??? Have a Source-of-Truth for Foundational School Safety: School safety isn’t just a checkbox—it’s a daily commitment. With excellent insights from Secure Passage President, Kirk Cerny, discover why a unified “source of truth” is the foundation of school safety. This comprehensive approach gives teams the clarity and confidence they need to protect students and staff every day, from routine risks to rapid-response situations. ? Dive into Kirk's full piece for more on how Secure Passage builds strong safety foundations for our nation's schools!
Have a source-of-truth for foundational school safety! School Safety—For good reason, it's a significant topic. Just yesterday, I sat with lawmakers to discuss how they not only prepare for low-probability / high-impact incidents like an active shooter, but also how they plan, prepare, and perform on a daily basis for everything else that impacts school safety—annual physical security & fire assessments, weather events & disasters, behavioral issues—the list that school safety & security practitioners face is long. In 2014, our team in service to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) launched the Florida Safe Schools Assessment Tool (FSSAT) for conducting school safety assessments statewide. FSSAT was the nation's first solution to comprehensively collect, analyze, and report school safety posture and progress to education stakeholders. Florida school officials and their law enforcement and emergency management partners needed to assess the safety of all 6,000-plus public and charter schools in the state. To get this done, they required a tool accessible to authorized users from FLDOE, other agencies, and the state's 67 school districts via secure online portal. What we delivered has since become 'Haystax for School Safety', the preeminent 'source-of-truth' platform to provide a comprehensive picture of the K-12 campus security environment. Our solution is able to store critical safety information so that those responsible for Florida's schools have a single location when they need to rapidly access data on a particular school. And, our integrated approach to software development ensures that all school safety stakeholders in Florida have a common operating picture of their security environment with the most up-to-date information available, accessible any time and anywhere on any device. Having served on committees responsible for designating K-12 safety and security grants, I've seen the proliferation of funding for 'point solutions' in education. Yes, we need point solutions like cameras, hardened access points, and panic buttons, but even more importantly, states and their school districts need a foundational source-of-truth platform where these point solutions and other school and mission-critical information from community platforms like student information systems and computer-aided dispatch can be analyzed efficiently for daily risk or rapid response in an emergency. Haystax is designed to highlight the individual safety and security issues facing each school, as well as to allow district and state officials to develop a broader understanding of the threats and risks confronting all schools in their areas of responsibility. Like constructing a strong, secure and long-standing building, you start with a solid foundation. Haystax is the footing to foundational school safety and security. Message me for more information on Haystax, and above all, stay safe.