Developing a Crisis Plan

Throughout this course, you have explored the concepts of educational leadership through creating and maintaining a safe school environment. In addition to acquiring this knowledge, you have also considered how to use your collaboration skills to cultivate and maintain relationships with students, parents and guardians, stakeholders, and community members.

For your Learning Outcomes Project, you will create a crisis plan that will support a safe school culture and mobilize resources to respond effectively to a crisis situation.

Taking on the role of the principal of a high school, in Module 1 you analyzed the challenges of creating a safe school environment and culture. In addition to striving to develop a safe school culture, you must also be realistic about providing a crisis plan for a worst-case scenario of violent intruders. Every school district should have a plan for developing and maintaining an overall safe and supportive school culture in each building. This means striving to keep students, faculty, and staff physically and emotionally secure in the day-to-day events in their school building.

The Learning Outcomes Project for this course is to create a crisis plan. You can use the various resources provided to you in this course’s readings, media, textbooks, and Discussions. You may also use resources and knowledge from your own school setting.

For this Assignment, assume the role of the principal at Grand City High School. You have discovered that a crisis plan does not exist. All that exist are general comments in the district handbook that state that the school buildings will provide a safe and supportive learning environment for all students, faculty, and staff. There is no specific plan for what you should if an intruder or intruders decide to bring violence into a building. What structure or plans need to be in place to respond effectively to a crisis?

As a starting point for your plan, review the crisis plan in your own educational setting, which you can use as a reference. For your Learning Outcomes Project, you may choose to update this plan or create a new crisis plan.

Your crisis plan should include the following:

• Introduction: (approx. 1–2 pages)
  • Explain the purpose and goals of your crisis plan, specifically addressing how the plan will support a safe school culture and mobilize resources to respond effectively to a crisis situations..
• Body (approx. 5–6 pages): Using the template provided create the sections of your crisis plan as follows:
  • Describe your plan of action including the following:
    • Your crisis response plan including a crisis response team (e.g., assistant principal, director of guidance, other members)
    • Your plan for evacuating the school during the crisis
    • Your communication plan for notifying outside agencies (e.g., police, hospitals, counseling agencies)
    • Your communication plan for notifying parents/guardians
    • Your media communications strategy (e.g., how and when do you notify the media, in what area can they work, who addresses the media)
    • Your plan to incorporate community resources to assist students and personnel in the aftermath of the crisis
  • Explain how your plan will be effective in responding to and mitigating crisis situations and will maintain a safe school culture and minimize negative impact.
• Summary: (approx.1–2 pages)
  • Summarize the insights you gained as a result of creating this crisis plan and how you will utilize these insights to inform efforts in your own school setting.
• Reference Page: All scholarly resources must follow APA (6th ed.) guidelines. All references and research studies used to support the crisis plan should be evidence-based and scholarly in nature.