The Client and Its Challenge
One of the nation’s largest public school systems was facing funding cuts and new regulatory requirements related to its poor collection and management of risk-related information.

With more than $1.4 billion in yearly expenditures, this school district is divided into geographically defined constellations. Each constellation has administration responsibility for the elementary, middle, and high schools located within its boundaries, which include regular, special education, vocational/technical and alternative programs. The system has more than 160,000 students and 26,000 teachers, administrators, and staff in 300 facilities.

Like all public school districts, the client faced the challenge of providing a safe and secure learning environment for its students, its staff and visitors to its facilities. In this case, the challenge was made more difficult by the fact that it had an inadequate data and risk management information system. Specifically, three issues were driving the school administration to improve its overall risk management capability:

1. Reductions in state funding due to declining student enrollment. Student transfers and truancy create large financial gaps for the school system. It is estimated that 5,500 students were enrolled but not present for ”student count days,” required by the state. As a result, $39 million in state funding ($7,100 per student) was removed from the school system’s budget. Any tracking tools that help reduce this would have a direct impact on the budget.

2. Federal regulations related to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Under this law, schools having increased reporting requirements related to behavior incidents involving students. Additional funds can be made available for special programs if valid data can be presented. However, the administrative overhead involved with collecting and providing that data can be extremely expensive.

3. A public safety infrastructure lacking in standardized data recording and reporting. The school district's administrators were concerned about whether the current capabilities were adequate to handle routine issues, such as student behavior incidents, much less emergency situations.

The Risk Consulting Solution
Marsh’s Risk Technologies Practice has developed a strategy that addresses each of these issues. The key tactics are to equip the schools with tools for tracking student behavior data and to provide the school system’s police department with the technology necessary for delivering professional law enforcement and crisis management capabilities wherever and whenever needed. Marsh’s TrendTracker® and STARS™ software systems are at the heart of the solution to track teacher and student absenteeism and behavior incidents.

TrendTracker provides the school system with the power and flexibility to dramatically improve its public safety and risk management programs in the areas of communication, incident reporting, analysis, and crisis management and prevention. Specifically, the school system’s police officers will use TrendTracker to perform the following functions:

1. Record the critical reporting requirements of any type of incident;

2. Use “drill down” protocols for responding to a specific crisis and document these actions as they occur; and

3. Communicate real-time with crisis command control to ensure timely analysis of emergency incidents.

Results
The TrendTracker system works in tandem with STARS to manage all risk information. STARS and TrendTracker share vital incident and investigation information by transferring data between the systems. Additionally, STARS and TrendTracker will both capture incident information from the school system’s Web site for immediate and appropriate response.

Fundamental to the success of the student behavior incident tracking solution is that the public has access to this information, a requirement under NCLB. Also critical is that the technology be easy to use, since it will be accessed be people with different technical levels of expertise. STARS’ Web-based capabilities make it easy to access such information.

With the STARS and Trend Tracker solutions in place, the school system will be able to report incidents related to workers’ compensation, general liability, auto, and student behavior. It now has access to the critical information it needs to develop a comprehensive risk management program while also complying with necessary federal, state, and local regulations.

The goal of the school system is to become a national model in public safety and risk management. Marsh’s Risk Technologies Practice will help it achieve its goals and realize its mission: safer/secure schools, lower staff and student absenteeism, better education, higher test scores, and the building of brighter futures