Schools Hone Safety Plans to Include Terrorist Acts

In southern Orange County, officials of the Capistrano Unified School District have drafted a plan to evacuate students in case terrorists attack the nearby San Onofre nuclear power plant.

In Beverly Hills, school officials chat daily with city police and emergency officials and are installing hotline phones a safe distance from district headquarters.

And in the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, administrators are in the midst of a crash program to prepare for the possibility of biological or chemical attack, even sending out periodic “safety grams” to spell out how campuses should respond.

Throughout Southern California, school districts are honing safety procedures and beefing up communications, even as they vent frustration about having to cope with vague threats.

The extent of preparation varies. Some schools have detailed plans for everything from tainted food to bus hijackings; others lack even a basic intercom system.

But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have given emergency preparation efforts both a new dimension and a new urgency.

Monday’s nebulous warning from the federal government of possibly imminent terrorist activity has heightened the pressure. After all, it is educators’ role each weekday to take the place of parents in looking after more than 6 million California children.

“What would we do as a staff if buildings downtown were attacked, since we’re very close?” wondered Germaine England, assistant principal at Commonwealth Elementary School in Los Angeles. “What would the repercussions be for us? What would the reaction of the parents be? How can we plan for that?”

School Police Chief Propelled Into Action

Within days of the terrorist attacks, Jim Miyashiro, Santa Ana’s chief of school police, had some ideas. He contacted the FBI, the Santa Ana Police Department and local fire and health services departments and put together a School Multi-Agency Response Team.

He also arranged to get daily updates from the Police Department and the FBI, promising in return to alert the agencies to any suspicious activity at schools.

School officials also drafted a shelter plan to make schools available to residents displaced by an attack. They have braced for the idea that a school bus could be hijacked, or cafeteria food contaminated, and put plans in place to deal with those scenarios.

“You don’t have to think like a paranoid freak,” Miyashiro said, “but . . . if you don’t prepare and something does happen,” you’re in trouble.

Although schools have been crafting plans for coping with disasters natural and man-made--from earthquakes to mass shootings--terrorism, with its threat of bombs and biological weapons, is a different beast.

“Sept. 11, of course, has brought changes,” said Susan Leeds-Horwitz, director of special projects for the Beverly Hills Unified School District.

She has worked with schools to standardize disaster plans so that teachers who travel between campuses won’t have to learn different procedures.

At times like this, she acknowledged, it pays to be a small district; Beverly Hills has just 5,200 students and five schools.

It is far more difficult to plan for a district as massive and far-flung as L.A. Unified.

In daily meetings at the district’s downtown headquarters, the Office of Environmental Health and Safety is drafting procedures for teachers and principals, poring over news reports for any potential new threat and reviewing the nearly daily flow of terrorism scares.

On Tuesday, the group worked on the draft of a “safety gram” that will be the fourth sent to the district’s 900 schools this month. It outlines procedures for responding to a release of toxins into the air.

“The decision to remain indoors or evacuate the buildings requires judgment and must be based on the nature and extent of the chemical released,” the draft says.

In case of a large-scale release, the school population should go to designated rooms, the draft says. Doors and windows there should be sealed with wet towels or duct tape and air conditioning should be turned off, the memo said.

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, campuses have suffered the same scares that have struck other institutions nationwide. Only Monday, for example, the principal of Foshay Learning Center found white powder inside a piece of mail.

The substance turned out to be powdered chlorine, dangerous but not life-threatening.

Since Sept. 11, there have been 33 other such incidents districtwide, all requiring special attention, school officials said.

The word “anthrax” has been found scrawled in a chalky substance; an unidentified powder was found on a library book; and benign substances that would have attracted no attention before have brought out hazardous materials teams.

Angelo Bellomo, the district’s director of environmental health and safety, said about 60% of the incidents have been hoaxes. The rest proved to be nonmalicious.

One School Lacks an Intercom System

At some schools, officials feel stymied by a lack of equipment.

At Verdugo Hills High School, for example, there is no intercom system, said Assistant Principal John Plevack.

If the school went into lock-down mode, administrators would have to rush to classrooms to inform teachers to secure their doors and keep students inside.

One of the biggest problems, Plevack said, is handling parents who rush to campuses when there is an emergency.

“There are 10 administrators on campus to deal with the 400 parents coming on campus,” he said.

Terrorism raises the specter of crises that teachers and staff have never before faced--smoke, fumes or biological agents. They realize they have no answers.

“We don’t have gas masks or surgical masks,” said Assistant Principal England of Commonwealth. “And would they even be effective?”

Times staff writer Erika Hayasaki contributed to this report.