How This Differs from Our School Security & Emergency Preparedness Assessments

Our School Security and Emergency Preparedness Assessments focus heavily on building-level practices and physical security conditions, including extensive walk-throughs at individual schools. School Safety Services

By contrast, Strategic School Safety Leadership and Management Consultations:

• Operate at the district and organizational level, not school-by-school.
• Focus on governance, leadership, decision-making, coordination, and accountability, rather than detailed physical security walk-throughs at every building.
• Use a targeted sample of schools and stakeholders for context, rather than visiting each campus and meeting with every individual building team.
• Are designed to help leaders navigate specific issues, controversies, or decisions, not just generate a broad, comprehensive risk and vulnerability assessment.

The areas we explore are often similar (policies, emergency plans, threat assessment, physical security, communications, etc.), but we view them through a system-wide, leadership and management lens, rather than as a checklist at each school.

Who We Talk To

Each consultation is customized to your district’s needs, but typically includes interviews and focus groups with a broad, diverse cross-section of leaders and stakeholders, such as:

• Board of education members
• Superintendent and central office cabinet (operations, safety/security, student services, HR, communications, legal, etc.)
• Secondary and elementary principals and assistant principals
• School safety, crisis, and threat assessment team leaders
• Law enforcement and first responders (police, sheriff, fire, EMS, emergency management)
• Community partners involved in safety and support (mental health, juvenile justice, etc.)
• Parent organization representatives and other community stakeholders identified by the district
• Other issue-specific stakeholders, as needed (transportation, facilities, technology, unions/associations, etc.)

Our role is to listen, probe, and connect the dots across departments and roles that may not routinely sit together to talk about safety and crisis leadership.

Issues These Consultations Commonly Address

Strategic School Safety Leadership and Management Consultations can be adapted to a wide range of situations, including:

• Post-incident and high-concern situations
  • Community and board concerns after a threat, major incident, or tragedy
  • Questions about how information was handled, communicated, and acted upon
  • Clarifying what went well, what broke down, and what must change going forward
• Complex districtwide safety and security decisions
  • Evaluating school resource officer (SRO) / school police roles and deployment
  • Weighing security technology options (e.g., visitor management, access control, weapons detection, cameras) from an independent, non-vendor perspective
  • Balancing safety, student experience, and school climate in policy and practice
• Leadership, governance, and accountability
  • Clarifying who is responsible for what during day-to-day operations and high-stress incidents
  • Aligning board, superintendent, and building leadership expectations on safety
  • Ensuring policies and plans match actual practice, not just paperwork
• Operational and procedural gaps
  • Understanding how safety and crisis procedures work in real life, across schools and departments
  • Examining day-to-day supervision, communication, and follow-through on safety responsibilities
  • Identifying chronic weak spots that don’t always show up on a traditional assessment
• Threat assessment, student support, and special situations
  • Reviewing how threat assessment teams function across the district
  • Examining how student services, mental health, and discipline connect with safety and security
  • Addressing specific, sensitive, or complex student-related situations where leadership wants outside perspective