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Proposed by: Laura Boudreau
Contact (name, email, phone, skype):lboudreau@worldbank.org, 908-601-8539
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: Cell phone: 908-601-8539
Although schools may have policies in place that delineate procedures for parents to locate and to pick up their children from school in case of an emergency, in the emergency atmosphere, parents are disposed to disregarding this information (or to have missed the notice of the policy when it was originally issued). This application would allow schools to immediately send a text message to parents or to legal guardians with the following information: 1) The school children are okay; 2) [In the case of evacuation,] the children are being moved to X location; 3) How parents/guardians can pick up their children.
During the Sichuan Earthquake in China, many school buildings collapsed entirely or were damaged. In cases where the schools were damaged and unstable and children had to be evacuated, parents could have been notified to know that their children were okay, had been evacuated from the building, and could be picked up in an organized fashion at X location.
Problem: Rocky and Bullwinkle are first and third graders, respectively, at their local public school. They are both in school at 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon when an earthquake occurs. Although shaken, the children are fine, but the building sustained some damage. The school decides that it is best to evacuate, as it is unclear whether the school’s structure is sound and what could be the possible impact of an aftershock. Teachers follow the school’s evacuation drill, keeping the children organized by class and bringing them to an open park around the corner from the school for safety. Meanwhile, Rocky and Bullwinkle’s mom is 40 minutes across town at work. After feeling the earthquake, her first thought is for the safety of her children. After the earthquake subsides, in a moment of panic, she grabs her keys and heads for the door, anxious to pick up her kids. She starts repeatedly calling the school, but the school’s line is busy. Her husband, working from home, is much closer to the school. He calls his wife repeatedly but cannot get through. His first thought is also to get to the kids. He vaguely remembers seeing a bulletin about the school’s emergency procedures, but is too caught up with the damage sustained to the house, his inability to reach his wife, and his anxiety over the well-being of Rocky and Bullwinkle to look for it. He also heads for his car. Solution: The school has software that includes a database of parent/guardian contact information. In the case of an emergency, administrators simply have to input case-specific variables (depending on the situation) and to click a button to send all of the recorded guardians a message that says that the children are okay, they have been evacuated to the park around the corner (for example), and the procedure for picking up the students. This idea could be developed further through an application that would message all recorded guardians for a child when the he or she has been picked up by the other parent/guardian.
The input system for when the tool will be used following a disaster must be very simple and allow for immediate deployment of the message to parents. It would also be beneficial for the instrument to be able to be manipulated so that if there is a portion of the school where children are hurt, those guardians can be isolated from the rest and send a distinct message, while other parents whose children have not been impacted also receive a message about their children and procedures for picking them up. Must be cost efficient.
Similar applications would also be highly valuable in hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons, all of which are being proposed for this RHoK.
There are numerous organizations who work in school disaster preparedness: http://www.riskred.org/schools.html
[SaraFarmer] I think something like this might already be in use in some UK schools: worth checking.
This work can be taken to real world users through the GFDRR, the Safe Schools Initiative, the Red Cross, Risk RED (Risk Reduction Education for Disasters), the UNISDR, etc., all of which work in improving schools’ disaster preparedness. It is highly likely that this software would be of great interest to these organizations.