The Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) has made school safety a major priority. The 13-member School Safety Project has been created to provide every school in Georgia with substantial assistance in making schools safer, and GEMA also strives to interact with other States to share information. While Georgia provides a wealth of free resources to assist schools in developing emergency operations plans, school administrators in some other States are not so fortunate. Therefore, the author provides a checklist to assist in the development of an emergency operations plan that will work during an actual crisis. He emphasizes the importance of creating a multi-disciplinary team to work on the development of an emergency operations plan and identifies critical functions to be addressed in the plan. These functions pertain to emergency evacuation, lockdown codes and procedures, crisis intervention and management, emergency threat evaluation, family reunification procedures, incident command, public information and the media, facility surveys, and emergency communications. 3 photographs