A Puzzle of Assessments, Plans and Tech

Managing school safety is like getting a box of puzzle pieces and figuring out how they go together, especially if the school district has no safety director and the task of school safety falls on the administration.

ZeroNow, a nonprofit whose members include both educators and private-sector tech leaders, addressed this topic in a webinar this week, focusing especially on risk assessments and technology.

What kinds of technology should a district invest in? There is a lot of it out there and not all of it is appropriate for every district. So where to start?

“Everyone starts by looking at physical threats and vulnerabilities, but it’s far beyond that,” said Glenn Norling, a retired FBI agent.

Many school districts are now considering hiring school security directors.

“A lot of them are coming out of the realm of law enforcement, so they kind of default back to what they’ve done in the past with full site assessments,” said Valdimir Talley, safety and security administrator for Decatur schools in Illinois.

A full site assessment can be a daunting challenge for a school administrator without background in risk assessment, said Carli Ducko, a school safety specialist in Montgomery County, Pa.

“Myself and another individual are responsible for assessments,” Ducko said. “In conducting these assessments, it can be very overwhelming for school administrators, so while walking around the buildings they are sometimes seeing things for the first time from the building level while they’re trying to manage the district.”

Talley said he’s been on the job in Decatur for about a year and for that reason is still relying on an outside source to do assessments. His goal is an assessment of all features of the district that will help create a safety template of “where we need to go.”

Ducko said it’s important for administrators to keep in mind that there is a lot of different school technology out there. She said that after an assessment, it’s critical to consider what recommended technologies you can actually implement appropriately.

A lot of the new technologies are driven by AI, but that may not work for everyone. Tulley pointed out that AI, although one of the main components in a lot of the technologies like cameras that monitor activity, is prohibited on campuses in his state because of federal laws and regulations.

Norling said assessments can be varied, and it may be difficult to locate all the resources at first to cover all the gaps they identify. He recommends starting with crime prevention through environmental design, a multidisciplinary approach to crime prevention; doing physical assessments, both internally and externally; looking at emergency plans and processes; training with local agencies; and then bringing it all together.

“How do you integrate security technology with plans and processes, and meld them together so you have no gaps?”