Making resilience a Priority in School District

Project architects, community members and children join a ground-breaking for Beaverton’s new resilient schools. PHOTO: Scott Johnson/Beaverton Project Manager-Facilities Development

The Oregon Chapter the Association of Civil Engineers was just mentioned in an article on making resilience a priority for school districts.  The article from ASCE News, focuses on the efforts of the Beaverton School District to adopt the findings of the Oregon Resilience Plan (ORP) for schools. The ORP’s  goals were to ensure that schools can be reopened thirty days after a Cascadia earthquake, and recommended that they be used for community shelters following the earthquake.

Although it focuses on the three ASCE members involved in the effort, I was also worked on the project as a sub-consultant for SEFT, Inc.,  Kent Yu’s firm. Kent led the the Oregon Resilience Plan effort when he was chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Committee (which I also worked on).  Chris Poland helped create the Resilient City study done by SPUR for the City of San Fransisco, which the ORP used as a core document.

The Beaverton School District is to be commended for its leadership in this effort.  The District intended this to be a model project and it is making the study available to other school districts and communities to learn from their efforts. All school districts in Oregon should be considering resilience in their long range planning.