In the spring of 2020, when faced with emergency school closures teachers had to switch from teaching face-to-face in brick-and-mortar classrooms to virtual meetings and online classrooms. To make changes quickly, teachers used the technology skills they already practiced and acquired others to engage and instruct their students online. This…

This article draws from and builds on the experience of schools in San Diego County following the forest fires that wrought havoc on the area last October. Three teachers (Dana Riggs, Marcelina Madueno and Miriam Atlas) provide a moving account of the personal experiences of their students, who lived through the fires. Their recollections…

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton declared natural disasters somewhere in the United States on average of about one per week between 1998 and 2005. Despite this frequency, most citizens are unprepared when a natural disaster occurs in their city or neighborhood. In particular, teachers and students can become paralyzed by the overwhelming…

This manual provides a brief framework of organization that serves as a response tool for a wide spectrum of crisis circumstances encountered by schools. It is meant to be a generic guide for school teams and should be customized by each school that uses it. Even with emergency procedures in place, each crisis at a school needs to be evaluated as…