4 Chapter 4 – Building a set of Voluntary Standards

The overall purpose of the School Safety and Security Standards (S4) project is “to determine the impact that a comprehensive set of voluntary school safety and security standards has on the knowledge, attitudes, and confidence level related to school safety and preparedness of faculty, staff, and administrators in the K-12 setting” (Bergeron, 2015). This research is particularly important based on the fact that there currently does not exist a universal and comprehensive set of school safety and security standards nationwide. Various states within the United States have attempted to define such standards with the states of Texas and Virginia respectively having the most advanced efforts toward this goal (Texas State School Safety Center. 2012 and Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety, 2014). However, even considering these efforts and the fact that the fiscal year 2022 U.S. federal budget dedicated one billion dollars million to five categories of school safety efforts, there is no definitive research that shows whether these type of investments and programs are actually doing what they are designed to do (Stanford, 2022).

Obviously, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of school safety and security standards we had to start with an actual set of standards that would meet the needs of the project and would provide a framework for the research. The S⁴ standards were largely adapted from the Texas Unified School Safety and Security Standards; Proactive School Security and Emergency Preparedness Planning, Trump, K. (2011); School Safety Assessment Protocol, Virginia Department of Education and Safe and Secure Schools: 27 Strategies for Prevention and Intervention, Brunner, J. and Lewis, D.(2009), as well as information gleaned from FEMA and the American Red Cross. They are organized in accordance with the basic tenets of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), and the Incident Command System (ICS), which contain the four basic components of the Comprehensive Emergency Management Cycle (CEM): Response, Recovery, Preparedness, and Mitigation, as well as the additional category of ‘Intervention’, which in many cases is unique to the school emergency management environment and ‘Prevention’, which is increasingly an emerging concept within the emergency management and homeland security disciplines. The standards are numbered by category for ease of organization and identification.

As you look at the standards you will see that they are purposely written in clear and simple language and are presented in a checklist style format so that they can be easily used by members at all levels of the education system. The S4 standards are designed to be used both as a self-assessment tool by individual school faculty and administrators to ensure that they are providing the best possible environment for their students in terms of safety and security and also as an external assessment measurement by school systems and districts given the lack of a universally accepted set of state or national level school safety standards.

The S4 standards can be used by all types, sizes, and composition of schools and school systems. They are designed to be flexible and purposely do not specify “how” a school or system should be meeting the standard, but simply specify “what” the result or outcome should be. Additionally, there is no mandate to purchase a particular system or technology and schools are able to apply the standards in accordance with their own unique circumstances, school culture, resources, and operational environments.

The following shows the organization and layout of the standards:

Table 4.1 – S4 Standards Organization