Had there been a preemptive state of emergency issued before Tuesday’s storm, Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis said children would not have been in class that day.
“If we had known what (the state) knew, we would have probably made a different call, or at least we would have had different information to synthesize,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday. “If GEMA, or anyone, declares an emergency, we’re not going to send the kids out in that.”
Davis’ comments came just before thousands of students and teachers return to the classroom Monday after three snow days. There will be counselors at several schools, especially locations were children had to spend the night.
“I think we are ready to go,” he said during an interview with Channel 2 Action News. “Hopefully, our kids are ready to learn.”
Davis said he is “profoundly sorry” so many students did not make it home Tuesday afternoon, and that students were stranded on buses for hours.
“We had approximately 50 students who were stuck on buses, and that’s 50 too many from our perspective,” he said. “We are accountable for the decisions we made, and we are profoundly sorry that our decisions did not work the way we intended them to work. This was a major crisis, but it was not just an APS crisis. People died, people were injured, and thousands of people were in accidents. If there is one thing I am proud of, it is the performance of our drivers, of our principals and of our teachers. We delivered all of our children safely and soundly, but it was the next day, unfortunately.”
Challenges going forward include establishing better communication with state and local officials and a review of the district’s emergency plan, he said.
“In emergency situations, there are already protocols in place. The question is are they enough and did they work as well as they should have, and obviously they did not,” the superintendent said. “That is one of the things I think we will find out is how much more communication is required.”
Davis said though the district’s emergency plan didn’t work as intended, he does not think it was a complete failure.
“It is not as if we have to start from scratch. We have an elaborate emergency protocol and communications system,” he said. “Some aspects of it didn’t work.”
One of those aspects was the district’s robo-call system, which was activated, but some parents didn’t get the message because of inaccurate contact information.
“We implore our parents to make sure the phone numbers in our emergency calling system are up-to-date, and not all of them were,” he said.
Davis said he is looking forward to reviewing the lessons learned, rather than dwelling on things that cannot be changed.
“Looking back on it is always easy,” he said. “Of course we should not have had school that day, given the things that happened, but really that’s not ever going to be the litmus test, looking backward. The test is going to be what can we do to make better decisions going forward.”
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