New School Safety Dashboard provides transparency on data for parents, staff
TAMPA, Fla. - The School Safety Dashboard, hailed by its developers as the 'most comprehensive school safety dashboard in the country,' is now available online.
Safe Schools for Alex, a Coral Springs-based nonprofit, announced the rollout on April 16 with a Facebook post, writing that "After 2.5 years in development, this Thursday Safe Schools For Alex in Partnership with the University of Florida will be rolling out the nation's first dashboard designed to assist parents and schools enhance the safety and security of their child’s school."
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In a news release from the University of Florida, the dashboard is described as being 'designed to help reduce violence on school campuses by providing timely access to critical school safety data. The dashboard currently serves millions of students, parents, educators, and policymakers throughout Florida.'
Developers hope the concept will serve as a model for the development of future dashboards nationwide.
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The data includes rates of violence like fighting and weapons, rates of disciplinary responses like suspension and expulsion, public health concerns like vaping, and indicators of school bus safety such as crashes.
It also includes measures of context like school achievement and community violence as well as measures of preventative approaches like student-to-teacher/counselors/nurse/social workers ratios, attendance, and whether schools have suicide prevention trained staff.
"By providing this access to data in a way that a broad spectrum of stakeholders can view, there will be opportunities for schools to adjust practices in real-time, and for the state to respond to the needs of districts and schools as they emerge," said F. Chris Curran, Ph.D., an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at U, and the director of the Education Policy Research Center in the UF College of Education.
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Max Schachter founded Safe Schools for Alex after the murder of his son, Alex, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. Since the tragedy, the nonprofit has been working to enhance school safety by encouraging accuracy and uniformity of school safety data reporting nationwide.
"Parents want and deserve to know what’s happening after they drop their child off," Schachter said in the UF news release. "The dashboard is the most comprehensive repository of school safety data available for parents and schools, so they can work together to improve the safety and security of Florida’s 4,000 public K-12 schools."
Before the launch of the Safe Schools For Alex School Safety Dashboard in 2020, developers said there was no easy way for parents to understand the levels of violence, drugs, and weapons along with school responses like suspensions and expulsions in Florida’s schools.
"Many states do not make this data publicly available, while others use formats that don’t readily reveal trends over time or show comparisons between schools and districts," UF spokesperson Brittany Sylvestri explained in the April 16 announcement.
School safety dashboard 1.0, created with Tableau software, was overhauled with a new design, updated data indicators, and a resource page. Version 2.0 offers best practices for school districts and parents, and the information is updated three times a year with data from the Florida Department of Education’s School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting (SESIR) System.
The UF team is currently providing Florida education stakeholders with training on how to implement and utilize the enhanced dashboard.
"The school safety dashboard holds promise for schools to be better equipped to track and respond effectively when situations arise," Curran said. "And parents will have the transparency they desire."
The development of the dashboard is supported by a $2 million grant awarded to UF by The Office of Justice Programs in the U.S. Department of Justice.