School, police, fire officials plan for best ways to handle the worst

• Reprints

Religion Education Secretary Gail Brown and Deacon Jerry Ryndak deliver books and other items to a classroom Tuesday at St. Patrick Catholic School in South Elgin. | Michael Smart~Sun-Times Media

Article Extras

Updated: January 1, 2012 8:12AM

SOUTH ELGIN — At one time, emergency planning in a school meant showing the kids how to crouch under their desks if the Russians dropped The Bomb. But a lot has changed since the end of the Cold War — including school shooting sprees and outside-threat lockdowns.

Today, school administrators and teachers have to work with local police and fire officials to get ready for everything from a tornado or fire to a fleeing bank robber or a gunman. And a case study in how to do this can be seen at St. Patrick Catholic School, which last summer moved its 520 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students from its longtime home in the heart of St. Charles to a new building along Crane Road, inside the village limits of South Elgin. The parish had set up a satellite church on that site in 1991, later also moving its offices and rectory there.

“We had a safety committee at the other building,” said Sister Liz Ryan, the vice principal. “But everything here is brand new. Besides the building being new, we have a new police department and a new fire department. So anything we planned at the old school has to be re-examined.”

The former safety committee became a critical incident planning committee. It began meeting monthly, with Ryan, Principal Joseph Battisto, teachers Mary Carol Mignin and Breannen Marshall, plus South Elgin police Officer John Rothecker and leaders of the Fox River & Countryside Fire/Rescue District.

Some changes were necessary just because the facilities were different. “The biggest thing at the beginning was just to work out our arrivals and departures” at a much bigger campus with its own parking lot, Ryan said.

“In the original school, we planned to put a good portion of the students in the cafeteria in case of a tornado,” Battisto said. “During our discussions here, we learned early on that we can’t use the new cafeteria because it has a large window that could shatter.”

So now, plans in case of a tornado call for the children on the second floor to be moved to the first floor, and for most kids to sit down along inside hallways, away from roofs that could collapse and outside windows that could break.

Armed with the lessons of the school shootings at Columbine, Colo., and Northern Illinois University, Rothecker also helped the committee put together a plan to handle a shooting. Mignin said each teacher would lock up his or her classroom, and the children would crouch in a section of the classroom where no gunman could see them through the hallway windows.

Mignin said color-coded cards have been distributed to each classroom that a teacher under siege can place in windows to signal the condition of the people inside. Green means everybody in the room is all right. Red means the room has a student with a medical condition such as diabetes or asthma. Blue means a handicapped child is present.

As in some other new schools, such as Hampshire High, the identification number of each classroom is printed on one of its outside windows. That would help firefighters and police outside coordinate with the people inside on everything from a counterattack against a gunman to an attempt to save kids trapped by a fire.

Ryan said St. Patrick School already experienced one “soft lockdown” last school year, back in the St. Charles building, when a fleeing bank robber hijacked a car and drove toward St. Charles along Route 59. School leaders and police wanted to deny any opportunity for the desperate man to take the school hostage.

But Fire Chief Greg Benson said no that no matter how detailed it is, no written plan can take the place of practical experience. In the last month, St. Patrick held both a lockdown drill and a fire drill. Committee members figured out from the fire drill that too many classes were being asked to evacuate via the same corridors, so escape routes in case of a fire have been rearranged.

“It’s a process. It’s not etched in stone,” Benson said. “You come up with a plan, but then you keep adjusting it.”

“The emphasis in recent years is on being proactive, because you never know where a threat might come from,” Benson added. “Officer Rothecker pointed out that there are several branch banks along Randall Road, just east of the school, and a bank robber from there could head this way.”

Battisto said Sherman Health Services has offered to donate emergency kits for each classroom that include flashlights, snacks and first aid supplies for use in a lockdown, a devastating storm, a fire or perhaps a spill of hazardous materials.

Benson said there also are four public schools within the fire district, some of them in Elgin School District U46 and some in St. Charles Unit School District 303. Doing similar planning with those, he said, he works with the principals but also with a District 303 committee and the District U46 safety officer, who draw up emergency policies and rules for all schools in their districts.

“But I like how this committee has a variety of teachers and administrators,” Benson said. “It is one thing to work with the principal, but ultimately it will be the teachers who have to execute these plans inside each classroom.”

“Now we’re working not just with schools but with churches, too,” Benson said. Christ Community Church near Bolcum and Randall roads, for example, “recently hired a safety and security manager, and they’re putting together emergency plans. Churches often have hundreds of people onsite. A few weeks ago Christ Community hosted a controversial speaker — the son of a Hamas leader who had become a Christian — and we recognized the potential for some trouble there.”