Educational Employers: Tackling Crime-Related Liability
Boards of education and private educational entities contend with a wide variety of challenging employment issues on a daily basis. Educational employers are exposed to employer liability through an array of occurrences between their employees, students, vendors, visitors and other community members.. To combat these potential liabilities, educational employers should focus on preventative and predictive measures rather than on reactive measures—a shift in thinking and policy making that can lead to significant cost savings.
One area of concern is the occurrence of violence and crimes in schools. School boards may operate in reaction mode regarding crimes involving their students and staff and others on school grounds. However, the statistics suggest changing this mindset. Nearly 2.7 million crimes are committed in American schools each year, and teachers are the victims in more than 400,000 of those crimes. It stands to reason that educational employers should think preventatively about the commission of crime on their property.
Here are a few tips for school board members and other educational administrators to help adopt a more proactive mindset to employment issues.
First, gain an accurate understanding of the safety issues present in your school buildings. Once this is achieved, try to predict the violent and criminal situations that may arise at your school.
Next, focus the management skills implemented at your school. There should be sufficient support, often in the form of data and statistics, for the pertinent decisions being made. When decisions and policies are well-supported, management is effective and liability is decreased.
You should also pay attention to school policies regarding truancy. Events leading to a school board’s potential legal liability frequently occur when students fail to report to class on time and when student skip class altogether. Therefore, the policies you develop and maintain in this area are crucial.
Finally, ensure that the plans your school implements for emergency situations are clear and well explained to all students and staff members. Liability can easily arise and escalate when an emergency situation is not properly handled, leading to tangential events that could have been prevented. When everyone knows what to do in an emergency, and you can demonstrate that the policy was well established and widely known, you take a major step toward limiting your liability.
These starting points will not only help you to become a more aware and effective employer regarding legal issues, they will also help you to engage in district-wide explorations and conversations that will put you on the path to a true shift in thinking from reaction to prediction and prevention.