Our schools sit on the Cascadia subduction zone, and a lot of our buildings are still waiting for seismic work that has been promised since 2015. Upgrading those buildings takes provincial money and provincial timelines. Getting ready for the day it happens does not, and that work is squarely within a trustee's control.
My Plan
The district's current safety plan gives earthquakes about two pages out of fifty, and most of what it says is how to drop, cover, and get out of the building. It does not plan for what happens in the hours after, when the buildings are empty, the roads are broken, and parents cannot get through. I will push for a full review of post-disaster planning built around a magnitude 9 Cascadia event, with realistic assumptions about how long students and staff will be on site before anyone comes.
In the first hours after a major quake, the people already on site are the emergency response. Right now our training depth is thin, and it is concentrated in a small number of staff. I want first aid certification funded and offered widely across staff, and age-appropriate training built into the middle and secondary years so students are an asset rather than a liability.
The district sets no mandated standard for what a school holds in emergency supplies, and there is no public inventory or replacement budget. The only firm number anywhere is a request that parents leave 72 hours of medication at the school, which tells you the assumed timeline while putting the burden on families. I will push for a per-school cache standard with water, food, shelter, and sanitation for the full school population, audited annually and funded as a line item.