Disaster Preparedness: Resilient Children/Resilient Communities
The purpose of the Resilient Children/Resilient Communities Initiative is to assess and improve capacities to meet the needs of children in an emergency. This pilot project is taking place in only two counties in the nation, Putnam County, New York and Washington County, Arkansas, with the goal of creating a model of child-focused preparedness that can be shared with communities across the country.
Emergency response plans often do not address the specific needs of children and their families before, during and after disasters. Child care centers, schools, and other programs that serve children may lack the knowledge, resources, and capacity to ensure the children in their care will be safe until they can be reunited with their families while restoring services as quickly as possible. Studies show that when children are unable to return to school or child care quickly, the resulting lack of routine and normalcy can lead to long-term negative impacts. Getting back to these familiar settings can improve children’s ability to cope with crises, while allowing parents the opportunity to address other family recovery issues.
Disaster preparedness is important for everyone, but especially for children:
- 69 million children nation-wide are separated from their parents each work day as they go to school or child care.
- 37% of American households are not confident in their community’s ability to meet the needs of children during disasters.
- 54% of Americans believe they will be reunited with their children within several hours of a disaster. It took almost 7 months to reunite the last child with her family after Katrina.
- For every $10 spent in federal grants for national preparedness, less than one penny is spent targeting children’s safety.
The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University conducted a Community Preparedness Index to assess levels of preparedness across sectors where children are likely to be or end up in a disaster. Within the child care community, two major strengths were identified: Licensed facilities all have written emergency plans and there is a standard practice to have a plan in place for continuity of operations and family reunification. However, additional recommendations came out of the assessment to improve the preparedness and resilience for child care and all of us can play a role: Child Care Resource & Referral (the Child Care Council), Licensors and Registrars, Child Care Directors and Owners, Child Care Staff, Head Start, Parents and Children.
In Putnam County there has been a Train the Trainer session held on Disaster Preparedness geared especially for school age programs. The Child Care Council will be offering workshops in 2017 for child care providers on disaster preparedness in both Dutchess and Putnam. Disasters can strike any time, any place, so we must be prepared for the moment and be resilient in recovery efforts, especially for the children.
(Sources: Save the Children Disaster Report Card 22014 & Children in Disaster: Do Americans Feel Prepared? A National Survey, National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute)
