S.D., Oceanside Schools Get Quake Kits : Disasters: Timing of presentations with Bay Area temblor was coincidental, but the sessions indicate growing attention to preparedness.

More than 100 San Diego city school principals Wednesday listened intently to a presentation about the new $600 earthquake emergency kits that the school district has purchased for each of its 180 facilities. The rest of their colleagues heard about the kits and about new disaster procedures Tuesday at a similar seminar.

At Wednesday’s weekly cabinet meeting led by Oceanside schools Supt. Steven Speach, the advance agenda included a scolding by administrator Jim McCargo to push harder a pending proposal to buy emergency water drums for all 20 schools in the North County coastal city. A major temblor could require students to be kept at schools for as long as three days.

The timing of the disaster discussions in San Diego and Oceanside this week was coincidental with the devastating quake Tuesday evening in San Francisco. The meetings had been scheduled well in advance.

But both sessions indicated the increased attention being paid to earthquake preparedness and response since a countywide meeting of school districts two years ago showed scant preparation on the part of most districts.

“I can say that there has been a great deal of progress,” said Donna Adams, fire safety specialist in El Cajon and former liaison to schools for five years for the county Office of Disaster Preparedness. She has co-written a manual on school preparation.

“But, while many schools have completed disaster plans and have held drills, now the things that need to be done involve money, such as putting away supplies, getting additional communications equipment, etc., which must be (spread) over more than a single year,” Adams said.

San Diego city school administrators, who run the nation’s eighth-largest urban district with 119,315 students, have bitten the cost bullet.

“This district has finally set aside enough money so that we’ve got basic elements in place,” retired principal Wanda Walker, now a consultant, said Wednesday. Walker pioneered quake preparedness as principal of Paradise Hills Elementary, where teachers are trained in advanced cardiopulmonary training and standard first aid, and where emergency water and blankets are stored in classrooms.

“All schools now have real disaster plans and have practiced them, which is a far cry from what we had been doing before,” she said.

The new emergency kits include flashlights, hard hats, shovels, special gloves and medical trauma equipment, all contained in a trash can on wheels so that search-and-rescue teams could move quickly from place to place to extricate children caught in a collapsed room or building.

“They are really a great start for schools that up until now had nothing” in the way of equipment, said Sandy Wright, a city schools nurse who on her own several years ago drew up detailed plans for Gage and Benchley-Weinberger elementary schools in the San Carlos area.

School trustees this past summer also agreed to equip every school with a two-way radio over the next three years to improve communications. The schools are now dependent on telephones. There are also new emergency procedures for evacuating handicapped children and for providing brochures in all major foreign languages represented in the schools--Spanish, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian--so that parents know how a school will handle their children in an emergency.

Schools have detailed plans on how to deal with panicked parents trying to find out whether their children are safe, since Adams said that “family reunions would be the critical issue at many schools.” Principals will have checkoff lists of all students so that they can immediately tell any parent showing up at the school gates that his or her child is safe.

But San Diego schools, with few exceptions, have not stockpiled food or water, even though they might be required to keep students for several days in the most serious emergency. Oceanside is among the districts that have stockpiled schools with adequate food for 72 hours. But McCargo said it needs the water drums because the city has no water storage in case aqueduct lines are severed by a quake. The Oceanside school board is scheduled to vote on funding water drums next week, he said.