ExAM: Putting security and safety first

One of the things that’s been incredibly exciting for me personally and for our company has been the development of the ExAM for Schools product. As somebody who has three kids that will all be in the school system soon and a partner who also has three kids in school, safety is something that we take pretty seriously. You’re expectation when you drop your kids off at the front door at school is that they’re going to be safe. You’re more concerned with are they going to learn the things that they’re supposed to learn? Are they going to make friends? Are they going to have fun today? Unfortunately, if you look at the statistics around what’s happening in our schools, you probably would be a little more concerned than you are even if you don’t have kids. After all everyone here is stuck here with the kids of everybody else, those are the people that are going to shape the next generation. If we want this place to be a better planet over the next 20-30 years, we need to get serious about what our kids are learning at school, what that learning environment looks like, and what are the lessons that they’re taking home every day.

Over the last two years we’ve taken the security expertise that we have and built out on top of Salesforce. We built a comprehensive school security operations platform with the flagship idea of it being security assessments. This is something that we had a background in. We’ve done assessments for about 190 schools in terms of basic physical security infrastructure. This means we looked at things like how do they stand with regard to lighting? Lighting is an important part of being able to feel safe on a school campus because dark areas invite people to do bad things if they’re so inclined. Bad lighting makes it so that CCTV is less functional which brings me to the importance of understanding how CCTV is deployed in your environment. All of these pieces are kind of active monitoring things but just simple things like understanding whether or not the paperwork is up to date from a facility inspection standpoint or from a security officer certification standpoint are important too.

There are so many things that go into ensuring that you’ve done the appropriate amount of facilities and security planning. You need to know that you’ve done the right amount of work to secure the exterior of your facility with regard to fencing, parking, and visitor management and same thing goes for the interior. How do we manage people within the facility? What type of monitoring measures do we have in place? There’s a huge amount of things that go into just the security assessment alone as we work to develop this more comprehensive security and operations package for schools.

As we’ve gone to look and gone into market, so many things have happened over the last two years including a lot of real tragedies. We had a lot of heated debate internally about how do we get this out into the market. We have spent a lot of time talking about it and we’d like to offer it out for free. I think that as somebody who has a real stake in how we educate people this is something I don’t want to see people miss out on or understand how important this is. You don’t want price to be what keeps somebody from going there with this increasingly vital assessment. What I’m curious about and what I’d really appreciate feedback on from the people out there in the government community, is whether or not this is something that is going to be feasible? Is free going to be ok given that it might have implications for how school systems leverage it? Ideally what we’d like to see is everybody take the ExAM, go through and get their scores, and immediately begin addressing areas where they have deficiencies. Then we can come in and try to sell them on our larger approach to school security and operations but first and foremost, we want to start that process of gathering information and beginning to address security situations whether or not we end up with that school system as a client. So I’m very curious what people think? Is free going to be a problem as a pricing model for us and do people have advice for how to best move forward in terms of trying to get something out there? How can we at least get people engaged around fixing some of the security issues while we work towards some larger set of objectives?