Is It Better to Release Students or Keep Them at the School?

In response to an ongoing discussion on keeping kids at school or releasing them, guest blogger RJ Hilton had the following thoughts:

Every solution to a problem has consequences. In the case of tornadoes, gathering people in one location increases the impact if something goes wrong. It does however reduce substantially the potential of threat exposure to the student body as a whole. The alternative of sending people home substantially increases the exposure period and the range of potential direct encounter to the point it’s unlikely some individuals could avoid one. As with any procedure, the more you have to do, the more chances of something going wrong. Consider the steps required to complete each process.

Moving students to a specific location or group of locations is a localized and immediate process with very little required in the way of external information before making a decision. It also involves no direct threat exposure. The alternative requires a series of detailed bits of information often unique to each student. The process is time consuming with a number of variables which creates a lot of unknowns.

If you’re in an area were tornadoes are rare then an administrator has the luxury of making a decision very early in the process, since it would likely only affect one school day. In an area where severe storm events and tornadoes are common, an administrator can’t afford to be sending people home at every indication of a storm. This means their window of opportunity to avoid an encounter decreases as time goes by.

Increasing the difficulty of the situation is the fact that administrators can’t just send everyone home arbitrarily. They have to decide which students are better off going home and which aren’t. Even if you have a list of students who have parents that are normally at home, you would have to confirm they were that particular day. If you’re lucky enough to have up-to-date phone numbers, it would still take some period of time to make the calls, not minutes. (Unless your district has a reverse-911 system.)

We must also consider, storms don’t have schedules, they can often accelerate in intensity much more rapidly then any one would expect. And once the decision has been made to take students home, how long will the process take can't be known for sure. In addition it's not just getting students delivered but getting school personnel back to safety. The process of moving students in less then ideal conditions opens up additional variables and hazards, not usually encountered on a normal day. Tornadoes are situations where time is essential, yet the potential for delays increase substantially due to the nature of the storms that precede them. Traffic or accidents could potentially leave students stranded and left in a dangerous situation.

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