North Penn School District Emergency Management & Safe Schools 2019 - 2020 Proposed Budget Executive Summary The mission of the North Penn School District Department of Emergency Management & Safe Schools is to support a safe, secure, and orderly educational environment and workplace for all students, faculty, staff, and guests of the School District. Organized under the Facilities and Operations branch of the District, the department is charged with implementing progressive prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery strategies across all eighteen schools and three support facilities. In addition to overall awareness and mitigation of threats to health and safety, core areas of responsibility include physical security, emergency planning, public safety coordination, response training and exercising, and vulnerability assessment. The department is lead by an administrative coordinator, and staffing consists of two security supervisors who
- versee thirteen full time and three part time security officers.
Ninety percent of the department’s proposed 1.6 million dollar operating budget is attributed to staffing. Since the fall of 2017 the department has restructured, reduced one full time position, and taken steps to optimize staff deployment. Contact time has increased to sixteen hours per student day and North Penn security officers provided service at more than 150 extra-duty events last year. The per diem staffing pool has been expanded, allowing more flexibility which has resulted in a 34 percent decrease in overtime costs over three years. Requests for security service remain high and regularly exceed available resources. Proposed in the 2019- 2020 budget is additional funding for per diem staffing of a patrol initiative designed to help meet some of these needs, particularly at the elementary level. The remaining portion of the proposed Emergency Management & Safe Schools budget will maintain existing systems and programs including surveillance, visitor management, mass notification, canine searches, and threat assessment. New efforts have also been proposed to further align North Penn with leading safety and security practices. Chief among them are the expansion of unified mass notification capability and situational awareness tools at the elementary level. Additional items of note include professional drafting of tactical response maps for all District facilities and a pilot of the Ruvna real-time accountability platform at Penndale Middle School.