Safety Summit' for educators

San Jose Mercury News
By John Woolfolk Mercury News
November 10, 2005

An explosion rocks a San Jose middle school, sparking a fire, injuring staff and students and shattering windows at a nearby elementary and high school. Smoke fills the school as students and teachers flee outdoors.

Teachers lead the students to a football stadium, but an earlier dispute among eighth-grade boys erupts into fights as rival high school gangs join in. Weapons are seen. Parents swarm the elementary school following erroneous news reports that evacuated students are there.

Fortunately, that nightmare never happened.

But in what San Jose officials billed as a unique exercise, city police and fire officials Wednesday coached scores of schoolteachers and administrators in how to think and act like emergency responders in such a situation.

"This just happened at your campus," San Jose police Lt. Bruce Toney told a room full of 200 public and private school officials from northern and central San Jose during the "safety summit" at City Hall. "Who are you going to communicate to? What we want you to do is come up with ideas."

Teachers, principals and superintendents spent the next couple of hours at a table with a diagram of the mock school district, discussing responses with suggestions from police and firefighters.

The event was timely. On Tuesday, eight Oak Grove High School students were suspended after a brawl involving more than a dozen people at the South San Jose school, and a high school freshman in Tennessee was accused of shooting an assistant principal to death and wounding two other administrators.

San Jose has 19 school districts, with 300 public and private schools, more than 230,000 K-12 students and 18,000 teachers. But city officials said each has different safety policies, procedures and plans. And none of those are well-aligned with San Jose police and fire emergency procedures, or coordinated with neighborhood groups or community centers near schools.

Wednesday's event aimed to solve that problem. The half-day session was sponsored by Mayor Ron Gonzales' Gang Prevention Task Force and San Jose Unified School District under a state Department of Education emergency response and crisis management grant.

"From what I understand, we're the first city tackling this issue," said Angel Rios Jr., city superintendent of parks, recreation and neighborhood services and a member of the gang prevention task force. "It's a good first for San Jose."

While public safety and school officials have staged campus emergency drills simulating crises, they've been limited to specific sites, and served more to hone police and firefighters' tactics.

By contrast, Wednesday's summit aimed to gather teachers and administrators from schools throughout the city, as well as leaders of community groups, to get them thinking about how police and firefighters react to emergencies, and how to coordinate with them.

Rios said the summit is a first step toward developing a citywide crisis response and training protocol that will help save lives and ease anxiety in emergencies ranging from earthquakes and fires to school shootings, gang wars or terrorist attacks. Participants will return to their schools, discuss what they learned and reconvene at a future date to develop policies.

"I thought this was a great start," said Marian Stuckey, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of San Jose.

"We've had emergency plans for many years but we look at this type of catastrophe and we're really not prepared. There's a lot we need to do in terms of helping our schools be trained and organized."

Peter Demme, a kindergarten teacher at McKinley Elementary School, said it was "forward-looking for the city to provide us with this seminar. "

"This was essential," Demme said. "It's not a matter of if a big disaster is going to happen, but when."