Surviving Your Golden Hour: Crisis Planning for Christian Schools

 

The first hours of a crisis will shape everything that follows. Dr. R. Adams Cowley, widely regarded as the father of trauma medicine, described what he called the “golden hour”—the critical window immediately following a life-threatening injury, during which rapid intervention dramatically increases survival odds. “There is a golden hour between life and death,” he observed. “If you are critically injured, you have less than 60 minutes to survive.” What is true in the trauma bay is equally true in the principal’s office. For the thousands of schools that make up the Association of Christian Schools International, a crisis can arrive without warning and without sympathy for anyone caught unprepared.