Validating your Emergency Response Plan through testing is essential to ensuring your entire school district has attained a minimum level of response preparedness. Testing evaluates the overall plan, staff members’ abilities to execute their assigned tasks and checks communications procedure.

Hour-Zero™ offers school districts practical tools to make certain their Emergency Response Plans are thoroughly tested prior to implementation in an actual emergency.

Hour-Zero™ offers four types of testing methodologies to help staff practice their roles and identify areas within the Plan that require improvements or refinements.

Drills

Hour-Zero™ helps schools design and conduct drills that test specific procedures within the emergency response plan, such as a lunch-hour lock-down, parent-child reunification, or sweep team practice.

• Drills are typically run at a school or classroom level and take about 1 hour to execute.
• A qualified evaluator is on hand during the drill to administer an audit for the school.

Functional Exercises

Hour-Zero™ assists school districts in organizing and implementing functional exercises which simulate a real emergency and exercise a specific incident protocol. These exercises are conducted under high-stress conditions and involve members of the District Emergency Response Team and the School Emergency Response Team. Functional exercises require schools to run through all the response steps of an incident – beginning with activating the plan to conducting a debriefing session.

• A typical exercise will last between 4 – 8 hours.
• The exercise will be audited by a qualified evaluator.

Full-Scale Exercises

Hour-Zero™ provides coordination services for districts wishing to engage in full-scale exercises involving the broader community. These exercises involve the deployment of field equipment, multiple responders and agencies, possible activation of an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and full execution of communications processes. In order to properly carry out a full-scale exercise districts should be prepared to mobilize staff and resources, e.g., buses.

• A typical exercise will last several hours to multiple days.
• A qualified evaluator will audit the exercise.