Despite the name, CEDP is not just an emergency credential. It’s a public safety credential school leaders should consider
CEDP, or the Certified Emergency Disaster Professional certification is, as the name suggests, primarily for emergency response professionals. The credential covers a variety of emergency management concepts related to
- Disaster planning
- Disaster management
- Hazard vulnerability analysis
- Emergency response, and
- Effective leadership across large-scale events like natural disasters, active threats, and more.
Despite CEDP’s name, it should not just be limited to emergency response organizations. K-12 schools should be recognized as the critical component of community resilience and recovery infrastructure that they are.
Schools are emergency management and public health centers, too
When a tornado strikes a small town and a community needs an emergency shelter, there’s the hospital and the schools. When an active threat happens, like a gunman, hospitals and schools very likely coordinate their lockdown procedures along with law enforcement.
When a disease spreads, schools are on the front line just like hospitals.
And when a mass casualty event occurs and rural or suburban hospitals need mass transportation, they likely call the school district.
School principals, administrators, or select staff inside school buildings who are CHEP-trained will learn:
- Incident Command Structure (ICS)
- Continuity of Operations (COOP)
- How to collaborate with public health, EMS, and local healthcare emergency management contacts in a shared language
- And begin to understand ways to coordinate public information and public health communication (CERC courses go into more depth about emergency response communication)
These trained K-12 staff and faculty can and should become valuable liaisons between education, emergency management, and healthcare providers.
Cross-disciplinary value in high-risk, high-population environments
Schools, like hospitals, are high-occupancy facilities. And each faces similar risks:
- Medical emergencies like severe asthma attacks, injuries, and disease risks are common in both schools and hospitals
- Schools and hospitals are targets for active threats, mass casualty events like bus accidents, and contagions like COVID-19, flu, measles, etc.
CEDP training provides a structured framework for risk assessment, response planning, and communication to improve safety, apply emergency management principles, and mitigate hazards and risks when a response is necessary.
How CEDP certification can work in your school
CEDP aligns with standard emergency operations plans (EOPs), which schools already have and should pay close attention to.
Through regular tabletop drills and crisis simulations — which VPC can design or help coordinate based on your community’s needs — schools can help support and train local EMS, fire, law enforcement, and healthcare providers as part of their emergency management efforts.
Grants and funding through homeland security, federal agencies, and emergency preparedness grants are available, too.
School staff and leaders who are CEDP-certified are also better-positioned to receive additional funding for school safety equipment like safe rooms, radios, and additional training.
Get your Certified Emergency Disaster Professional certification now
Schools provide leadership for their students, and they can model CEDP-reinforced trauma-informed care, mental health crisis response planning, and prepare employees through essential exercises with CHEP. School leadership trained in CEDP principles will improve response and confidence in real incidents, potentially saving lives.
CEDP is more than an emergency credential despite the credential’s name. The objectives ensure better, faster, and more coordinated disaster management and emergency preparedness. Contact us to learn more, get certified, and keep your community safe.
FAQs about CEDP for school staff and leadership
Incident Command Structure, hazard vulnerability analysis, communication protocols, resource coordination, and more all align with district-level SOPs surrounding drills, lockdowns, unification plans, community information and PR, and multi-agency coordination.
A single SRO — often tasked with covering several buildings at once — may not be on-site or enough. That officer is likely focused on immediate preservation of life and safety. CEDP-trained school staff can provide broader attention to long-term public health responses, communication with hospitals, EMS, and emergency managers, and other scenarios where law enforcement may not be the lead.
CEDP reinforces a shared language between community responders, making drills and responses smoother and providing much more coordinated disaster management.
PD days are a great time to conduct tabletop exercises or even full-scale live-action drills if coordinated with other agencies or public health departments in your community. We recommend conducting at least one tabletop exercise per academic year.
VPC’s team of first responders and CEDP-certified staff can offer scenarios and evaluation tools that are customized for schools.
If your facility serves as a community shelter, polling place, or reunification center for your community, additional training in first aid, CPR, and AED, ICS, Continuity of Education Planning (similar to COOP), and psychological first aid (PFA) can be excellent additions to your building.
