Our Approach to Safety

KSI’s approach combines the priorities of Kansas leaders with nationally recognized best practices and recommendations to improve student and community safety.

Kansas Priorities

The development of KSI resources, programs, training and partnerships align to six key priorities. The KSI Advisory Board identified these as elements that are essential to making measurable progress on student and community safety across Kansas.

Unified Communication & Language: Building a common vocabulary between districts and safety partners, as well as baseline safety plans in every Kansas school district.
Cohesion & State Alignment: Expertise and skills to promote best practices, language and legal compliance state wide.
Training & Professional Development: Regular, continuous learning opportunities that are affordable to all Kansas communities.
Resource Sharing & Equity: Learning from existing safety structures and leveraging collaboration to support every community, large or small.
Data & Strategic Planning: Centralizing information and aggregating information to measure KSI’s impact and results.
Trust & Collaboration: Extending school district efforts to include community partners with vocal participation from all stakeholders.

KSI's work aligns to the Kansas Education Systems Accreditation (KSEA 2.0) priorities of continuous improvement, school climate, governance oversight and student success systems.

National Best Practices

Implementation of KSI priorities is built on themes consistently found within national school safety, emergency management, threat assessment, school climate, and organizational readiness research. KSI owes a debt of gratitude to the work of these organizations and many others.

National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC)

Early identification of concerns
Information sharing
Multidisciplinary threat assessment teams
Violence prevention strategies

Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG)

Evidence-based threat assessment
Early intervention
Student support systems

U.S. Department of Education REMS Technical Assistance Center

Prevention
Protection
Mitigation
Response
Recovery

National Association of School Psychologists (NASP)

Prevention-focused school safety
Mental health supports
Crisis preparedness

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

School connectedness
Trusted adult relationships
Protective factors for prevention

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

Preparedness
Planning
Training
Exercises
Continuous improvement