The Emergency Management Unit coordinates the activities for the district’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC). When activated, the EOC is a central location where the district’s Incident Management Team officials and, if needed, local government and agency officials convene during disaster situations to make decisions, set priorities, and coordinate resources for response and recovery. Atlanta Public Schools also uses a virtual EOC to communicate with remote officials.

Besides training and testing on the district-level plan, the Emergency Management Unit also assists appointed emergency coordinators to design school and departmental emergency action plans.  The critical goals of each plan are:

• To synchronize efforts.
• To prevent fatalities and injuries.
• To reduce damage to buildings, documentation, stock equipment.
• To accelerate the resumption of normal operations.

Each plan, regardless of hazard or threat category, will address the common duties, responsibilities, authority/chain of command and resources for emergency response. A plan template is provided for each school’s emergency coordinator.

Among the responsibilities that will be addressed and assigned in each emergency plan are:

• Reporting the emergency and activating the emergency plan.
• Assuming overall command and alerting staff; coordinating activities of various groups.
• Establishing communication (for example, advising the media, alerting external agencies or alerting the outside population of possible risk).
• Ordering evacuation and confirming evacuation completed.
• Requesting external aid.
• Providing medical aid or advising relatives of casualties.
• Ensuring emergency shut-offs are closed.
• Sounding the all-clear.
• Completing a comprehensive plan for handling emergencies is a major step toward preventing disasters.

Business Continuity is the advanced planning and preparation taken to help ensure those district departments and employees have the ability to respond to and recover from any emergencies or events that would disrupt our business operations. Typical Business Disruptions: Personnel Unavailable, Facility Unavailable or Technology Failures. To help organizations plan for business disruptions, departments develop a Business Continuity Plan. The Business Continuity Plan is the documented procedures that guide organizations and individual departments to respond, recover, resume, and restore to a pre-defined level of operation following a disruption. The Emergency Management Unit will help departments complete business continuity plans for their respective areas.