Local educators attend emergency training workshop - FOX Carolina 21

Local educators attend emergency training workshop

On Monday, The Bement School in Deerfield held its first-ever training session to give local educators an all-hazards training.

The three-hour workshop showed teachers and administrators how to create an Emergency Action Plan, as well as how to assign and train an emergency team.

A special emphasis was placed on lessons learned by the Newtown, CT, Sandy Hook Elementary School in the wake of last December's shootings.

Although The Bement School already has an emergency plan in place, faculty say the Newtown incident has spurred the school to re-evaluate existing strategies.

"Certainly at Bement, we've begun these conversations and begun to look at our protocols ... and again the ways that we train our faculty and staff to help keep kids safe ... but Newtown absolutely changed the landscape about how we think about all of those issues," said Shelley Borror Jackson, head of the The Bement School.

Educators who attended Monday's workshop not only learned how to handle a situation similar to the Newtown incident, but they will also be able handle other disasters including earthquakes, tornados and oil spills.

According to federal laws, private and public schools are required to have an emergency action plan. Laws also require all schools to be retrained annually on safety and emergency situations.  

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