1.4
Partnerships Help Save Lives
Ron Gird, NOAA/NWS, Silver Spring, MD; and R. Lopes
Partnerships amplify and broaden messages of awareness, preparedness, and increase the real-time broadcast and dissemination of weather forecasts and warnings to the public and the American business community. Messages are amplified when the National Weather Service (NWS) and the American Red Cross promote both science and safety to households, schools and the workplace. The NWS and Red Cross promote partnerships to improve the effectiveness of informing the public and the American business community, ensuring they receive timely, accurate, consistent messages when time is precious.
The American Red Cross recently developed the Masters of Disaster (MoD) curriculum. MoD is an innovative curriculum for students in grades K-8 and helps teachers meet academic requirements. MoD provides lessons on science, math, social studies, language arts, and fine arts by studying earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and in general, awareness and preparedness. The NWS provided several Subject Matter Experts for the project and technical material which was integrated into MoD. MoD curriculum kits are specifically tailored for several grades and contain lesson plans for teachers, activity books for students, a video showing the how and why of disasters, a large poster for the classroom, and stickers and certificates for students.
The Talking About Disaster: A Guide for Standard Messages was produced by the National Disaster Education Coalition (NDEC), a group of national agencies and organizations. The NWS and Red Cross are founding members of NDEC. NDEC's goal is to produce consistent educational information for the public on all disasters, human induced or natural. Users of this guide may include emergency managers, meteorologists, teachers, disaster and fire educators, public affairs/public relations officials, mitigation specialists, and media personnel. The safety information is intended for dissemination to the general public. Messages are created for educational presentations, displays, bulletin boards, print and electronic media and any other medium in which disaster safety is communicated to the public. NDEC encourages the widest possible dissemination of the information contained in the guide.
Both the Red Cross and NWS continually seek new partnerships and improve existing partnerships which provide consistent science and safety information to the general public.
Session 1, K-12 Educational Initiatives
Monday, 14 January 2002, 9:30 AM-12:15 PM
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