School safety, security, and violence prevention resource

Today is an important day for school safety in the United States. Not everyone might know it, but the 2009 School Safety Index was released on this day. CDW Government, Inc. (CDW-G), a wholly owned subsidiary of CDW Corporation, is the entity behind the latest survey, which involved more than 400 K-12 district IT and security directors. The parameters of the study involved 10 indicators and four contraindicators that set the national standard.

So what are the results? Obviously, they are not that good, as you can see from the title of this post. Earth Times has listed down some of the most important findings of the study:

• Both IT and physical breaches are on the rise. In the last 12 months, 55 percent of districts report experiencing an IT breach, such as unauthorized user access, hacking or viruses; 67 percent experienced a physical breach such as break-ins, unauthorized persons in school buildings or vandalism
• Despite increased numbers of security breaches, three-quarters of respondents rated their cyber and physical security as adequate
• Most IT breaches originate internally – 41 percent from students and 22 percent from staff or employees. Physical security breaches are most often caused by unidentified persons (42 percent) and students (37 percent)
• Districts’ top IT and physical security barriers – lack of budget, too few staff resources and the need for more security tools – remain unchanged for the third year .

Point number one is to be expected, I guess. Cyber security breaches in general have gone up, partly due to the increased technical awareness of people. More and more individuals are learning the basics of “hacking,” and it is only to be expected that the cyber security in schools is a target. More so, the last point above contributes to this. Because of the lack in resources – money, people, and tools – it is easy to see how these breaches can easily occur.

Is something being done about this? I suppose that there are some efforts being made as of this writing. However, nothing is standardized yet. After all, the results have just been published. Part of the release of the Index, however, is a call to action; something that we may all want to be a part of in one way or another. The School Safety Index Self-Assessment Tool was released as well, which can help schools find out where they stand exactly and to be able to come up with formal procedures to ensure safety.

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