Unleashing Leadership: Driving Success and Safety

In our last blog, we talked about the importance of leadership. Leadership is never more important than when we are driving organizational success. As our current school year comes to an end, we have to look forward, plan for next year, and learn from our experiences of this past year. Driving success requires you to be a dynamic problem solver, planning and management wizard, all while keeping a balanced perspective on your entire safety program. This blog will likely be one of our shortest, but will likely generate the most work required by you, the safety leadership.

At this time of the year, you are likely finished with all of your instruction and most of your schools are closing down for the year. However, your responsibilities are now ramping up for the new school year. With that, you should have already begun to collect your data to begin the review of the efficacy of last year’s safety program. What we are looking for are those areas that we can capitalize on to build a better program, and to build on the experience and knowledge of our staff. You should be looking through all of the improvement suggestions and recommendations, and implement those which you have identified as having the highest priorities. This process in itself should be a high priority for you, as you will be looking to incorporate and implement these improvements in a couple of short months before the new school year.

As we look to the future and the success of our safety programs, planning your year will be critical for several reasons. Trust me, I know how difficult it is to get time to do anything safety-related in the first place. So having a well-thought-out plan and schedule will go a long way to successfully making the argument to the district leadership that they need to carve out space within that calendar for the administration of the school safety plan. This is part of your proactive efforts to create and bolster your school safety culture. It will also allow you to identify gaps in policies and administrative regulations to ensure participation by all of your staff.

Your plan should include every actionable aspect of your safety program:

• Staff training
• Safety Committee and safety team meetings
• Drills and Exercises
• Follow-up training and corrective action to deficiencies
• Assessments and gap analysis
• Asset management and inspections
• Succession planning and training
• Threat Assessment and Behavioral Intervention training and team status updates
• Etcetera, lots of etceteras

If you feel like there are areas in your safety plan that could use improvement, it's important to address them sooner rather than later. Don't wait until it's too late. If you're not sure where to begin, we suggest checking out our previous blog posts where we discuss these aspects in detail. And if you need further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're here to help and guide you on getting started with your safety plan.

The work you put in now will determine the level of success you have in the future, consistency is the answer here. Consistently interacting with your plan and its efficacy, will ultimately lead to a successful safety program.  However, consistently ignoring your plan and its results will ultimately lead to failure when lives are on the line.