Last week, many eyes were trained on a school bus accident in Harrisonburg, Va., not for shock appeal — but for learning purposes, as the city teamed with a local school district for a mock school bus crash designed to prepare school officials for the real thing. Craig Mackail, director of operations and communications outreach at Harrisonburg City Schools, told School Transportation News that everyone involved agreed it was a good way to hone their skills before the new school year.
Mackail said the previous bus-crash drill was so successful that he and the Fire Chief Larry Shifflet decided it was time to conduct another one. This time around, the drill began when a school bus lost control in a parking lot at James Madison University, hitting a street lamp, as school administrators observed. Immediately emergency responders were on the scene, following protocol and rescuing children still inside the bus.
Mackail pointed out that it can be “very difficult” for the fire department to provide verbal updates to multiple officials while trying to move children out of the bus. In the previous drill, various school administrators showed up at the accident site and they kept asking the fire department the same questions over and over.
“Now, after we call our schools via radio, we designate one principal or assistant principal to be the school division representative,” he said. “So, one person shows up on the scene, wearing the vest that shows he or she is in charge until one of the central office representatives can get there. That individual handles all the questions, which really helps.”
The Harrisonburg district tries to schedule this type of drill every year, or every other, before the first day of school, Mackail noted, in order to prepare any new principals that have come on board.
“This is a good training for them. If they were teachers prior or from a different division, we need to get them up to speed on emergency response,” he said. “Every time we do one, it gets better and better.”
He added that this year, they created a scenario that was “as close to reality” as possible. Staff members in the district’s emergency communications center handled the radio traffic, while the paramedics triaged children with (fake) injuries and transported them to the local hospital.
“We had a number of agencies — the school district, fire department, rescue squads, hospital and police — involved in this drill,” Mackail continued. “We had some really good comments about how the process worked. I think the kids who participated, who came off the bus either on their own or on a stretcher, seemed confident about their safety.”
Mackail said the district did have a school bus accident, not a “serious” one, five or six years ago that brought to light some areas they needed to fine-tune.
“Out of that accident, there were some procedures on our side and on the fire department’s side that we had to go over and rethink, and then we decided to do a bus drill. There were some communication issues,” he explained. “Out of that came some revamping of our protocol on both sides.”
The next step, he said, is for the committee in charge of the training to hold a debriefing meeting to “see what we could do better.” Because there is always room for improvement.
