School evacuation tests emergency plan

All 650 students from Bordewich-Bray Elementary School evacuated on foot last week to nearby Carson Middle School as both schools field tested their evacuation plans.

All schools in Carson City in the past two years have put much more detail into their emergency management plans. By January, copies of the plan should be ready to send home to all parents of children in the Carson City School District.

There is an overall booklet for the entire district and each school was allowed to tailor the book to that school's specific needs.

At Bordewich-Bray, for instance, the plan calls for children to evacuate to Carson Middle School. Unless, a calamity hits both school. Plan B takes the pupils to the First Presbyterian Church.

Principal Kirk Kinne has the added challenge, unique in Carson City, of having have two distinct campuses to evacuate.

The Bordewich kids walked down Musser Street (not King Street because the Bordewich building is too close to King). The Bray kids made their way down Fourth, Iris and King streets to reach the middle school.

A couple years before the school district fully embraced a safer schools campaign, a bomb threat arrived at Bordewich-Bray and Kinne became alarmed at his school's inadequate, even dangerous, evacuation plan.

"We really got hit off-guard with that," Kinne said. "On that day we had the kids go to the playground. But the playground is close to the building. If a bomb had gone off, it would not have been pretty."

Kinne credits Vice Principal Rick Redican for rewriting the emergency management plan for the "very spread out and very wide open" campus at Bordewich-Bray.

Kinne and CMS Principal Tom Badillo fine-tuned the plan as the children stood on the middle school football field on a somewhat blustery afternoon.

"They used the football field because the weather was still OK," Badillo said. "But winter lasts nearly the entire school year. Next time I think we'll bus them to our cafeteria. They have only 600 kids. I think they'll all fit."

Carson-Middle School also tailored the district plan. Badillo personalized the code word for the middle school that alerts staff to an immediate lock-down situation.

"No matter were we are in the school this is what happens," Badillo said. "You lock the door, get the kids against the wall and out of sight of windows."