USB outlines new school-safety duties, statewide threat flag and forthcoming ESI incident fields for LEAs

USB policy and technical staff briefed LEA data contacts on a package of school-safety and student-data changes passed in the session and on planned data-collection changes.

Jennifer Wadsworth summarized HB44 as a multipart school-safety statute that clarifies guardian requirements and stipends, extends wearable panic-alert eligibility beyond lead teachers to include school safety personnel, requires LEAs to develop visitor-management systems and minimum cybersecurity practices, and tasks USB with administering guardian stipends and publishing the annual stipend amount by July 1. Wadsworth said LEAs may contract with private vendors for guardian training; she also said the bill contains no new ongoing funding for USB administration of these duties.

On student-threat reporting, USB described SB51, which requires LEAs to report credible student threats to the state board and establishes a statewide risk-assessment flag in student-information systems. USB staff said the board will create guidance and training, will conduct audits, and will report annually (October 1) on the flag’s effectiveness; staff noted a one-time $15,000 implementation allocation to support flag creation in LEA SIS and the state system.

Cliff (technical lead) described work to add incident-specific ESI fields to Utrex: a set of nine items per incident recorded on the I2 (incident-association) record, including whether alternative interventions were attempted, the ESI purpose(s) (multiple values allowed), the total ESI duration in minutes (summed per incident), outcomes, whether training was offered to the school and whether the individual staff member received training, and counts/durations of physical restraints and seclusions. Cliff and other presenters said the design records summed duration per incident (to reduce reporting burden compared with multiple separate entries) and asks LEAs to mark if any single episode exceeded a 30-minute threshold that the Legislature flagged for review.

USB staff acknowledged the ESI work is in active development. They said some incident-code changes are already in the Utrex specification and that a small number of new incident codes were added to improve reporting consistency. But they cautioned that full Utrex ingestion for the new ESI fields is not guaranteed before the school year, that the Qualtrics reporting process will remain a fallback while system ingestion is finalized, and that USB plans to provide follow-up mapping and technical guidance to SIS vendors and LEAs.

Why it matters: The combination of HB44, SB51 and the ESI data changes will alter what LEAs must record and how they share student-safety information with USB. LEAs should prepare workflows to collect incident summaries and to ensure training and visitor/cyber policies required by statute are in place.

What’s next: USB said it will publish the updated Utrex specification pages and follow up with SIF/XPath mappings, clarify whether deprecated codes will error midyear or be soft-failured, and share a timeline and testing opportunities for LEAs that volunteer to pilot MFA and data-ingestion changes.