Natural disasters in recent years have left many districts facing months and years of recovery, and recently record-breaking numbers of tornadoes have touched down in the Midwest. Other parts of the country have experienced epic flooding, cataclysmic forest fires and devastating hurricanes. Through it all, schools must go on.

Districts that don’t already have an emergency plan should create one and if the plan is dated, experts recommend taking time refresh it. The plan should include caring for the building, but also caring for the mass amounts of student data that is likely stored inside. Some schools have backed up data to cloud services that are off-site and often out-of-state, away from any local catastrophes. Though districts express concerns about potential data breaches and meeting Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requirements, these obstacles can be overcome by careful vetting of the cloud vendors.

Districts that opt to avoid cloud storage and keep all data on-site are taking the risk of losing it all in the event of damage to their servers. In the event that equipment is damaged, experts will need to be hired, which can be very expensive. Those experts also must be FERPA compliant.

Read the full article about disaster preparedness by Shawna De La Rosa at Education Dive.