Good Crisis Management Planning And Evaluation Research Paper Example

[Crisis Management Planning & Evaluation]

What is a crisis?
A crisis is a change that may evolve suddenly or may take some time to evolve and results in urgent problem needed to be addressed immediately.

Definition

Coombs (2011) narrated the crisis as,
“The discernment of the impulsive event that can threaten the important expectancies of stakeholders and it can seriously impact organizational performance and spawn pessimistic outcomes”
A major difference between crisis, incident and emergency is that incident is low level problem, emergency a term more emotive and wider scale problem, while the crisis is the unpredictable problem whose extent cannot be measured.

Crisis faced by schools and institutes

Dinkes et al., (2007) analyzed that it is necessary for the educators to establish crisis prevention plans. There are various kinds of crisis faced by students of the school or the school community. Some of them have been enlisted as
Public Safety: Osher et al., stated the major school crisis is the accidental deaths and acts of violence. In the period 2007-08 United Kingdom experience more than 78% cases of accidental deaths and 17% of violence acts.
Reputation Loss: There are some crises that are associated with the student behaviors. These crises are deemed to negatively affect the student behavior, adjustment, and education (Dinkes et al., 2007).

Crisis Management Plan:

Crisis management is the management and integration of education institute’s responses to an incident danger of harms that are effecting the planning and automation of the organization (Coombs, 2011).

Rationale for crisis management plan

The above factors provides a strong rationale for having a crisis management plan for school community as they negatively affect the level and quality of education of school students. These crisis management plans are also necessary to prevent the legal litigation of the educational institutes. Although schools or educational institutes are exempt from the expected danger of litigation, because they are formed under local government community. But the expected behavioral or violence acts may affect the public relations and may promote the school image negatively.
The need for having a strong crisis management plans for educational institutes have also been supported by many researchers such as Adamson & Peacock (2007). They stated that it is safer for the schools to have a crisis management teams and plans.

Purpose and importance of crisis management plan

The crisis management plans are necessary to mitigate the estimated chances of risk. Main purpose of the crisis management plan is to provide a clear, accurate and appropriate communication for all the constituents important for crisis. A crisis management plan is crucial for non-emergency and nonprocedural communication to all expected and encountered crisis. The crisis management plan also saves time during crisis by pre-assigning tasks and serving referencing sources.

Information’s contained in crisis management plan

Coombs (2011) stated that a crisis management plan provides information about the key steps adopted during a crisis management. It also provides with the list of documents required for providing a response to a crisis.

Crisis management team

Definition:
Barton (2001) defined crisis management team as the chain of command that will help everyone in getting awareness about their duties while facing a crisis. Teams for mitigating educational crisis are relatively different from district or regional level crisis management teams.

Members of the crisis management teams

Major members of the crisis management team of the educators include public relations, security teams, and legal, financial and human resources teams (Vernon, 2010).

Role

A counselor should be the part of the crisis management team as it potential to meet with administration and key staff to formulate a action plan for crisis management. It is also helpful in contacting the parents in case of emergency. Also counselor knows more about the students and parents behaviors so he must be readily available for preparing any action plans on the onset of crisis. They also helped to formulate an intervention plans.

Ethical and legal standards of crisis management

It is necessary for the crisis management team to establish such plans that work in accordance with the ethical and legal standards. The crisis management plans must be coordinated with the community-based emergency response agencies. Legal standards imply that crisis management plans must be based upon factual data (Kano & Bourke, 2007). While formulating a crisis management plans administration must keep these ethical and legal issues into mind.

Collaboration in crisis management

Collaborations helped to work with other groups depending upon the situations. These collaborations helped to achieve more integrity and wider coverage areas. Pre-crisis collaboration helped in getting effective action plans while in post crisis era these collaborations helped to cover more dynamics.

Crisis plan critique

Commonwealth High School Crisis Management Plan:
Commonwealth High School Crisis management plan operates within the boundary of Jefferson County School Board policy. This plan operates on the basic principles of crisis management (Horsley & Barker, 2002). This is considered to be the most effective plan for managing the crisis in the educational institutes. This plan can be critically evaluated through observing its strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths

Explicit procedure for each incident of the crisis
Chain of command
Based on factual data and situations
Network of key communications
Established a communication plan with the school and with the community
Quick arrangement for support services
Step by step evaluation of the crisis plan
Weaknesses
It lacks simulations. In order to be effective, efficient simulations must be implemented to take account of changes.

It ignores the external uncontrollable factors that will help to evaluate the crisis as opportunity or threat for future conditions.

It ignores the financial constraints faced by leading educational institutes.
Recommendations
Leaders and administrators of the educational institutes should be incorporated into every crisis stage.
Enforcement authorities must be cautious about the secrecy of planning and management of crisis (Horsley & Barker, 2002).

References

Adamson, A. D., & Peacock, G. G. (2007). Crisis response in the public schools: A survey of school psychologists' experiences and perceptions.Psychology in the Schools, 44(8), 749-764.
Barton, L. (2001). Crisis in organizations II. South-Western College Pub..
Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (Eds.). (2011). The handbook of crisis communication (Vol. 22). John Wiley & Sons.
Dinkes, R., Cataldi, E. F., Lin-Kelly, W., & Snyder, T. D. (2007). Indicators of School Crime and Safety (NCES 2008-021/NCJ 219553). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, and Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.
Osher, D., Dwyer, K., & Jimerson, S. R. (2006). Safe, supportive, and effective schools: Promoting school success to reduce school violence. Handbook of school violence and school safety: From research to practice, 51-71.
Savelides, S., Mihiotis, A., & Koutsoukis, N. S. (2015). Crisis management for secondary education: A survey of secondary education directors in Greece.International Journal of Educational Management, 29(1).
Soda, K., Kano, Y., & Chiba, F. (2012). Food Polyamine and Cardiovascular Disease-An Epidemiological Study. Global journal of health science, 4(6), p170.
Vernon, A. (2010). Counseling children and adolescents. Love Publishing Company.