Idaho doesn’t require schools or daycares to have disaster plans. According to a reportout this week from the nonprofit Save the Children, Idaho is one of four states that have no requirement.
Idaho is not prone to tornados and hurricanes, but the state has disasters of its own; take the wildfires still raging in Idaho’s forests. The Teton Dam collapse of 1976 was one of Idaho’s largest disasters. It killed 11 people and did about $2 billion of damage in eastern Idaho. Water poured through the halls of Sugar-Salem Junior High where Kevin Schultz is principal. No one there was hurt, but Schultz says to this day when they work on the building they find residue from the disaster. They call it flood mud.
But Schultz, who is also district safety coordinator, says even with that event looming large, their disaster plans are not what they should be.
The National Commission on Children and Disasters created by George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina, recommends states require all schools and daycares to have four types of disaster plans. Those are evacuation and relocation, family-child reunification, a plan for children with special needs, and a K-12 multiple disaster plan.
Sugar-Salem has the first three. Many Idaho school districts have some or all of these disaster plans in place. A spokesman says the Boise district has all of them.
Twenty-two states require schools and daycares have each disaster plan in place. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia require some. Idaho, Iowa, Kansas and Michigan are the only states that don’t require any of the disaster plans.
Richard Bland is policy director for Save the Children. He says without state regulation, some schools will be prepared for disaster and some won’t.
“If the state doesn’t require it, what we’ve found is that those under-resourced schools in particular, in low income areas or extremely rural areas, are more likely than not, not to have a significant emergency plan,” Bland says. “Or if there is an emergency plan it’s not well practiced.”
Schultz says Sugar-Salem has focused on beefing up school security in the wake of last year’s Connecticut school shooting. He’s heading a committee this year to update all their plans. That includes working on one for multiple disasters.
He rattles off several possible disaster threats near his school. Those include recent earthquakes in some Idaho mountain communities, volcanoes in Yellowstone National Park, the Idaho National Lab nuclear facility, and a nearby potato processing plant that receives shipments of toxic chemicals.
But Bland says Idaho’s weakest point is not schools, it's daycare. He says states in the Mountain West have been reluctant to regulate daycare. But Idaho he says, lags all its neighbors in disaster preparedness requirements for child care providers. Recently, Save the Children worked with Idaho neighbors Utah and Wyoming, to update their regulations. In the new report both got perfect scores.
Copyright 2013 Boise State Public Radio