When something goes wrong: response, reporting and review

Even with good supervision, careful plans and well-trained staff, things go wrong. A student breaks an arm on the play structure, a third-grade student wanders away from the group at a museum, a student has a severe allergic reaction on a bus, or a canoe capsizes. What staff do in the first minutes, how they communicate and record what happened, and how the school learns from it afterward all matter, for the student, for the family, for the other students, and for the staff involved. This final lesson brings the course together around the response to an incident, and ends with a capstone review of a full trip plan.

The first minutes

Whatever has happened, the first minutes follow the same order:

• Make it safe. Stop the activity, move other students away from the hazard and make sure nobody else is hurt. On the water, that means rescuing people before equipment.
• Care for the injured student. Give first aid within your training, use the medical plan if the student has one, and give emergency medication such as epinephrine without delay.
• Call for help. Send a specific adult or student to call 911 if needed, and to get the AED, first aid kit or the student's medication.
• Keep everyone else supervised. One adult cares for the injured student; others take charge of the rest of the group, move them away, count them and keep them calm. This is why every outing has at least two adults.
• Tell the person in charge. The trip leader or principal takes over the overall response, which frees the first adult to focus on the student.

A missing student

A student who cannot be found is one of the most frightening incidents for any school, and one where speed matters most. The district's missing student procedure applies at school and on trips:

• As soon as a student is noticed missing, the adult tells the person in charge and does a quick named count of the rest of the group, to be sure only one student is missing.
• Adults search the immediate area and the places the student is most likely to be, such as the restrooms, the last place they were seen, the bus, the exit and the gift shop, while one adult stays with the group.
• At a site such as a museum, park or ski hill, the leader tells site staff at once; most sites have their own lost child procedures, including watching exits.
• If the student is not found within about ten minutes, or at once for a young child, a student with a disability or medical condition, or anywhere near water or traffic, the leader calls law enforcement and the principal. Calling early is never a mistake.
• The principal contacts the family, and the group continues to be supervised and counted.

Afterward, the review asks how the student became separated and how it was noticed. In many cases, the answer is a missed count at a transition, a group that was too large for one adult, or a student who needed closer supervision than the plan provided.

Informing families

The family of a student who is hurt, ill or missing hears from the school as soon as possible, by phone, from the principal or the person in charge, with the facts known so far and where their child is or is being taken. For serious incidents, the principal decides with the district what to tell other families and when, so that they hear accurate information from the school rather than rumors. Staff do not post about incidents on social media and refer media questions to the principal or the district's communications staff.

Writing the incident report

The incident report is written the same day by the staff member most directly involved, with help from others who saw what happened. A good report is factual, specific and complete:

• Who was involved, including the student, the staff on duty and witnesses.
• When and where it happened, as precisely as possible.
• What the activity was, how it was being supervised and what instructions had been given.
• What happened, in plain, factual language: what was seen and heard, not guesses about causes or blame.
• The injury or illness, and the first aid or treatment given, with times.
• Who was called and when: 911, the family, the principal.
• What happened afterward: the student went home, to hospital, or back to class.

Reports go to the principal and, through the district's system, to the people who need them, including the district's insurer for any injury that might lead to a claim. Staff injuries also go to the workers' compensation insurer, and serious staff injuries must be reported to MNOSHA within the required hours. Some incidents trigger other duties: suspected maltreatment is reported to the local welfare agency or police, and serious incidents are reported to the superintendent the same day.

Supporting people afterward

Serious incidents affect more than the injured student. Classmates who saw a friend collapse, a teacher who gave CPR, a volunteer who could not find a student for twenty minutes, all may be shaken. The district follows the psychological first aid approach from HSE-362: check on people, listen, give practical help and information, and connect them to support, such as guidance staff, the employee assistance program or community services. Staff involved in a serious incident are not expected to finish the day as if nothing happened.

Reviewing and improving

Every serious incident and near miss is reviewed. The purpose is to find what can be changed so it does not happen again, not to find someone to blame. A useful technique is to keep asking 'why?' until the answer points to something the school can fix: a student was missing at the museum; why? Because the count at the cafeteria was missed; why? Because the group leader was buying lunch and the count was nobody else's job; why? Because the plan did not name who counts at each transition. The fix is a plan that names a counter for every transition.

Patterns matter as much as individual incidents. Willow Park reviews its injury reports each semester to see where and when injuries happen. The program below shows the kind of summary the principal looks at.

from collections import Counter
# One term of student injury reports at an elementary school (invented data): (place, time, type)
reports = [
    ("play structure", "lunch recess", "fall"), ("play structure", "lunch recess", "fall"),
    ("paved area", "morning recess", "collision"), ("field", "lunch recess", "collision"),
    ("play structure", "lunch recess", "fall"), ("hallway", "class change", "trip"),
    ("gym", "phys ed", "sprain"), ("play structure", "morning recess", "fall"),
    ("paved area", "lunch recess", "collision"), ("field", "lunch recess", "fall"),
    ("play structure", "lunch recess", "fall"), ("bus loop", "dismissal", "trip"),
]
print("by place:", Counter(p for p, _, _ in reports).most_common(3))
print("by time: ", Counter(t for _, t, _ in reports).most_common(2))
ps_lunch = sum(1 for p, t, _ in reports if p == "play structure" and t == "lunch recess")
print(f"play structure at lunch recess: {ps_lunch} of {len(reports)} reports")

by place: [('play structure', 5), ('paved area', 2), ('field', 2)]
by time:  [('lunch recess', 7), ('morning recess', 2)]
play structure at lunch recess: 4 of 12 reports

Five of the twelve reports come from falls on the play structure at lunch recess. The school checks the surfacing under the structure, which turns out to be compacted and worn thin under the slide and the overhead ladder, has it topped up to the required depth, and adds a second supervisor in zone B at lunch. The next term's reports show whether the changes worked.

Capstone: reviewing a trip plan

To bring the course together, consider the plan Leah Tremblay submits for next spring's four-day eleventh-grade canoe trip, and the review Daniel Lefebvre carries out using everything in this course.

Daniel approves the trip with three conditions: the large-lake rule for wind, the named contact to meet any evacuation at the road, and the translated letters. None of the findings are dramatic. That is the point. A well-planned trip is one where the review finds small things to tighten, because the large things, ratios, swim tests, life jackets, medical plans and emergency communication, are already in place.

Following up with the family

The response does not end when the incident report is filed. The principal or the staff member who knows the student best calls the family a day or two later to ask how the student is doing, to answer questions and to explain what the school is doing as a result. If the student needs a return plan, such as after a concussion or a fracture, the school sets it up with the family. If the review leads to changes, families are told about them in general terms. Families who see that the school took the incident seriously and acted on it are far more likely to keep trusting the school with their child.