Schools are places of learning, and their key focus for centuries has been on providing students with a quality education. Sadly, schools have also become targets for violence, as evidenced in the increasing number of school shootings in recent years. School administration teams are now tasked with implementing security measures to ensure the safety of their students, staffs, and visitors. This represents an entirely new learning curve for many. Fortunately, there are resources out there to help educate the educators on school security. The Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS) offers up a fabulous one – and has developed guidelines and best practices as a resource designed to help school administrators make decisions and put in place proven security practices that are specific to K-12 environments.
PASS was established in 2014 as a not-for-profit coalition of organizations and individuals from the education, public safety and technology integration communities. They joined forces because they recognized the challenges that K-12 schools face in these times, which include everything from loitering and vandalism to bullying and targeted violence. Their mission is developing best practices for school safety and security.
PASS’s Safety and Security Guidelines for K12 Schools was first published in 2015. It was a comprehensive undertaking, with the goal of educating all those invested in school safety. The guide instructs on how Schools can navigate their specific security challenges by evaluating their existing security infrastructure. Based on those assessments, they can better prioritize which investments are needed most given their individual budgets and resources.
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to school safety and security, PASS’s Guidelines stand out among the rest because they embrace the real-world complexity of school safety and security. The Guidelines provide a detailed, layered, and tiered approach to those ever-changing issues, making it a comprehensive best practices resource designed to equip schools of all shapes, sizes, and budgets. In addition, PASS also developed a School Safety and Security Checklist for quick and easy reference that distills these various layers, tiers, and components of school security infrastructure.
PASS's coalition of experts recognizes that security threats and challenges facing K-12 continually evolve. To that end, they, in turn, continually update their Safety and Security Guidelines to addresses those evolving challenges.
School administrators and security staff can be assured that the PASS Guidelines are a trusted resource for them to turn to. From the Federal Commission on School Safety to the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services, policymakers, and subject matter experts at the state and federal levels trust PASS’s recommendations to inform on everything from prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. As many schools seek to establish baseline standards for safety and security, PASS offers a critically important first step toward evaluating, understanding, and implementing industry-trusted best practices.
PASS’s Guidelines and Checklist are free to download on passk12.org. To get the most out of these tools, explore the PASS Checklist of best practices to evaluate what boxes your school does and doesn’t check.
We at ProTec Design are deeply experienced in providing schools with the security solutions they need to better safeguard their students, staff, and visitors. We welcome the opportunity to share our knowledge to help you navigate the many technologies and options available to assist you with all your school security needs.