Emergency prepardness

The two disaster scenarios I chose are very real. Both of these occurred at my place of work. Our Head Start building consists of four classes and it is located in a community center. The upstairs part of the building schools teenager who are not allowed to attend regular school due to pregnancy or behavior problem. Each Head Start class consists of 17 children in each class, one lead teacher and one assistant. Our school is located in the ghetto or the project part of town. All the children who attend our school live in the project or what I call section 8 housing. I have seen a few drug busts, shooting and prostitute activities. Our windows face the street so we have to cover the windows.
The first incident occurred last year. There is a green colored house right across the street which we call the crack house. Even the children know it is the crack house. All of a sudden soon after breakfast, the SWAT team surrounded our room. We all had to move to the hall way an escape through the window from the back classroom of our building. One pair of the teacher stayed inside to pick up the children and give them through the window and the other pair had to receive the children on the other side. We then took the children onto the open field designated for these type of disaster. The school bus was waiting for us there and we were then taken to the company headquarters. Nice job in describing this frightening scenario! This should be another paragraph: The other incident took place couple of weeks ago. The children were in their work area when all of a sudden the weather radio alarm went off. I have trained my children to freeze when the alarm goes off. All the children dropped their toys and gather on the area rug silently. This training and practice of this training is absolutely essential! Nice! The radio stated we have a tornado watch so we asked the children to stay away from the window and work in the middle of the room. Soon after this the principal on the intercom asked us to stay away from the window and come in the middle. Ten minutes after this
another alarm came on for tornado warning. We quickly cleaned up the classroom and gathered around the rug. We had turned the light off. In the mean I talked to children of what is happening and how we are going to have to move to the hall way. As I was talking to the children my assistant grabbed our fanny pack (emergency first aid kit), water jugs, cups, snacks, toys and some books. We took all these items and our sign in and out book which consists of emergency contact # for that day. Few minutes after all these the intercom came on and told us to move in the hall away. We gathered our children, counted the children, moved in the hall away and hunkered down without any confusion. We all knew including the children knew what do without being told.
I think it is very important that me and my co-worker is prepared. My co-worker and I are prepared When we panic, the children panic which causes useless stress on them. In order to be prepared we need to have good communication going on between the two teachers and the children. and to practice – we cannot overstate the importance of practicing. Our job is to protect these children. If we are not prepared the children won’t feel safe in our care nor will the parents. The parents do not need stress of being worried about their children while working.
The plan we develop for these kind of disaster is drill. Every month we have fire drills, tornado drills and code red drills. Wonderful! We have? protocols of these kind of disaster. We call it the red folder. During the code red drills we turn off the light and hide underneath the tables and corners. The children know to line up when the fire alarm goes off and which door to head towards with one teacher in front of the line and the other at the end. When we come back in from the drill we do hunker down in the hall way as tornado drill.