Overcoming Disaster: What Colleges Learned from Catastrophe to Recovery - Paperback

by Katherine B. Persson (Author)

Overcoming Disaster: What Colleges Learned from Catastrophe to Recovery provides a resource to help leaders at many levels in an organization understand what can help and hinder their disaster recovery, whether natural or man-made caused. The author and contributors share their lessons learned on recovering from hurricanes and a mass shooting on campus where nine were killed. The seven parts of the book include the aftermath to recovery with chapters on trauma and grief, being overwhelmed, healing, and recovery strategies for individuals, organizations and communities. The finale of the book is a master crisis response cheat sheet.

Author Biography

Katherine Persson was a founding faculty member and a long-time college president of Lone Star College-Kingwood when Hurricane Harvey's sewage-laden floodwaters washed over eighty percent of everything on the main campus just before the start of 2017 fall classes. With 113 classrooms lost, LSC-Kingwood built a new instructional business plan and started classes 27 days after flooding with no employee layoffs, and an increase in student enrollment of over five percent for that eventful first semester.