"If power goes out, no elevator to evacuate from upper floors."
That line comes from a school staff member describing what happens to a student in a wheelchair when the fire alarm goes off on the third floor. It's one of 113 open-ended responses in a new study out of the University at Albany (Kurto, Asaro-Saddler, Gahtan & Smith), surveying 141 teachers, nurses, counselors, and support staff — 92% of whom have worked with students with disabilities — about how prepared they actually feel for a school emergency.
The quantitative piece is straightforward: staff who were more familiar with their school's Emergency Operations Plan felt significantly more prepared to support both general education students and students with disabilities. No surprise there. What's more interesting is what familiarity didn't predict — personal feelings of safety. Knowing the plan and feeling secure turned out to be two separate things entirely. As one respondent put it when asked if they had concerns: "You should always have concerns!"
The open-ended answers are where the real gaps showed up. Confusion about who's responsible for what during a lockdown ("We will have no clue who is doing what in an emergency"). Uncertainty about whether disability needs were even written into the plan — only about half of respondents knew. And a recurring critique of one-size-fits-all protocols like Run-Hide-Fight, which the authors argue quietly assume every student can run, hide, or fight the same way.
The authors' broader claim is the one I keep chewing on: treating emergency planning as a compliance checkbox misses the point. Done well, it forces a school to fix its communication gaps, its interprofessional coordination, its accessibility blind spots — the same things that make a school better on an ordinary Tuesday, not just during a crisis.
For anyone building safety programs, training, or platforms in this space: are individualized evacuation plans and disability-specific protocols treated as a standard build requirement, or as an edge case that gets addressed after the "main" plan is done?
#SchoolSafety #InclusiveEducation #EmergencyPreparedness #DisabilityInclusion #SafetyLeadership