What is the School Safety Assessment Tool?
The School Safety Assessment Tool is an interactive safety assessment tool for K-12 schools maintained by the US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The goal of this tool is to help K-12 schools evaluate and improve their safety and security planning processes.
Specifically, the tool aims to:
- Apply physical security strategies: Helping schools implement the principles of detection, delay, and response in their security planning.
- Inform safety and security planning: By providing a structured way for schools to assess their current security measures.
- Take stock of existing security: Enabling schools to understand what security measures and supports they currently have in place across their campus.
- Identify areas for improvement: Highlighting where schools can make changes to enhance the safety and security of their students, staff, and facilities.
- Focus on protection and mitigation: Guiding schools to consider measures that prevent incidents and reduce the potential harm if they do occur.
How Do You Use the CISA SSAT?
When you first visit the page for the SSAT Tool, you will see an instruction document on how to use the tool. The process is simple and designed to be user friendly. According to CISA, the tool will take you through the following steps:
- About School: The tool will ask questions about your school’s attributes such as grade levels served, location, campus layout, and the presence of school security personnel.
- Choose a Scenario: The tool will ask you to choose from a limited number of safety-related incidents. You can complete the tool for multiple incidents, although you will need to run the tool separately for each distinct incident.
- Existing Safety & Security Measures: The tool will ask you to answer a series of questions about the security measures in place across your campus. The questions will only ask about measures in place at those physical security layers relevant to the safety-related incident that you selected in “Choose a Scenario.” Keep in mind that some scenarios will require that you answer questions about measures in place at all four physical security layers—the school perimeter, school grounds, building perimeter, and building interior layers. It will take you longer to complete the tool for these scenarios, relative to scenarios that affect only one or two physical security layers.
- Safety & Security Measure Detail: The tool will ask you a series of follow up questions about the security measures you indicated are in place at your school. As noted above, this section may take longer to complete depending on the safety-related incident you have selected in “Choose a Scenario.”
Credit to CISA.gov.
Who Should Use the CISA SSAT?
The team at CISA designed the tool well, and it is tailored to a broad range of decision makers and stakeholders in K-12 education. A few examples of which include:
- School and district administrators: Principals, superintendents, assistant principals, and other leadership personnel who oversee the safety and security of school facilities and students. They can use the tool to gain a comprehensive understanding of their current security posture and identify areas where improvements are needed at both the school and district levels.
- School safety teams: These multidisciplinary teams often include administrators, teachers, counselors, security personnel (like School Resource Officers or School Safety Officers), and sometimes even parents and community members. The SSAT can serve as a valuable framework for these teams to collaboratively assess risks, evaluate existing measures, and develop comprehensive safety plans.
- School security personnel: This includes dedicated security staff, such as School Resource Officers (SROs), School Safety Officers (SSOs), and security guards. They can utilize the tool to evaluate the effectiveness of current security measures on the ground and identify vulnerabilities in physical security layers.
- Local law enforcement and first responders: Police officers, fire department personnel, and emergency medical services can use the SSAT to better understand the security infrastructure of the schools in their jurisdiction. This can help them in developing coordinated response plans and conducting joint training exercises.
- Security experts and consultants: Professionals specializing in school safety and security can use the SSAT as a complementary tool in their work, providing a structured approach to assessing school security and offering tailored recommendations. This might include DHS Protective Security Advisors (PSAs).
K-12 safety and security teams are dynamic and rapidly evolving, CISA understands very well.
When Should You Start Using the CISA SSAT?
As soon as possible. K-12 education and safety is rapidly growing increasingly more dependent on technology and data. Not only should student safety, health, and well-being be top of mind, but student privacy is important as well. School districts are seeing a shift towards a focus on protecting student data, requiring compliance and certification with frameworks such as SOC2.
Security frameworks can seem daunting and can be quite complex to understand. However, their main goal is to help protect user data, which, in this case, are the students of the district. Fortunately, a framework like SOC2 is less rigid than frameworks like ISO 27001. The team at Secureframe has an excellent post on SOC2 basics.
The CISA SSAT helps determine areas for improvement, while, at least for the infrastructure side of things, frameworks like SOC2 help with the implementation.
Conclusion
The School Safety Assessment Tool is an interactive planning tool maintained by CISA. The tool is intended to provide a user-friendly way to identify gaps in school safety to help stakeholders identify areas the need improvement. This article covered how to use the tool, what the tool is, and how it will help you keep your students safe.