The California Department of Health Services and California Department of Education have teamed
up to provide a well designed and user-friendly Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Website. The website provides links to checklists, sample plans and tool kits for pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade, home and family. Links to planning and prevention checklists in other languages, including Spanish, Vietnamese, Farsi, Chinese and Arabic are also available.

View an Interactive Preparedness Checklist for K-12 Schools.

The first step in achieving these goals lies in obtaining authoritative information about both seasonal and pandemic influenza. Establishing a relationship with local public health agencies is strongly encouraged. Your County Office of Health Services can provide you with up-to-date information and guidance for both family and school preparedness.

If possible, planning activities should be conducted without causing undue anxiety or alarm. The advent of a pandemic is by no means a certainty, and severe outbreaks of the more typical seasonal (nonpandemic) "flu" are capable of producing morbidity and mortality rates similar to, or even exceeding a pandemic influenza.

The federal government has prepared a web document titled "National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza." Read the full document or access it by clicking on the book icon appearing above.