CISA Helps Schools Reinforce Mental and Physical Safety
Patrick Massey, CISA Region 10 Regional Director
Schools provide the foundation of our nation’s success and play a vital role not just in learning, but also in the development of a student’s social, emotional, and interpersonal skills. To ensure the academic success and emotional well-being of all students schools must be safe spaces.
Student safety can mean a couple of things; emotional safety – ensuring mental wellness is not threatened; and physical safety – a space free from physical harm.
K-12 school communities increasingly contend with an evolving and unique set of threats, hazards, and security challenges, oftentimes with limited resources. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is dedicated to working alongside school districts to improve the physical security of our nation’s schools.
CISA is focused on helping schools build resiliency to outside threats. That’s why we developed the K-12 School Security Guide Suite in our continued efforts to assist schools in conducting more robust vulnerability assessments and implementing layered physical security elements across K–12 districts and campuses.
The suite of products is designed to provide resources, tools, and strategies to improve school physical security. With these products, schools and districts will learn the steps necessary to assess vulnerabilities, strengthen security, and better protect K-12 communities.
Specifically, the products offered include and the CISA K-12 School Security Guide, 3rd Ed. – This guide details safety and security planning for all types of K-12 schools across the U.S. and is applicable to schools from rural to urban, and schools at various levels of maturity in their security planning process. Additionally, the Guide demonstrates how schools can create safe and secure learning environments without asking staff members to become security experts.
The CISA School Security Assessment Tool (SSAT) incorporates a systems-based approach to evaluate your school’s safety posture. It’s a web-based assessment that walks users through a tailorable vulnerability analysis and provides results and recommendations.
This partnership with CISA and schools across our region is vital to hardening the security around schools, thereby protecting students from outside intruders intent on doing harm.
Fostering a safe and nurturing environment where students feel empowered to express their concerns when they experience an emotional threat is also important. Reporting programs are designed to provide students with a trusted avenue for seeking help and reporting concerns. These systems facilitate early intervention, thereby helping to prevent targeted violence and other negative outcomes. However, schools often face challenges because many students and adults are reluctant to report this activity.
In a combined effort to improve and encourage reporting, CISA’s School Safety Task Force, and the United States Secret Service (USSS) National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) have partnered to publish “Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting: A Toolkit for Strengthening K-12 Reporting Programs.”
The toolkit offers simple strategies and guidance that K-12 schools and school districts can use to implement and enhance safety reporting programs and encourage bystander reporting among students and the greater school community. The toolkit is geared toward superintendents, district and school administrators, school boards, and state policymakers.
There is no more important institution to the future prosperity and strength of the United States than our K-12 education system. CISA stands ready to partner with schools to improve your security and resiliency.
For more information or assistance, please contact the Region 10 office for CISA at CISARegion10@cisa.dhs.gov.
Patrick Massey has served as the Regional Director of the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Region 10 office in Seattle since 2016. Prior to joining CISA, Mr. Massey served for twenty years with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region 10 office including eight years as the Director, National Preparedness Division. He also served as the Regional Integration Branch Chief, Technological Hazards Branch Chief, and as a Hazard Mitigation Specialist. Prior to joining FEMA, Mr. Massey served as the Assistant State Hazard Mitigation Officer with the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and served as a Planner for a Regional Planning Commission in Illinois. He also trained as a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Officer in the U.S. Army serving in a tank battalion in Germany and the First Gulf War.