Making School Safety Leadership More Visible: Mandates Need People Behind Them

During last week's NCSSD member discussion boards, one comment stuck with me:

"People don't value safety until something bad happens."

The comment came from a member concerned about potentially losing their countywide safety director position due to budget cuts. Several others responded that they were in similar situations or had recently lost their own positions. 

Around the same time, another discussion focused on school safety legislation and concerns about states increasingly mandating specific technologies or products. Members noted that legislation is moving beyond general conversations around school safety and toward operational requirements: panic systems, mapping tools, staffing models, surveillance technologies, and more.

While the intent behind these efforts is understandable, several members pointed out that implementation itself is often overlooked.

One member described it as giving schools “the roof for their school security house when they lack a foundation.” Another noted that legislators often speak with many stakeholders but not always the practitioners responsible for implementing these measures each day. Others raised concerns about legislation being influenced by specific technologies or vendors rather than starting with an assessment of a school's unique needs.

Those conversations felt connected to me.

But if school safety leadership positions are being reduced because things are going well, who sustains those efforts over time?

Questions about funding and sustainability are not unique to this discussion. Similar concerns emerged after Texas required an armed officer on every K–12 campus following the 2022 Robb Elementary School tragedy. District leaders cited staffing shortages and funding challenges as barriers to meeting the new requirements.

Safety directors are largely responsible for coordinating emergency planning, training, behavioral threat assessment efforts, first responder relationships, policies, and long-term implementation. Those responsibilities don’t disappear because there wasn't a major incident this year.

One of the challenges with school safety work is that success can be difficult to measure. How do we quantify something that didn't happen? How do we quantify a crisis that was prevented or a threat that was addressed early?

Members also discussed several ways leaders can help make that work more visible, including documenting responsibilities, tracking initiatives and outcomes, and identifying measurable indicators such as cost savings, training efforts, assessments completed, or other ongoing safety activities.

That challenge may also make school safety harder to defend during budget discussions. If success is measured only by visible incidents, school safety leaders can be left trying to prove the value of work designed to prevent those incidents from happening in the first place. It also reinforces something that came up in another recent discussion around staff buy-in: people often support what they understand. That may mean finding ways to make the ongoing work behind school safety more visible.

In some ways, it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The visible solutions often get attention after a crisis, while the people doing the ongoing work behind the scenes can become harder to justify on a spreadsheet during budget meetings.

This also feels like an area where organizations like NCSSD can help — not by opposing safety initiatives or being anti-technology, but by helping policymakers better understand what implementing these measures actually looks like inside schools.

Continue the Conversation in the NCSSD Community

During last week's discussion boards, NCSSD members also discussed:

• School safety funding and grant strategies
• Transitioning from Run Hide Fight to the Standard Response Protocol/Standard Reunification Method
• How SRP/SRM and SSAVEIM Train-the-Trainer™ work together
• Additional perspectives on implementation, sustainability, and demonstrating the value of school safety work

Join NCSSD to participate in discussions, access shared resources, and connect with school safety leaders facing similar challenges.