Policy: 5255

Section: 5000 Personnel

Title: Response to a Crisis or Tragic Event

Status: Active

Adopted: May 28, 2019

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Response to a Crisis or Tragic Event

Introduction

The Ferndale School District is committed to providing a caring and supportive environment for all students and staff including during times of heightened emotion or stress resulting from a critical incident or tragic event.

Definitions

A critical incident or tragic event: A sudden or unexpected event whether by natural forces or human action that causes death, serious injury, significant emotional distress or threat to a physical space or person. Strong emotions from the incident/event affect a person’s ability to function in a school environment.

Mobile Response Team: The purpose of the mobile response team is to implement the critical incident stress-debriefing model. This seven-step model of debriefing an incident/event focusses on assessing the functionality of students and staff while providing brief support. The value of this model is to provide a full cycle process moving from cognition, affect and back to cognition. The school environment is not a place to provide high levels of affect exploration or intense therapy. Any student or staff person, whom cannot contain their affect/emotions following the interventions provided, should seek other more appropriate settings for support. Those could include parents, faith communities, physicians and mental health providers outside the school environment.

Policy

The Superintendent or designee will ensure people and systems are in place to address critical incidents and/or tragic events when they occur using a Mobile Response Team approach.

 

Adoption Date: 05.28.19

Ferndale School District