, made them available to each teacher either in their room or
in a storage room nearby, and trained them on safe use of ladders. Their
claim rate dropped dramatically.
In Oregon, a district's insurance carrier is required to offer loss-control
services for free. They will send out an accident prevention specialist who
will review your accident data and work with you to prevent accidents. It costs
the district nothing and save quite a bit in reduced claims and lower rates.
This program is targeted at workers, but while the professional is already on
site the school can ask about risks to kids.
Other programs in Oregon provide grants (through Oregon OSHA) for mitigation
of a work-related claim. Another provides for tools and equipment needed to
return an injured worker to their job, and can pay up to 50% of their wages
while restricted if they return early or stay on the job despite the injury.
For elementary schools, playgrounds are a major issue. Even though there
are guidelines for playground design, use common sense, do inspections (and
record them), and make sure that areas subject to fall have an adequate cushioning
material. Certain types of wood chips are an inexpensive way to provide this
cushion. Any cushioning material, be it sand, chips, or pads, needs to be
maintained, renewed, or replaced periodically, which ties back to periodic
inspections.
For middle and high schools, the major problems come from labs, shops, and
art studios (see separate paper on labs). Again, clear standards are available
for equipment and material safety in these areas.
Some schools neglect to plan for serious athletic injuries. Are school staff
at the practice or event trained to advanced first aid? Is a paramedic available
or on call nearby? Is there access to a phone for calling for help? Good practice
would required first aid training for coaches and assistant coaches, equip
them with a phone, and provide clear written procedures for how to handle
injuries and other emergencies.
HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY
With the huge increase in synthetic compounds of the past 40
years and the emergence of new environmental illnesses, the
general public has become much more sensitive to the relationship
of building environments to health (additional information
on indoor air quality is contained in a separate article).
The relationship between healthy interior environments and
academic performance is now well-established. If nothing else,
clear policies regarding use of interior materials and notification
of construction activities is the minimum level needed to manage
these issues.
A logical first step is to ensure that interior finishes
are built and maintained with low-ipact materials. Simply changing
cleaning and maintenance materials to environmentally-friendly
alternatives can substantially improve environmental health
of students, staff, and especially custodians. In most cases,
this also reduces the cost of cleaning materials.
A second step is to make sure that building personnel
are notified well in advance of work ordered or coordinated
at the district level. An effective way to do this is to have
a single point of contact for the school to be notified, and
have that person responsible for notification of building users.
It is required that you keep material safety data sheets for materials used
in your building. It is wise to consistently keep track of at least the most
toxic and most controversial of these materials. For example, Eugene school
district 4J has a very elaborate policy for the use of pesticides and herbicides
outdoors which is designed to limit quantities of toxic materials and potential
exposure to students and staff. However, they apparently have no policy for
the indoor use of these same materials, and run the risk of having their staff
or contractors contaminate a building environment so thoroughly that it would
need to be evacuated for weeks.
Similarly, almost every school district has had incidents of student or
staff illness related to exposure to fumes from construction activities. In
general, it is good practice to have a preconstruction meeting before any
construction activities occur in the school. All of the parties can be introduced,
clear lines of communication established, and necessary separations can be
planned.
Ideally, no construction would occur in occupied buildings. There are times
that the ideal can't be met. In that situation, it is best to build a physical
barrier between occupied space and construction areas and to separate any
ventilation systems that might cross-connect the two environments.
PERSONAL SAFETY
This has become an issue of high concern among parents and
teachers. However, it is a much larger issue than the statistical
risk of shooting of students or staff, or abduction of a
child. It is much more likely, statistically, that
someone will be hit by a car in the parking lot, be injured
or killed while being driven to school, or assaulted in
a restroom by a fellow student, or raped on their way home
in the evening. Nearly all abductions are custody-related
and most violence is committed by family members or friends.
This isn't to say that the more dramatic "TV
news" events aren't a real risk. A clear assessment of risk
can ensure that high-risk issues receive attention as well
as those with dramatic risks.
There are no simple, easy answers to these problems, which
are related to violence in our society and in our communities.
There is, howver, an approach to personal safety in schools
based on concepts embodied in CPTED (Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design) that uses concepts of natural surveillance,
natural access control, and territoriality to provide security
without having to build a prison-like environment. For further
information on this subject, read the related articles,
read Safe
School Design, from
the ERIC Clearinghouse.
There are many measures that can help, such as:
- Education: Inform people of statistical risks. Make sure that they are
as concerned about higher risk/less publicized problems as they are about
lower risk/more publicized problems like shootings. On average, our schools
are very safe environments.
- Make sure that the school teaches respect, non-violent solutions, and
other measures designed to reduce physical violence. There is a growing
body of research and techniques in this area.
- Establish very clear rules with realistic, appropriate sanctions that
you are ready to enforce. If minor infractions are slated to be punished
by expulsion, then often they will go unenforced. Lack of enforcement leads
to a lack of respect for rules.
- Design the physical environment to be friendly and inviting, yet also
public and visible. Avoid hidden entrances, and provide generous visibility
from administrative and instructional areas. Teacher prep areas, cafeteria
kitchens, and other staffed areas are useful for providing at least the
impression of surveillance. These are typically more effective than surveillance
cameras, although cameras can also be useful tools, especially for existing
facilities that have visibility problems that can't easily be overcome with
minor physical improvements.
- Develop social and administrative structures that prevent putting kids
at risk because of isolation and alienation. Physical facilities that encourage
interaction can help in this regard.
- Encourage open communication between kids and staff. Provide a wide variety
of measures so that every student will feel that there is someone at school
that they can confide in.
There are also specific building measures that you can use:
- Establish and enforce procedures for logging in and identifying all visitors.
Encourage all staff to make contact with visitors, and to challenge (in
a friendly way) visitors without badges or identification.
- Establish a crisis response plan, which at a minimum includes procedures
for and practice in lock-down or intruder alert events. Arrange for "real"
drills in which emergency authorities are warned that it
is a drill, but school staff are not aware.
- Use "natural" surveillance
of administrative offices, teacher prep areas, libraries,
or cafeteria kitchens, to provide supervision of exits
and other key areas. Interior windows providing a view
from these staffed areas are an essential part of this
system. At best, these areas can be located at intersections
or protrude into corridors to provide maximum surveillance.
- Consider keeping some exterior doors exit-only. If an entrance is difficult
to supervise and not needed for regular entrance, this is a simple solution.
If they are exit only and located in an area with natural supervision, control
of their use is easy to achieve. The exits can also be alarmed, either locally
or centrally, although that carries an administrative burden.
- Consider removing restroom doors if privacy sight
lines allow. Schools who have tried these "airport-style"
restroom entrances report many fewer behavioral problems
in restrooms.
- Make sure that your school has the ability to communicate the need for
lock-down and has the means (locks and keys), communications system (intercom),
and training to lock-down when needed.
- Closed circuit video is not always an effective tool
for supervision, as staff time required is high. However,
it is very effective for use at specific times and also
works as a deterrent. If you use CC-TV you can also add
dummy cameras to increase the effect. There is one body
of opinion that in some situations cameras can be counterproductive
by increasing alienation and resentment against the school. On
the other hand, they are powerful after-the-fact evidence.
- Some schools also install and use metal detectors at entrances. These
can have a positive effect through increasing people's sense of security,
but they do need to be staffed and maintained, and they are not foolproof.
They can also be intimidating to some people when metal shoe plates or other
unknown metal parts set them off.
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