MSGIA – School Safety at the Forefront Forefront
By Shawn Bubb, MTSBA/MSGIA Director of Insurance Operations
At a time when violent acts have become a heightened concern for school boards and school administrators, the MSGIA continues to reshape industry expectations when it comes to providing the most comprehensive school safety services for our workers’ compensation pool members. And please know that in the coming year the MSGIA is doubly committed to continuing to provide around-the-clock social media monitoring for potential violent posts that have the potential to impact our WC pool members.
As you may recall, in the second half of last school year, the MSGIA entered into a pilot program with a company called Firestorm in order to provide our members with three critical school safety services. Those services were:
- Access to one hour of professional Crisis Management Services during the onset of a new school crisis to provide guidance and direction on decision support making and media message management;
- Access to exceptional open-source social media protective monitoring services when needed – this is the social-media monitoring best suited for anticipating and monitoring for potentially violent intent directed toward the district or one of your employees or students;
- Security-vulnerability assessments for your school district.
Each of these services provides the district with an invaluable layer of risk management protection not found in any other WC provider offerings that we have seen in Montana. Further, it needs to be noted that since the pilot began, Firestorm has been acquired by another new company, Recor. The MSGIA learned in this pilot phase the critical importance of the services provided by Firestorm and the need to continue these services going forward for MSGIA WC Pool members. Following this acquisition, the MSGIA elected to contract with Ellis and Associates, a separate group providing the same 3 core services. We have some service team members from the prior company providing the same services for our new service contractor to allow for a continuation of the same high-quality safety and risk management services. Any requests for these services can be sent to either myself, Kevin Bartsch, or Matt Komac with the MSGIA.
With the continually evolving threats of violence in our current society, the MSGIA will continue to be an ongoing partner for our WC Pool members to keep students, staff, and members of the public as safe as possible while in our public schools. The MSGIA seeks out the best, most sophisticated and progressive partners to aid us in these endeavors in school safety.
Your school district safety efforts are very important to us at the MSGIA, please give us a call at 1.877.667.7392 to get started on updating your school plans for this year.
Be Well and Be Safe! Return to 2019 Fall Newsletter