Schools are critical infrastructure entrusted with the responsibility of creating citizens of tomorrow. A safe and secure environment is a prerequisite for effective teaching and learning. Thus ensuring safety of children, teachers and staff members during disasters is necessary. In the light of recent tragedies involving school children, like the Kumbakonam fire tragedy, Dabwali fire incident and earthquakes around the world where school children were affected due to unsafe school buildings. It becomes of utmost importance that safety of children is given due consideration, thus making schools safe also serves the purpose of their dual use as evacuation centres during emergencies.
The National School Safety Policy Guidelines was published in early 2016 by National Disaster Management Authority of India (NDMA). It envisions India where all children and their teachers, and other stakeholders in the school community are safe from any kind of risks due to natural hazards by making the schools risk resilient ensuring that all school children across the country remain safe from any kind of disaster risk as they access their right to education.
The policy envisages the following school safety responsibilities for the School Management:
Incorporate National school safety issues in the school development plan.
Ensure that teachers and non-teaching staff receive appropriate training in disaster risk reduction.
Ensure that relevant norms and standards for school safety are applied in their own school building and functions.
Ensure active and equitable participation of school community, including children andelected representatives for implementing School Development Plan.
Building safe schools should be a priority for architects, engineers, policy makers, administrators and emergency response planners. Among all public facilities, children in schools are the most vulnerable during disasters. A large number of schools operate in congested urban centres and are exposed to various hazards. School safety includes within its ambit structural safety of the buildings per se and non-structural measures like awareness generation, ensuring communication, school preparedness plans, capacity building of students and teachers, rehearsals and mock drills etc. Building safe schools will not only ensure safety of children in disasters, but will also promote faster rehabilitation post disaster.
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