School boards have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure schools are adequately prepared to deal with emergencies. Hour-Zero™ provides a complete solution for school districts to address this obligation in an affordable and effective manner.

Why choose Hour-Zero™ as your emergency response program?

Because Hour-Zero™:

• Caters exclusively to the K-12 school community.
• Was developed by a team of experts with first-hand experience in dealing with school crises along with specialists from the risk management industry.
• Is affordable and effective; saving school districts time and money.
• Addresses all four phases of crisis response management: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

In selecting Hour-Zero™ your school district is assured of having an effective emergency response program that is built on ability, confidence and trust.

Harvard Business Review cites 10 critical elements of an effective crisis response plan.

Here's how Hour-Zero™ measures up …

• A representative set of planning scenarios: Hour-Zero™ addresses more than 30 common emergencies that schools may potentially face. In addition to these scenarios Hour-Zero™ also addresses any outstanding scenarios that have been identified in the district’s risk assessment.
• A flexible set of response modules: In addition to specific protocols, Hour-Zero™ establishes a set of modularized emergency response processes. These modules are flexible and allow schools to deal with unexpected scenarios.
• An established matching of response modules to scenarios: Hour-Zero™ has an established set of incident protocols that can be immediately activated; these incident protocols range from playground accidents to missing child to active shooter and include preset communication protocols to ensure all stakeholders are kept informed.
• A clear chain of command: Hour-Zero™ is based on the Incident Command System (ICS) which clearly established unity of command for the entire school district and enables the school district to collaborate with emergency responders.
• Preset activation protocols: Hour-Zero™ clearly defines the processes to activate and deactivate the district’s emergency response plan.
• A command post and backup: Hour-Zero™ identifies and evaluates primary and secondary Incident Command Post (ICP) locations for use by the emergency response team.
• Communication system: Hour-Zero™ offers an extensive crisis communication section that includes everything from communication processes to use of technology to over 300 preformatted templates.
• Backup resources: The Hour-Zero™ program identifies what resource are needed by a school, where those resources are stocked and back-up provisions are available to ensure schools can operate independently for at least 72 hours.
• Regular simulation exercises: The Hour-Zero™ program establishes a regular training and testing program for all staff members. Training and testing includes workshops, drills, tabletop exercises, functional exercises and full scale exercises.
• Disciplined post-crisis review:  Hour-Zero™ includes post-incident debriefing exercises, response evaluation and yearly reviews of the entire plan.