Let’s face it, we Cantabrians know that emergencies happen and we need to be prepared. I recently attended a superb workshop jointly run by the Ministry of Education and Police. This gave us the opportunity to fine-tune our plans and make a few changes. As a result, we have formed an incident management team. This includes me as Principal (or anyone acting in this role) taking the role of incident coordinator, Trine would lead communications and Steve and Donna would play pivotal roles.
Emergency responses now fall into four main areas;
- Fire – the alarm would sound and children evacuate the building, assembling on the courts
- Earthquake – stop, drop and cover and then evacuate the building, assembling on the courts
- Shelter in Place – music would play and we would use the PA system to direct children inside. There they would carry on with learning with the doors locked. This would be for something like a chemical spill, fumes outside, a dog onsite or bee swarm
- Lockdown – an alarm would sound and children would hide inside. This would be used on rare occasions where threat and danger are high.
We regularly practice all drills except lockdown. However, teachers would discuss and practice this drill on teacher only days.
Communication to parents
This would be via our Hero App and/or text through the app. Updates would also be provided on our school and whanau Facebook pages. On occasion, we will test our text feature. 
Food and Drink
We keep a supply of snack foods in each of the spaces in the event of an emergency. When these get close to their expiry dates they will either be eaten or donated to food banks. We would then advise you that these need to be replaced and rely on parents donating replacement items. We have large containers and water purifying tablets should we need to use water from the nearby stream.
Keeping Us Updated
It is incredibly important that all details are kept up to date. This includes phone numbers, email addresses and medical information for your children. We will shortly send home the information we have on file for you to check and return with any changes. Please return this regardless, if there are no changes simply state ‘all correct’. We then know who we have to chase! In addition to this, we would like to digitise our emergency pick up information. These are people who live nearby who you authorise to pick up your children should there be a significant event and we close the school. We ask that you check with these people before nominating them as they may live and work locally and therefore be nominated by more than one family.
Please help us by completing this form with details for each child.
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