SAFETY, HEALTH, AND RISK MANAGEMENT

©2006 Fred Tepfer
1380 Bailey Avenue Eugene, OR 97402
non-commercial use freely granted
 

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TOPICS

Safety is an area of high potential costs and of large potential savings. It's not an area to which schools have historically given much attention other than doing fire drills and paying insurance premiums.

CONCEPTS AND APPROACHES

The underlying concept that will minimize losses and maximize savings is having a comprehensive safety program. This need not be time consuming or burdensome, but it must be deliberate, well-conceived, ongoing, and well-documented.

At its core are the following concepts:

FIRE AND LIFE SAFETY

This is the safety area that most schools concentrate on through fire drills. These are very important, but it's also important to keep records including the date of the drill, the evacuation time, and whether people were adequately accounted for after they left the building. Also refer to the article on Fire Engineering and Detection and Supression Systems. Documented implementation of these measures can reduce fire insurance costs (although always check first to confirm this before making choices about investing in changes).

Many prevention opportunities exist:
Fire sprinklers : Very few catastrophic fires occur in buildings with fire sprinklers. Fire sprinklers also reduce your fire insurance rates, and dramatically reduce the probable damage and down-time in the event of a fire. In the long run they pay for themselves.
Fire extinguishers : Properly sized and placed fire extinguishers can prevent small fires from becoming large fires. All areas of fire hazard should have the appropriate fire extinguisher readily at hand (there are a number of types), and all areas should have fire extinguishers within a twenty or thirty second distance.
Fire extinguisher maintenance : Every year each fire extinguisher should be taken off its bracket, have its pressure checked on its gauge, and inverted and tapped on the bottom with a hammer if it is a dry chemical type (to fluff up the powder). A maintenance tag on each extinguisher should record each maintenance visit.
Emergency lighting test : Your building should have an emergency lighting system to light the exitways should power fail. This system should be tested annually, and for at least a couple of minutes to ensure that the power source is still reliable. If you don't have an emergency lighting system, at a minimum you can put glow-in-the-dark tape at regular intervals along the floor of the corridors leading to exits.
Fume hoods and shop sawdust collection systems should be maintained by competent professions at least annually.

There are basic fire and life safety measures that all staff should be aware of:

- Any room used by 50 people or more needs two separate exits. For typical classrooms, this means rooms of more than 1000 square feet.
- Fire doors should never be locked from the inside.
- People with disabilities will often need assistance. This must be planned for in advance if it is effective, and must be planned with the person needing assistance. See separate article.
- No one but fire fighters should return into a building on fire.
- To prevent false alarms, fire alarm pull boxes can either be equipped with indelible ink on the inside of the handle, or an outer pull cover can be installed that sets off a local alarm.

ACCIDENT PREVENTION

The key to preventing accidents and decreasing accident and claim rates is research. Each accident should be seen as a source of information about accident prevention. All accidents should be tracked so that patterns emerge which guide prevention efforts.
Example: A school district was experiencing a high number of claims from teachers who had had falls. An investigation showed that in many cases, they were trying to reach items stored on high shelves. Often they would put a chair on top of a table to be able to reach the highest shelves. Removal of the shelves would restrict already limited storage. The district bought stepladders, made them available to each teacher either in their room or in a storage room nearby, and trained them on safe use of ladders. Their claim rate dropped dramatically.
In Oregon, a district's insurance carrier is required to offer loss-control services for free. They will send out an accident prevention specialist who will review your accident data and work with you to prevent accidents. It costs the district nothing and save quite a bit in reduced claims and lower rates. This program is targeted at workers, but while the professional is already on site the school can ask about risks to kids.

Other programs in Oregon provide grants (through Oregon OSHA) for mitigation of a work-related claim. Another provides for tools and equipment needed to return an injured worker to their job, and can pay up to 50% of their wages while restricted if they return early or stay on the job despite the injury.

For elementary schools, playgrounds are a major issue. Even though there are guidelines for playground design, use common sense, do inspections (and record them), and make sure that areas subject to fall have an adequate cushioning material. Certain types of wood chips are an inexpensive way to provide this cushion. Any cushioning material, be it sand, chips, or pads, needs to be maintained, renewed, or replaced periodically, which ties back to periodic inspections.

For middle and high schools, the major problems come from labs, shops, and art studios (see separate paper on labs). Again, clear standards are available for equipment and material safety in these areas.

Some schools neglect to plan for serious athletic injuries. Are school staff at the practice or event trained to advanced first aid? Is a paramedic available or on call nearby? Is there access to a phone for calling for help? Good practice would required first aid training for coaches and assistant coaches, equip them with a phone, and provide clear written procedures for how to handle injuries and other emergencies.

HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY

With the huge increase in synthetic compounds of the past 40 years and the emergence of new environmental illnesses, the general public has become much more sensitive to the relationship of building environments to health (additional information on indoor air quality is contained in a separate article). The relationship between healthy interior environments and academic performance is now well-established. If nothing else, clear policies regarding use of interior materials and notification of construction activities is the minimum level needed to manage these issues.

A logical first step is to ensure that interior finishes are built and maintained with low-ipact materials. Simply changing cleaning and maintenance materials to environmentally-friendly alternatives can substantially improve environmental health of students, staff, and especially custodians. In most cases, this also reduces the cost of cleaning materials.

A second step is to make sure that building personnel are notified well in advance of work ordered or coordinated at the district level. An effective way to do this is to have a single point of contact for the school to be notified, and have that person responsible for notification of building users.

It is required that you keep material safety data sheets for materials used in your building. It is wise to consistently keep track of at least the most toxic and most controversial of these materials. For example, Eugene school district 4J has a very elaborate policy for the use of pesticides and herbicides outdoors which is designed to limit quantities of toxic materials and potential exposure to students and staff. However, they apparently have no policy for the indoor use of these same materials, and run the risk of having their staff or contractors contaminate a building environment so thoroughly that it would need to be evacuated for weeks.

Similarly, almost every school district has had incidents of student or staff illness related to exposure to fumes from construction activities. In general, it is good practice to have a preconstruction meeting before any construction activities occur in the school. All of the parties can be introduced, clear lines of communication established, and necessary separations can be planned.

Ideally, no construction would occur in occupied buildings. There are times that the ideal can't be met. In that situation, it is best to build a physical barrier between occupied space and construction areas and to separate any ventilation systems that might cross-connect the two environments.

PERSONAL SAFETY

This has become an issue of high concern among parents and teachers. However, it is a much larger issue than the statistical risk of shooting of students or staff, or abduction of a child. It is much more likely, statistically, that someone will be hit by a car in the parking lot, be injured or killed while being driven to school, or assaulted in a restroom by a fellow student, or raped on their way home in the evening. Nearly all abductions are custody-related and most violence is committed by family members or friends. This isn't to say that the more dramatic "TV news" events aren't a real risk. A clear assessment of risk can ensure that high-risk issues receive attention as well as those with dramatic risks.

There are no simple, easy answers to these problems, which are related to violence in our society and in our communities. There is, howver, an approach to personal safety in schools based on concepts embodied in CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) that uses concepts of natural surveillance, natural access control, and territoriality to provide security without having to build a prison-like environment. For further information on this subject, read the related articles, read Safe School Design, from the ERIC Clearinghouse.

There are many measures that can help, such as:

There are also specific building measures that you can use:

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