In The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)’s plan about school safety for the next five years, it expects disaster education to have secondary effects, such as contributing to learning about students' own community and to local human resource developments. In the study, such forms of disaster education are called "community-based disaster education." And ideal school management systems for sustainable community-based disaster education were analyzed. Subjects of the study were public elementary and junior high schools in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture. The education board of the city places importance on “cooperation and collaboration with the local community” and “disaster education.” By searching documents and interviewing, unique indexes to assess sustainability of community-based disaster education were created. A questionnaire to elementary and junior high schools there was conducted using the indexes. By considering the results of the questionnaire and the differences in the school management systems among schools which had responded, the important school frameworks or rules to sustain community-based disaster education was analyzed. The results showed that schools which became Community-Schools or Safety-Promotion-Schools are more likely to be able to make their own community-based disaster education sustainable and that it is more difficult for junior high schools to sustain the disaster education than elementary schools because they lack local relationships and are busy studying for high school entrance exams.

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We created teaching materials compiling topographic and geological conditions and disaster histories (e.g., earthquakes and tsunamis, heavy rains, storm surges) in each region and conducted visiting classes to students and disaster education to teaching staff to return the latest research outcome on disaster science to the local community. As an example for such activity, we report the summary of the disaster education for teaching staffs at a high school in Omuta City, Fukuoka Prefecture. In the disaster education for teachers, we explained the causes of inundation due to the most recent heavy rain in the region in July 2020, the assumption of each disaster to create a hazard map in Fukuoka Prefecture, issues of school disaster prevention, and important points for creating manuals for disaster prevention. After the disaster education, a questionnaire survey was conducted to evaluate this initiative and extract the problems. Our efforts are expected to contribute improving the capabilities for crisis management and the ability of teaching staffs to respond to disasters.

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[in Japanese]

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