Location of School and Disaster Risk Reduction

In the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, the education sector experienced major damages, like other sectors of housing, infrastructures, energy and livelihoods. Education sector has important role of growing the children for future. Has explained above, education sector has other role in the community in usual time and also during disaster.  For example, it becomes an evacuation center and also helps in developing relationship with communities through communication. Stability of social and environment of education sector is key elements for recoveries from this disaster. 6,284 public schools received damage and 733 school students/teachers died or missing by Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, 2011. MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) classified damages into three levels. For level 2, it was significant damages, and also need some amount of structural and non-structural measures, and for level 3, it was minor damages, mostly non-structural.  For new constriction, education sector, school and community people have to discuss and decide about grand design of new school. In this disaster, many schools and students/teachers received damage. School is important public facility in the community. For community based disaster risk reduction, people and community need to make linkage. Also, school is one part of community. Therefore, school need to make linkage with community for community based disaster risk reduction. School building need to be strong for disaster and combine some facility for disaster risk reduction. In the recovery process of community and local government, it is difficult to make priority among different issues like living, education, infrastructure, hospital, welfare and etc. People have to make many decisions for recovery plan under limited time and budget. On the other hand, people have a right to receive the education, and elementary school and junior high school education is compulsory education in Japan. The right to receive education should be protected.  First priority role of school is continuity of education and keep education quality. Thus, education in emergency becomes a key issue, and education in normal time is a standard.  Safe school protects students from disaster, and it is a large part of sustainability of community.  Safe school is not only to keep student’s life and education place, but also student’s presence is large power for community recovery. Since most of the affected areas have higher percentage of aged population, the voices or noises from the school give vitality to the people and community living in the area.  Many old people come to the school playground just to observe young kids.  A good interaction or communication platform between the school and the community will provide more vitality to the old people living in the community.  This will also bring the knowledge and values from the past to the future generation. How to communicate and build trust in community and school is the key point for recovery process and disaster risk reduction in general time.