2023-10-07 04:50:00
Santiago. A total of 2,378 educational establishments in the Metropolitan Region registered to participate this Friday in an earthquake drill, organized by the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED) and which evaluated the responses of the educational communities of more than one million of students and education workers, in the context of the protocols considered by their respective Comprehensive School Safety Plans (PISE).
On the occasion, Minister Nicolás Cataldo, together with the Undersecretary of Education, Alejandra Arratia, and Seremi Flavia Fiabane, monitored the activity at the República de Syria School in Ñuñoa. The exercise simulated the response of the educational community to a greater intensity earthquake (VIII on the Mercalli Scale and magnitude 8.8 of Mww).
After the drill, which lasted 30 minutes, the Secretary of State evaluated the response of the more than 700 students who participated in the facility. “We need to train ourselves and generate capacity in the educational community to respond to natural disasters, especially earthquakes, given that it is something that happens regularly. Until now, we have not had the recent experience of situations like these on the day, when children and young people are actually in educational centers,” he said.
Furthermore, he added that “I am sure that this has been a successful day, from which we will learn many lessons, so that when the time comes, we will be prepared to face these challenges.”
The MINEDUC authority announced that the ministry and SENAPRED will work together so that teachers and education assistants can acquire new skills to protect school safety in earthquakes and other emergencies.
For his part, the national director of SENAPRED, Álvaro Hormazábal, stated that “we are a country exposed to a series of threats of natural and anthropogenic origin. For some we can do mitigation works, prevention works, but for others we have to improve resilience capacities.”
In this context, Hormazábal explained that “what these exercises seek is to train at our most basic level, the young people who are the ones who have the ability to transmit this to families, to know what they have to do, how they have to act in a situation.” “One of the main threats we have, which is an earthquake, which we know that no matter how much preparation we have, we will all be exposed to suffering from it at some point.”
Meanwhile, the director of the establishment, Óscar Vilches, said that “prevention is very important for the safety of our students and our staff. Doing these preventive exercises will prevent us from many problems in the future.”
The regional presidential delegate, Constanza Martínez, also participated in the activity; the regional director of SENAPRED Miguel Muñoz; the president of the Chilean Association of Municipalities and the mayor of Peñalolén Carolina Leitao.
Deployment of MINEDUC
The deployment of MINEDUC authorities included the Undersecretary of Early Childhood Education, Claudia Lagos, who monitored the drill at the Isidora Aguirre Nursery Garden and Nursery in Pedro Aguirre Cerda, accompanied by the executive director of Fundación Integra, Carlos González. , and the vice president of JUNJI, Daniela Triviño.
For his part, the Undersecretary of Higher Education, Víctor Orellana, traveled to the Barrio República, in Santiago, to participate in the exercise at the headquarters of the Andrés Bello University. The rector of the institution, Julio Castro, was also present on the occasion.
Likewise, the national director of the Directorate of Public Education, Jaime Veas, together with the provincial head of Education Santiago Poniente, Jorge Figueroa, were at the Alejandro del Río School in La Granja, belonging to the Local Public Education Service (SLEP) Gabriela Mistral .
Earthquake drill in educational communities
The educational units that carried out the exercise registered voluntarily and will be able to record their experience, through an evaluation guideline applied during the simulation exercise and that will be uploaded to a web link provided by SENAPRED.
The drill was developed within the framework of the Chile Prepared program, created in 2010 by ONEMI (currently SENAPRED), which aims to promote a culture of prevention and self-care in the community, preparing it for various emergencies.
To date, more than 11 million people across the country have participated in these evacuation exercises. In the Metropolitan Region, six evacuation drill exercises have been carried out, 4 for the education sector (2012, 2013, 2014 and 2017), one for the health sector (2015) and one for mass removal in San José de Maipo (2018 ).
Comprehensive School Safety Plan
The Comprehensive School Safety Plan (PISE) is an instrument created in 2001, replacing the old Operation Deyse, which was only evacuation, with a mainly reactive focus.
This tool seeks to generate a concept of collective responsibility in the areas of prevention, preparation and response to an emergency, involving the different levels of the educational community: teachers, students, management teams, mothers, fathers and guardians.
In the case of preschool and school education establishments, PISE considers the formation of a School Safety Committee, responsible for knowing and applying prevention and safety standards, to identify internal risks and know what to do in an emergency. In the case of higher education, institutions have an Emergency Plan, which also considers measures to prevent and face contingencies.
Tags: School Community, General Education, Early Childhood Education, public education, Higher Education, mineduc, PISE, school safety
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