Our society and the environment we live in are very vulnerable to hazards such as earthquakes, flooding, cyclones and more. Pakistan is fairly exposed to natural hazards as it falls in a seismically active zone. Conservative reports claim that more than 75,000 people were killed and around 3.3 million were displaced due to the devastating earthquake in 2005 alone. With more than 50% of the population living in high seismic activity zones, there is a potential threat to approximately 30,000 schools that are located in earthquake prone areas of the country.

Generally speaking, experts are unanimous about the fact that many schools collapse due to an acute lack of knowledge, lack of maintenance and lack of guidelines for school site selection, design, construction, use of construction material, etc. It is an established fact that pre-hazard risk reduction techniques are valuable in reducing the impact of a natural hazard. Preparation of schools to react to hazards - after or while they are occurring - is equally crucial in reducing damage. These strategies include evacuation plans, designated evacuation areas, and safety awareness. Raising awareness about school safety is of strategic importance to overall community safety as activities related to school safety trickle down to the larger community through various means such as training of local workers and technicians, and transfer of information by children to the entire household.

Educating school children on how to make their environment risk-free is a leading strategy towards informing people to work towards their safety and that of others. A few recommendations, as discussed in the 2008 ‘International Conference on School Safety’, for parents, community members, teachers and school managers are listed below, the objective being to increase awareness of the multitude of steps that can be taken to keep schools risk-free and children safe.

Keeping Schools Safe – A Collective Community Effort

Disaster management has usually constituted of strategies that focus on post-disaster support, i.e. relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction. However, this approach is gradually being proved to be insufficient in protecting people, especially those living in very vulnerable and economically disadvantaged regions.

With time governments and organizations are realizing the value of pre-disaster prevention and preparedness. This approach opens up an entire dimension of strategies that can utilize science, technology, indigenous knowledge, public education and other avenues that can be useful for disaster management. Getting people motivated and mobilizing them to use their local knowledge as well as new technologies from experts is not only cost-effective for governments and disaster management NGO’s but has proven to be sustainable and effective in disaster preparedness, response and mitigation. The school can play a key role as the nucleus through with life-saving knowledge and awareness can spread across communities, through children reaching out to their parents and school management reaching out to community elders and disaster management experts.

Keeping Schools Safe – Teachers and Caregivers

Adequate and applicable education is a crucial component to ensure successful disaster risk reduction. The integration of both formal and informal education through schools is a very potent way to ensure that important messages reach out to every household/community member and that learning is sustained into future generations. Usually, small children enthusiastically share with their parents and families what they learnt at school, for example, if they have learned a nursery rhyme during a particular class, they will sing it for their parents and indirectly transfer its message to them. It is also assumed that learning in early ages helps information to stay in the children’s mind for a long time in order to be used by them later in life (Parsizadeh, 2008).

Education related to disaster risk reduction does not necessarily have to teach students how to become specialists of disaster management. It should be more focused on helping students think and pay attention to their environmental and societal risks. Past experience has revealed that the children who are aware of the risks they live in and know how to react in emergency situations have resulted in ‘better mitigation strategies and information dissemination on the dangers of hazards’. (Tovmasyan, 2008). Experience has also shown a strong correlation between school education and disaster risk reduction. However, disaster preparedness cannot take place overnight. Educating children, their families, and other community members is a long-term goal that may require changes to conventional ways of thinking and behavior. The underlying logic behind disaster risk reduction education is to lead people from taking a reactive stance towards a proactive ‘Culture of Prevention’ (Tovmasyan, 2008).

Bearing this logic in mind it would be a valuable exercise for teachers to put together a course for environmental risk awareness and preparedness for students at school. In addition to general awareness on natural hazards and disasters, this course could focus on local risks and locally applicable strategies to avert those risks.
Understanding and accounting for local knowledge and practices can contribute to improving the formulation and implementation of disaster preparedness activities, for e.g. in the western Himalayas of Uttaranchal, an earthquake prone area, people do not build houses and school buildings with bricks or concrete but with wooden structures and stone. During the Uttarkashi earthquake all the brick and cement houses were totally destroyed whereas traditional houses survived with minimal damage. Cases such as this can play a vital role in helping the child understand the value of indigenous knowledge in helping save and improve lives (Mukhopadhyay, 2008)