Structured to Partner: School District Collaboration with Nonprofit Organizations in Disaster Response

Abstract

Emergency preparedness and response is moving from a specialized circle of emergency management professionals and select nonprofit organizations (such as the Red Cross and other national relief organizations) to include a broader variety of organizations not traditionally fulfilling emergency management roles, including schools. It is not clear who among these new potential members of emergency preparedness networks collaborates with whom. We present the results of a survey of Texas public schools and test how structural characteristics are related to collaboration with nonprofits and relief organizations following a local, visible disaster, that of the 2005 Gulf Coast Hurricanes. Our results show that the propensity to collaborate is related to the size of the districts and its degree of centralization, even while controlling for a district’s general collaborative tendency.