Orange County School Disaster Plans: a Disaster Waiting to Happen

The overall quality of the 28 Orange County School Districts and their individual school’s emergency preparedness plans are in need of much improvement. Response: Ocean View School District, over the past 18 months has worked hard to upgrade our District and Site Disaster Plans. Although we have come a long way there is always work to be done. Our Plan is updated yearly and as potential disasters are identified, we are quick to include them into our plan. Our efforts were rewarded with a Met Expectations for out District Plan and one of our school plans and Above Expectations on one of our school plans. However, I would like to take this opportunity to comment on a couple of other aspects of the report. First and foremost, I believe the report did a disservice to Orange County School Districts by assigning a grade to their plans without supplying the District with even a general matrix on how each plan was scored by the members reviewing plans. Therefore, for our purposes, we feel the findings were very arbitrary and leave us with no indications of where the plans failed so we can work on a plan of action to improve the plans. This is especially true for the Districts that at least Met Expectations to know what the members of the Grand Jury preserved as the areas needing improvement. We would not expect them to provide us with detail of how and when to do the improvements. If there wasn’t some sort of matrix developed prior to the review, used during the review, and distributed back to the Districts, the findings seem to be completely arbitrary. Secondly, there is always improvement needed as new legislation, new threats, new