Five-Step Planning Assists Public Education Program
Public Information Officer Clackamas Co., Ore. Fire District No. 1
Realizing the potential of a systematic public education program, many fire departments are taking steps to implement a public education program of some type and undoubtedly many are running into the same problems as I did.
When you mention manpower and time, you run into the budget crunches and I can’t blame a fire chief for being reluctant to go all out for an experimental education program when he doesn’t know where it’s going. This is where the five-step planning process can help.
The first step is to identify your major fire problems. To do this, you should identify specific fire hazards, determine high-risk locations and times, identify high-risk victims and their behaviors, and then evaluate all this data to single out a major fire problem. You may have more than one. For instance, our district problems are arson, juvenile firesetters and careless smoking habits.
Definition of problem
To identify them properly, however, you should use the factors in the identification process to end up with something like:
Elderly persons falling asleep with cigarettes in the living room of a single-family dwelling. This problems occurs mostly between 1800 and 2200 hours, Friday through Sunday during the months of August and September in the northeast residential section of our district.
It may sound like a rather wordy way of displaying your problems, but if presented in this manner, it will help to target a specific education program.
The second step is selection of objectives. You should consider your audience, resources, costs, and the benefits of correcting the fire problem.
Third, you design a program for the particular problem and audience you’re dealing with. Once you’ve determined message content, format and the proper time and place for the message. you can move on to the fourth step—implementation.
To implement your program, you may wish to produce or buy materials, and possibly train some people to help. Line personnel are often used, but as money is a factor (particularly with education) most of your work will be done alone.
Evaluation is important
The fifth step, and possibly the most important, is to evaluate your education program. You may find that it needs modification to be more effective. There are more sophisticated methods of evaluation, but by keeping track of fire incident reports and comparing the new data with the baseline, you should be able to determine whether the program is effective.
The five-step planning process is much more complicated than I’ve described here. The United States Fire Administration puts out a booklet on the subject, which will help should you decide this is the way to go. I believe in this system for various reasons, but it does present problems for the average educator.
First off, many of us don’t have an accurate enough data base to outline the fire problems as completely as I did in step one. It may be that you don’t have the detailed information in your report forms that is necessary to identify a specific behavioral problem. If you do have a good data base, your problem may be that you haven’t the means or time to correlate all the information into an accurate display.
Whatever your particular problem with data, you can at least make a start by looking at nothing more than incident numbers and causes. For instance, 200 fires caused by some type of smoker carelessness, out of a total 400 fires would lend sufficient evidence that smoker carelessness (of some sort) is a major problem in your area. Later on, you may be able to narrow the behavioral problem to specific age groups, times, places, etc. At least you have identified a major fire problem in your area, and can begin to target efforts toward an incident reduction goal.
Sure of direction
Plenty of time will still be needed while you follow the other steps to determine how you will combat your problems, but at least you know (and can let your administration know) that your efforts are in the proper direction. Job security for educators, I feel, will be bright—even in budget crunches—for the individuals who can show their chief that they are working for specific goals.
It is essential that you involve members of your community in the five-step process from the very beginning. Their involvement will bring you citizen awareness, involvement, and community resources you might not have otherwise obtained.
However, if your needs are similar to mine, then you will wish to produce some type of program almost immediately. You may lack time, manpower, money, or even citizens’ interest when it comes down to involving community members in the process. As valuable as their cooperation might be, you may wish to start the process on your own. Eventually, citizen and administration awareness will be raised by your program and at some point in the future, you can structure your program around community involvement.
By initiating the five-step process, you will provide your fire administration with a viable program. By evaluating your success, you may prove your worth when budget cuts come about, and administrators are looking for fads to delete. By involving the community as much as possible, you take enormous steps that will raise citizen awareness and provide your program with resources that might normally be beyond reach (not to mention citizen support for public education). Finally, by molding the entire process to your needs, you can best achieve that balance between “ideal” and “real” situations that will provide you with a workable program almost from day one.
