5.21.25 – SSI – Dan Ferrisi
Seventh revision of PASS Safety and Security Guidelines for K-12 Schools promises to empower stakeholders to keep students and teachers safe.
The Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS) brings together stakeholders from across education, public safety and technology integration in support of a single critical mission: keeping schools and the people within them safe and secure.
PASS established itself in 2014 and, over the last 10-plus years, its volunteer team has carefully developed comprehensive information sources on securing schools. PASS’ greatest contribution, Safety and Security Guidelines for K-12 Schools, debuted in 2015; the successive years have seen continuous revisions.
The sixth edition, for example, debuted in March 2023. At ISC West this past April, PASS volunteer leadership announced the imminent release of Rev. 7 of the guidelines, an ongoing project some two years in the making.
Here, we’ll delve into some of the changes that Rev. 7 will reflect, synthesizing details from an informational webinar with key PASS committee members. Participants included Jim Crumbley, Risk Response Team LLC; Mike Garcia, HID; Guy Grace, ASSA ABLOY Door Security Solutions; Stacie Dinse, CareHawk; and Will Knehr, i-PRO Americas.
PASS Continues to Gain Attention, Influence
PASS’ good work continues to gain attention and influence among those invested in facilitating safer, more secure schools. During the webinar, moderator Scott Lord, of Electronic Contracting Company, ran through key PASS accomplishments from 2024:
- More than 1,800 downloads of PASS’ guidelines, with downloaders representing all 50 states and 39 countries.
- About 125 PASS-volunteer-led in-person and virtual training sessions across the country.
- Nearly 52,000 website visits.
- More than 37,000 individuals using PASS materials (e.g., the guidelines, whitepapers).
“Our entire mission has been to provide safety and security information to implement a tiered approach to securing and enhancing school safety,” Lord said during the webinar. He continued, “And one of the unique things that PASS brings to the table [is] that ability to take that layered approach…a tiered approach in the different components to actually put in physical security.”
The layered approach is worth emphasizing, as each webinar participant summarized guideline revisions relating to a particular sphere of school safety. These include video surveillance, communication systems, the digital infrastructure layer, district-wide initiatives and access control.
Video Surveillance
Crumbley’s role was to highlight updates pertaining to video surveillance, including refinements related to camera placement, field of view and more. However, he started by emphasizing whom PASS volunteers center in their mind when creating school safety resources.
“What we’ve tried to do is develop the guidelines that would help that administrator who’s sitting behind the desk and really is not sure what to do…what steps to do…and what to focus on and what to prioritize,” he said. “So, the consultants, the integrators, the experts, the SROs all can get a lot from the guidelines — and obviously, we want them to be used by them, and they should be used. But our focus is on the administrator.”
According to Crumbley, the operational requirements for each camera follow the following steps: detection, observation, recognition and identification. Depending on their location, individual cameras serve different needs.
“This way, as you look at your assessment, you can determine whether or not this camera needs to only detect,” Crumbley said, “and another camera — like at a main entry point — might need to identify somebody.” This means that budget-conscious schools need not install top-shelf cameras in every location.
The forthcoming guidelines also include recommendations pertaining to classroom cameras. “I think it’s really important now for us to understand that classroom cameras are very, very useful,” Crumbley declared. This is particularly true with the advent of “masking” technology, which facilitates maintaining a level of privacy.
“Then,” Crumbley continues, “investigators and SROs who might need to see what’s happening live in that classroom have the ability to see it without the masking, and others would not.”
Another video surveillance addition in the latest guideline revision relates to people identification and field of view at pickup and drop-off areas. “We want to be able to identify the student who’s getting into the car, what the car is, maybe if people are getting out,” Crumbley said. “We want to see who that child is going with.” Thus, top-notch cameras would be needed in those spaces.
Finally, the guidelines will encourage schools to build upon their existing safety foundation and lean on emerging analytic capabilities, including analytics related to brandished weapons. “We feel like it is something that can be useful if you have other things in place before you start investing in brandished weapon analytics,” Crumbley said.
Communication Component
Dinse said the committee focused on the communication component had three key imperatives: First, to lift up the language to reflect current technologies that schools are using. Second, to try to get an eye on emerging technologies that are increasingly playing a role in school safety. Third, to find ways to improve student and staff safety in school buildings.
The first change in the seventh revision relates to a district-wide approach to unified communication. “[It’s] this idea of being able to network your public-address systems together to give a unified, district-wide response,” Dinse said.
It’s not hard to think of emergencies when this might be valuable: For example, a community incident or weather emergency that would compel a school district to want to mount a unified response across all its buildings and campuses. A district-wide approach, she said, can shorten response times and bring greater security to students and staff.
The seventh revision also underlines the importance of connecting together disparate systems in a school (e.g., public address, intrusion detection, access control, VMS camera systems). “So, when there is an emergency,” Dinse began, “one person can press one button, and you get all these systems working in concert together to provide emergency response, whatever that may be.”
Visual communication as a complement to audio communication is another addition to the guidelines.
“That might be as simple as a strobe at the front of the school, warning visitors that the school is in lockdown, and you’re not to enter the building or attempt to enter the building,” Dinse explained. “It might be as sophisticated as full-screen displays in classrooms that list off the steps that a teacher might take to secure their classroom or exit their students out of their classroom for a tornado event.”
An added benefit of this visual component is assisting with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance by enriching the existing audio component.
Finally, the latest guidelines will call for schools even at the tier one (most basic) level to have a panic button not only in each building but also in each classroom. “This panic alarm will be connected so it provides an automatic signal to local law enforcement,” Dinse stated. “Again, improving that response time [and] getting them to the emergency as quickly as possible.” Moving up to tier two, the guidelines call for wearable panic-button devices to further remove friction from eliciting emergency response.
Digital Infrastructure Layer
Knehr shared the latest developments pertaining to the digital infrastructure layer, encompassing not only cybersecurity but also general digital hygiene.
“Our approach for this was to look at it as, if you are an advanced cybersecurity person or if you are just getting started in cyber — maybe you’re the math teacher or maybe you’re the English teacher — where can you start out? How can you approach this?” Knehr said. These are critical questions because K-12 institutions are prime targets for hackers because of a perceived lack of cybersecurity hardness.
To address this issue, the latest PASS guidelines offer a framework aligning with NIST Special Publication 800-53.
“For those who may not be aware, NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” Knehr stated. “They are the gold standard for cybersecurity.”
But bearing in mind that PASS aims to speak not only to integrators and technological whizzes but also and especially administrators and other school stakeholders, he adds, “We said, ‘Hey, we need to morph this into something that anyone can kind of take in.’”
Thus, the PASS committee modified verbiage and added numerous school-based examples to make things as easy as possible. And Knehr emphasizes that the framework will continue to evolve as emerging technologies (e.g., AI) further integrate into K-12 schools, just as Chromebooks and other tools do.
“I’m really excited about it,” Knehr enthuses. “I hope that it’s a great resource for everyone.”
District-Wide Layer
Grace offered insights into the district-wide layer, emphasizing that leadership and coordination at the district level is extremely important to successfully developing and adopting life safety components into school districts.
“What we’re talking about here with the Rev. 7 is a unified life safety approach,” he explained. “A unified life safety approach is not just a physical security technology; it’s about bringing the tools and creating the interoperability between our stakeholders in the district for day-to-day business, to enhance stability for the teachers to teach and students to learn, and our community not to be worrying about their loved ones.”
Grace underlined the fact that every school district — indeed, every school building — is unique, a fact that points to cookie-cutter solutions rarely being effective. But he emphasized that, with its new guidelines, PASS is seeking to foster greater interoperability within and outside school districts. The question, then, is how to facilitate that outcome.
“Many districts — about 30% in our country right now — are building security operations centers, for example,” Grace said. “And with a security operations center, it could be a law enforcement center…911 center…or it could be a school safety center staffed by school safety professionals within the district.”
The latest guideline revisions aggregate recommendations about how resources can work together to support a security operations center in a school district.
Finally, Grace underlined an important fact: “None of these systems can work on their own,” he declared. “We have realized that and fostered how a school district could unify all of these systems to work together as much as possible.”
Moreover, he emphasized that, although all-too-common horrors like active shooters tend to get the most attention, those committed to school safety must take the “all hazards” approach — and that includes having unified systems capable of frictionless, fast incident response.
Access Control
Garcia closed the webinar by focusing on access control. But, before getting into the Rev. 7 changes, he offered a passionate description of PASS volunteers’ foundational mission.
“It doesn’t matter what company we work for, where we came from [or] what we’re selling when we get off of the call,” he said. “It all homeruns into a mothership that says, ‘Hey, we are here for one thing and one thing only: We want to be the North Star for schools to point to….’”
He adds, “[We want them to say,] ‘PASS is where we go to figure out what we need to do, where we need to be and how we need to do it in a tiered methodology and in layers.’”
Garcia described access control as “…the central nervous system for a school district to have visualization, actionable intelligence and situational awareness into the entire district — an equitable district-wide focus for security.”
Breaking down the latest guideline revisions, he pointed to a new door lock matrix. “If you look at the classroom doors, [they should remain] closed and locked at all times,” Garcia explained.
He noted the substantial time invested in researching and assessing where the market is going in this regard. Moreover, Garcia reemphasized the individuality of each school, saying that the PASS guidelines leave room for variables among school communities.
Garcia expressed particular enthusiasm about the secure visitor entry center aspect of the Rev. 7 guidelines.
“There is a really, really nice section, and whitepaper to go along with it, on the secure visitor entry centers,” he said. Garcia continued, “That’s where it all starts.” He declared that the forthcoming revised guidelines set a new dynamic for secure visitor entry centers in K-12 across the board.
A Mission Fueled by Passion
Lord concluded the webinar by reinforcing the passion that fuels PASS volunteers now and has done so for 10-plus years. He says the hundreds of hours that dozens of people have spent will all have been worth it “…if there’s just one thing in this guideline that helps schools be safer and not have to make reactionary decisions, and not have something come up that they did not know about until it actually happens.”
It’s a refreshingly service-oriented, mission-driven, non-commercial approach — and it’s exactly the right approach when it comes to protecting teachers, children and our community members.