School District Chooses Online Training for School Safety

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 04/11/16

A Colorado school district at the beginning of the current school year implemented a new staff safety and regulatory compliance program that reminds staff members about their training assignments. Adams County School District #14 in Commerce City adopted EmployeeSafe, a suite of programs from PublicSchoolWorks after it was recommended by a job candidate interviewing with the district.

Linda Shamlin, who accepted the position as interim chief human resources officer in the school system, had used the software at a previous district.

"We decided to move to EmployeeSafe because it automatically deploys and reminds employees to complete their assigned training," she said in a press release. "If an employee does not complete their training, not only do I get a report stating this, I can create a personalized discipline letter detailing which courses they missed — all based on the same system."

Shamlin brought up the program during an interview and even showed it to an interviewer. That person presented the idea to the school cabinet, which decided to license the software.

In the current school year district employees had to finish seven online training courses in EmployeeSafe. Now it's in the process of implementing a staff accident management system to streamline the process of reporting staff accidents to the district's Workers' Compensation insurance carrier.

The course library for EmployeeSafe covers emergency management, food safety, hazard assessments and 11 other broad categories, each with multiple training videos, many available in Spanish and French. The system automates the management, notification, tracking and documentation of staff training and incidents. As reports are submitted, the program notifies the appropriate staff to address each safety concern and tracks the report to "completion" and auto-communicates with the submitter through the report resolution.

Among other school customers are Vandalia Butler City Schools in Ohio, Chinook's Edge School Division No. 73 in Alberta and Belle Plaine Unified School District 357 in Kansas.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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