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Emergency Preparedness in Texas' School Districts in 2007

School District Collaboration and Emergency Planning:  A New Dataset

Dr. Scott Robinson

Joseph Reed MPA

A new data set is available that assesses the disaster preparedness and collaborative practices for educational institutions. The data come from a Spring 2007 survey of Texas school districts that included questions related to emergency preparedness, coordination, and disaster experiences.  Dr. Robinson, an associate professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, collected the data with funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF #CMS0757143).

The data set includes 595 responding schools from around the state of Texas (representing a response rate of roughly 48 percent).  The survey included 20 questions that measured their emergency preparedness, coordination, and disaster planning.  One question of particular interest involves the collaboration between local school districts and government and non-government organizations in preparing for emergencies and disasters.  Based on the survey responses, more than 97 percent of respondents collaborated with police, fire, and first responders when developing and reviewing their emergency response plans.  Furthermore, 70 percent of respondents collaborated with other school districts, 65 percent collaborated with government relief and welfare organizations as well as with religious organizations, 54 percent collaborated with non-profit and relief organizations and 29 percent of respondents collaborated with business organizations.  Other questions of interest included the reported quality of school district emergency preparedness plans and the length of time elapsed since school districts last faced an emergency that called for the activation of their district emergency plan.

The data set collected by Dr. Robinson can be accessed at http://perg.tamu.edu.  For further questions please contact Dr. Scott Robinson (srobinson@bushschool.tamu.edu) or Joseph Reed (jwreed@bushschool.tamu.edu).

Access the Codebook (Codebook.pdf) and Dataset (DPAS 2007 Final Release.dta).