Emergency operations plan compliance
Your plan has to meet your state’s requirements. We build the parts that are hardest to write.
Most states require every school site to maintain an emergency operations plan, and those requirements have tightened steadily — hazard assessments, functional and hazard-specific annexes, trained command roles, and drills with a documented debrief. They read like a list of the things educational organizations have the least time to produce.
Obligations, not suggestions.
State requirements differ in their wording, but the elements below recur across nearly all of them and across federal guidance. Each one maps to work that has to be produced, reviewed, and evidenced.
A hazard assessment
Now a required element of the plan — not an optional appendix.
Functional and hazard-specific annexes
The annexes are where a generic plan stops being generic. They are also the part most organizations have never written.
ICS training for command roles
Incident Commander, Public Information Officer, Safety Officer, Liaison Officer, and Operations Section Chief — with a refresher obligation attached.
Defined drills with a debrief
Drills are now defined, with completion timelines and a required debrief. A drill nobody debriefs is a rehearsal for the wrong thing.
Whole-community inclusion
Planning that accounts for the people who need extra assistance to evacuate or shelter, and the families on the other end of a reunification.
A plan that is a gate to money
State and federal school safety grant programs commonly require applicants to produce a current site-level emergency operations plan. The plan is not just compliance — it is eligibility.
Requirements and deadlines are set state by state and change often. Confirm what currently applies to you with your own state education agency and state emergency management agency before relying on any description here.
Your staff will execute this, not us. That is why they help write it.
Few states offer a free site assessment service, and a template is not the same thing as a plan for your campus. We do the work that has to be site-specific: walking the buildings, writing the annexes with the people who will use them, designing drills that are worth running, and running the debrief that turns a drill into an improvement.
The realistic threat picture matters here. For schools, the dominant risk is not the outside intruder — it is the enrolled or recently separated student. That places a functioning behavioral threat assessment team ahead of hardware in effectiveness, and it is the first thing we look at.
- Charter networks. Independent decision-makers, no district procurement process, and one relationship that often covers several campuses. We work well with this structure.
- Districts. Board-ready documentation, comparable scoring across sites, and a roll-up view for the people who have to answer for all of them.
- Private and independent schools. No district structure behind you, and often no template either — which makes a site-specific document the whole of your position.
- Colleges and universities. Multi-building campuses, residential populations, and a command structure that has to work across departments.
- Cooperatives, pools, and consortia. One standard across many member sites, with each site getting a document that reflects its own building.
Deliverables built to be handed to someone who was not in the room.
- Gap review against the minimum requirements. We read your current plan against what the state now requires and give you a gap table — what exists, what is missing, and what has to be produced first.
- Hazard assessment and site assessment. All-hazards, scored, and specific to the campus, including CPTED review of approaches, entries, sightlines, and parking.
- Annexes and procedures. Functional and hazard-specific annexes, lockdown and evacuation, reunification, and severe-weather sheltering sized against your actual headcount.
- ICS role training. Command and general staff roles taught to the people who will actually hold them, aligned to FEMA course objectives.
- Drills, exercises, and the debrief. Designed and facilitated, followed by an after-action report with tracked corrective actions.
- Quarterly threat and trend intelligence. What changed in your county, what it means for your campus, and what we are closing out.
What people ask us first
We already have a plan. Do we need you?
Possibly not, and we will tell you if that is the case. Three questions usually settle it: does the plan name people who currently work there, does it describe the buildings as they are now, and has anyone practiced any part of it in the last year. If the answers are yes, you are in good shape and a gap review is all you need.
Can you write our plan, or only review it?
Both. We develop plans, annexes, and procedures, and we do it with the staff who will have to use them rather than handing over a document written elsewhere. Plans written without the people who execute them tend to fail in execution rather than in design.
Do you provide the ICS training the requirements call for?
Yes. We deliver command and general staff role training aligned to FEMA course objectives, taught by a practitioner who has held those roles on real incidents rather than only in a classroom.
How do you handle drills?
We design them for the population, facilitate them, and then debrief them — and the debrief is the part that matters. A twenty-minute walkthrough that gets discussed afterward is worth more than an annual full-scale exercise nobody talks about.
Are you selling us a platform or a subscription product?
No. We sell professional services only — no software, no hardware, no platform, and no referral fees from anyone who sells them. Software cannot walk your building, and a platform subscription is not a site-specific plan.
Bring us the plan you have. We will tell you what is missing.
A gap review against the state minimum requirements is a short, low-risk engagement, and it produces a documented list you can take to a board or attach to a grant application.