Creating a positive climate on your campus can help foster a culture of safety and well-being. Each individual doing one small gesture of kindness can help enhance connectedness and contribute to a positive culture. Random Acts of Kindness Day on February 17 provides an opportunity for your school or campus community to participate. This day is celebrated when individuals, organizations, and groups do acts of kindness for others. Use this day to inspire your school, school district, or institution of higher education (IHE) to create and sustain a culture of kindness, appreciation, and collaboration throughout the academic year.

The REMS TA Center invites you and your safety leadership to participate on February 17 and throughout the year by incorporating random acts of kindness in the ways mentioned below into your school’s or campus’ preparedness culture.

• Begin a core planning team meeting by acknowledging each member’s unique skills and expertise.
• Thank a colleague, such as an educator, counselor, bus driver, or cafeteria worker, for supporting students and working to maintain a safe learning environment, via a public service announcement, newsletter article, or letter disseminated to members of the whole school community.
• Spotlight a community partner on your social media, Website, or newsletter and their contributions to your education agency’s preparedness.

You can also use this day to assess your school or campus culture. Stakeholders in school emergency preparedness should strive to determine whether their students and staff are comfortable in their school environment, both physically and emotionally, and whether students’ families are comfortable with the school environment in which their children learn. The REMS TA Center has developed helpful fact sheets about Student Perceptions of Safety and Their Impact on Creating a Safe School Environment and assessing the culture and climate of your school. You can use these fact sheets to learn more and potentially improve your current school climate.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) produces an annual report combining 15 months of quantitative and qualitative research, analysis, and input from partners at the Federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels to identify the nation’s most concerning threats and hazards and provide guidance on current capabilities and emergency management opportunities. The 2022 National Preparedness Report finds that communities across the nation identified wide-ranging threats and hazards as concerning. Notably, they reported cyberattacks, pandemics, and flooding as the threats and hazards most likely to occur and which would most stress emergency management capabilities.

The REMS TA Center is ready to support education agencies in preventing, protecting their communities from, mitigating the effects of, responding to, and recovering from these threats and hazards. Resources and training from the REMS TA Center to help you prepare for cyberattacks, pandemics, and flooding are listed below:

• Cybersecurity Considerations for K-12 Schools and School Districts Online Course
• Integrating Cybersecurity Into School Emergency Operations Plans Specialized Training Package Module
• Pandemic Planning: Developing an Infectious Disease Annex Fact Sheet
• Preparing for Floods Fact Sheets for K-12 Schools and School Districts, State Education Agencies, and Institutions of Higher Education
• Emergency Exercises Training Package with resource lists, tabletop exercises, and fact sheets for preparing for threats and hazards.

Did you know that February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness month? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teen dating violence affects millions of young people every year and can include physical violence, sexual violence, psychological abuse, and stalking. Schools and IHEs, in their missions to ensure the safety and well-being of the school or campus community, can take steps to both prevent and address teen dating violence, which can be considered an adversarial and human-caused threat in the context of school and higher ed emergency preparedness planning. Consider taking part in this awareness month by

• Learning more about the effects of teen dating violence on schools and campuses and considering implementation of prevention programs;
• Educating your school or campus community about the warning signs of teen dating violence, as well as indicators of safe and healthy relationships;
• Creating or enhancing a Domestic Violence Annex in your emergency operations plan (EOP) that outlines courses of action to be taken before, during, and after known incidents of teen dating violence; and
• Offering students further resources and connections to support services for teen dating violence, such as the love is respect Website and hotline.

Using funds from the Grants to States for School Emergency Management grant program, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) increased their capacity to provide training and technical assistance on high-quality school EOP development. NYSED began by submitting a Virtual Training by Request application to the REMS TA Center, who then delivered the Developing Emergency Operations Plans (EOPs) K-12 101 Train-the-Trainer in December 2020 to a cadre of master trainers at the state level. The New York State Center for School Safety (NYSCFSS) customized the Train-the-Educator presentation with state-specific information and requirements and rebranded it as Developing District-Wide & Building-Level Emergency Response Plans. NYSED and NYSCSS launched this synchronous training in 2021 and delivered it virtually. This free training was available to emergency management points of contact, administrators, staff, and planning team members at regional education agencies, local education agencies, and charter schools throughout the state. To date, the Grantee has delivered this training 23 times to 2,757 participants.

To complement these efforts and build their training menu, NYSED and NYSCFSS recorded and archived virtual trainings on additional emergency management planning topics. Asynchronous trainings include Developing and Enhancing Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) With Your Community Partners, The Incident Command System (ICS) for Schools, and Integrating the Needs of Students and Staff with Disabilities and Others with Access and Functional Needs; these modules may be viewed online and more self-paced training modules are in development. NYSED and NYSCFSS also created resources that can aid planning teams in EOP development, such as a Safety Plan Development Resource Packet, functional annex considerations, sample tabletop exercises, EOP self-assessments, and other documents that may be found at the link below. In Spring 2023, NYSED will host a two-day in-person School Safety Summit for school and school district administrators and others who are involved in developing and implementing EOPs.

Ideally, your education agency will have an emergency exercise program that is included in your EOP and practiced throughout the year. Emergency exercises fall into five categories: orientations, tabletop exercises, drills, functional exercises, and full-scale exercises, which are important components of EOPs. Functional exercises are the most intensive, interactive, and time-sensitive types of exercises as they test one or more functions of a school or higher ed EOP. They can be used to determine the extent to which an existing EOP contains the appropriate procedures, policies, roles, and responsibilities for responding to various hazards.

Through partnerships with first responders and other local agencies, your education agency can implement functional exercises to identify strengths and weaknesses in your EOP. Use the REMS TA Center's fact sheet on Functional Exercises: Practicing the Plan With Multiple Community Partners to gather lessons learned and strategies for planning and conducting functional exercises with your community partners. Additionally, you can use tabletop exercises from the REMS TA Center’s Emergency Exercises Package and tools developed by school and higher ed emergency managers in the field found in our Tool Box to further support your emergency preparedness efforts.