Mark Ornstein of Detroit | What Most Schools Get Wrong About Emergency Preparedness

Mark Ornstein of Detroit

Your fire drill proves you can evacuate. It doesn't prove you can handle an emergency.

Everyone stands outside the parking lot while someone checks the clipboard, then everyone files back in. It's orderly. It's fast. It creates the total illusion that the school is prepared for something serious. But a fire drill is theater. An actual emergency is chaos with no script, and the drill teaches people almost nothing about managing chaos.

Mark Ornstein of Detroit has overseen emergency response in multi-campus systems where a real event in one building affects operations across the entire district. A fire drill is a scheduled, announced, planned pause. An actual emergency, a threat, an injury, a lockdown, happens at 2:17 p.m. on a random Tuesday when half your administrative staff is in meetings. The communication systems you've tested in perfect conditions don't work the same way when adrenaline is running and phones are actually being used.

Nobody practices actual emergency communication

A fire drill tests evacuation. It doesn't test the moment after evacuation, when parents are calling, media is calling, you don't have complete information, but everyone is expecting you to say something. How does your principal communicate with your superintendent? Does she have her number memorized, or is it in her email somewhere? If your email is down, can she reach anyone? What's the order of communication, do you tell parents first or staff first? Do you tell staff what you told parents, or do they hear about it from someone else?

The gaps reveal themselves under pressure. A suburban superintendent once told Ornstein that her school tested its communication protocol, students got called home, which is good. But they got called home at staggered intervals, so some parents learned about the situation from their kids before they heard from the school. That's not a drill success. That's a cascade failure wearing a safety vest.

Multi-campus coordination during crisis is something most districts haven't thought through

You have five schools. Something happens at School A. Do the other four buildings automatically go on alert? Does the principal at School B know that she should heighten security even though nothing happened at her campus? If the incident requires resources, how does the district decide whether to pull the nurse from School C or School D? These decisions sound straightforward in a planning meeting. In real time, with incomplete information, they're contentious.

Ornstein's systems include pre-arranged mutual aid agreements. If something serious happens at one building, there's already a decision tree about which staff person goes where, whose normal duties get reassigned, which role gets filled from which other campus. The principal doesn't have to think about it in the moment. She executes the plan. This level of coordination doesn't happen because someone drew a nice org chart. It happens because the district has practiced specific scenarios and worked out the logistics beforehand.

Your facilities infrastructure is either security or it's not

Most schools think of facilities as operations, HVAC, roofing, parking lot maintenance. But a building is also a security system. Where can you see the parking lot? Can you see the entrance clearly enough to know who's walking in? Can you lock down a hallway, or can someone move through the entire building if the main entrance is compromised? Does your security camera system actually work, or are half the cameras offline and nobody noticed?

Some of this is money. Some of it is attention. A principal who treats facilities as part of emergency preparedness thinks about those questions. A principal who treats facilities as "facilities' problem" doesn't. Ornstein has seen both, and the difference shows up the moment something goes wrong.

The test isn't the drill. The test is the moment after

Can your staff execute the plan when they're scared? Can they follow the sequence when phones are ringing? Can your communication system work when power is compromised? These aren't theoretical questions. They're the actual failure points, and you can't test them without a real emergency. But you can design your systems so that the human variables are minimized. Clear chains of command. Pre-decided communication sequences. Practiced handoffs between buildings.

The challenge is this: build a system that works when everyone is calm, but design it to survive when everyone is terrified. That's the difference between a drill and actual preparedness.