State board formalizes school-safety rules, training and a statewide dashboard as part of a broader compliance plan

The Utah State Board of Education is pushing several regulatory and operational changes intended to standardize school safety across the state, USBE officials told the School Safety Task Force on a statewide update. The board has formalized three strategic goals — elevating student learning, promoting educator quality and optimizing oversight and accountability — and has amended rule R277-400 to add recovery definitions, an incident-response grid, and explicit avoid‑deny‑defend and aid language for the Standard Response Protocol, Chantelle Coda, director of school safety and student services at USBE, told the task force. USBE’s additions aim to align expectations for drills, emergency response and post‑incident recovery across local education agencies and charter schools. “We’ve added those definitions so that everyone is clear and understands roles and responsibilities for moving that work forward,” Coda said. She also said USBE has set a deadline of Oct. 15 for districts to hold an annual safety meeting with administrators, SROs and safety staff. Board members and staff described additional operational steps that are about to move from planning into deployment. USBE staff said a school-safety dashboard will go on the board’s October consent calendar; mass‑casualty first‑aid (stop‑the‑bleed) kits are contracted and scheduled for distribution “this fall”; panic‑alert devices are in vendor review with PSAP (public safety answering point) experts on the selection committee; and the early‑warning system procurement is being revised and reissued as an RFP to better match state needs. “We are just tying a bow on that contract and getting those things out,” Coda said of bleed and first‑aid kits. “We are in the final weeks of getting these things out.” USBE also presented a five‑level compliance framework to structure oversight. The framework keeps levels 1–3 as supportive interventions (training, assistance and technical support) and reserves more prescriptive measures — up to recommending closure for severe, unresolved noncompliance — for levels 4–5, USBE staff said. Member Carrie Voorhees said the board has debated how and where the framework should be codified; USBE staff now plan to advance it through the board’s law and licensing committee and then to the full board. Molly A. Hart, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, framed the work as a structural and data problem: “One of my top three responsibilities as your new state superintendent is figuring out a way to make all this data talk, be safe and be useful,” Hart said. Hart and Coda said the dashboard and the early‑warning system are intended to provide interoperable, interpretable data for local leaders and policymakers, not only raw counts. USBE emphasized training and consistent language. Coda said all LEAs have a school safety director and every school has a safety or security specialist, and that those staff will be required to attend annual trainings tied to the new rule and compliance expectations. She described the Standard Response Protocol language change (adding avoid, deny, defend and aid) as part of that training package; she said a shared vocabulary helped in a recent incident response and “I believe, saved lives.” What happens next: USBE will present R277‑114 (enforcement and accountability) to the full board next month and expects the compliance framework to appear in law and licensing prior to a full‑board vote. The panic‑alert vendor review panel will include DPS and PSAP experts; the dashboard is scheduled for formal approval in October; and the unified needs‑assessment instrument is in final edits for statewide rollout. The board’s staff said the technical and procurement work remains complex and that timeline estimates remain subject to procurement length and rural delivery timing. “We can go out and buy a product — procurement takes a little time,” Hart said. “We need effective, which means we need to coordinate rather than just go to the store and buy something.” USBEs next steps will be rule votes, vendor review and statewide rollout of training and supplies; the board stressed that full implementation and auditing are the next, harder tasks once policy decisions are finalized.