Safety, Health, and Risk Management

SAFETY, HEALTH, AND RISK MANAGEMENT

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.

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). If nothing else, a clear policy regarding information and notification is the minimum level needed to manage these issues.

The first 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 small child. It is much more likely, statistically, that someone will be hit by a car in the parking lot or at the street or on their way to school, or assaulted in a restroom, 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 shouldn't be prevented. A clear assessment of risk can ensure that high-risk areas do receive adequate attention.

There are no simple, easy answers to these problems, which are related to violence in our society and in our communities. There is an approach to personal safety in schools based on concepts embodied in CEPTD (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design). It 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, or contact Tod Schneider at tod.schneider@ci.eugene.or.us. You can also Safe School Design, due out this summer from the ERIC Clearinghouse at the University of Oregon.

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.
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.
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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