School Security Assessment Tool (SSAT)

Adding missing policy or training can make the measures you already have more effective.

For some security measures to be most effective, the measure itself should be supported by policy or training.

You listed the following measure(s), some of which involve school staff or security personnel, where either policy or training was not currently in place. Implementing relevant policies and regular training could make these measure(s) more effective:

Better understanding your confidence in measures that you said you currently cannot assess

You flagged the following measures as ones about which you were unable to make a judgment regarding their ability to help detect or respond to a threat. These are measures that you should further assess in order to judge their performance in the event of an emergency.

For some security measures, the presence of other physical design features or technologies can help make them more effective.

For some security measures to be most effective, the measure itself should be supported by policy or training.

You listed the following measure(s), some of which involve school staff or security personnel, where either policy or training was not currently in place. Implementing relevant policies and regular training could make these measure(s) more effective:

Provide communications capabilities to ensure measures in outer layers of your security system can fully contribute to the effectiveness of measures in inner layers

One of the principles of a systems approach to security is that measures in one layer can reinforce the performance of measures in other layers. Detection measures in outer layers allow the system to mitigate risk inside the school. Delay measures in outer layers can provide time to implement mitigation measures more effectively in inner layers, and for school staff to initiate response actions. However, communications capability that allows those outer layers to warn the school an incident is occurring or call police directly is the wiring that leads to the realization of those benefits. The following measures could play that “wiring” role; however you indicated that the complementary ability to communicate the occurrence of a threat across layers was not in place:

Enable local emergency responder capability to respond to school incidents

Many school safety incidents happen on very short timelines, and many are complete even before responders from outside the building can arrive on scene. You indicated that the likely response time of law enforcement to your school is [responseTime].

A number of school safety and security measures can alert law enforcement more rapidly or speed their response when they arrive. Among the measures that do so and that are included in this tool, you indicated that you did not have:

Adding one or more of these measures to your school safety and security system (or increasing confidence in the performance of any of these measures you already have) could better enable law enforcement to respond to incidents at your school.

Take steps to increase your confidence in the performance of the measures you already have

In asking about your security measures, the SSAT asked you to make judgments about how confident you were that they would detect or be able to respond to this scenario. Many things such as concerns about the challenge associated with the scenario or questions about the preparedness of your broader school safety system could cause low confidence in measures.

The following measures were ones you flagged as being concerned about their performance in [scenario] to either detect or act in response to a threat.

Steps you could take to increase confidence include strengthening policies that increase confidence in actions staff are supposed to take, training and exercises that help people practice their actions, and engaging stakeholders outside the school community, such as local law enforcement and other first responders. Your strategy to increase your confidence in your school’s safety and preparedness will need to address the specific sources of your concern.

Strengthen layers where one or more key functions – detection, delay or response – is missing or depends on only a single security measure

A strong security system spreads detection, delay, and response capabilities across physical security layers to reinforce overall security performance. If each layer has multiple measures that can perform these key functions with high confidence, a school will be better prepared to address safety risks, relative to a school where functions are missing or where layers rely on a single security measure.

Combining your responses about (1) which measures are implemented at your school and (2) your assessments of your confidence in these measures and (3) your assessment of the breadth of their effect, the following functions appear to either be missing from some layers or layers appear to rely on a single security measure.

In some cases, layers listed here may already have relevant measures; however, you are not confident they will perform effectively. Taking steps to raise your confidence (discussed above) would address that shortfall.