The education sector is no stranger to reporting incidents. As you can well imagine, schools often have incidents, from students getting into trouble to educators or staff injuries to risk and hazard audits. However, the education industry has a number of challenges in documenting and managing those incidents.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ann Cyr, Risk Manager for the Carson City School District. Ann helped me to understand how valuable and efficacious it is to use a digital reporting system in her role to make incident management much more convenient, professional, and effective. Let’s start by getting to know Ann and the CCSD.

About Carson City School District

The Carson City School District, CCSD, is a school district located in Nevada’s capital that educates some 7,300 students across 10 schools. These include six elementary schools, two middle schools, and one comprehensive high school. The school district has impressive graduation rates, special programs including those for gifted students, and also boasts strict safety measures to keep students and staff safe.

With so many students and staff, managing safety across multiple facilities requires a high degree of organization, practical and effective procedures, and documentation that is professional and accessible to the appropriate personnel. It can be challenging at times. That’s why Ann needed a robust incident management system that could keep pace with the fast-changing situations that the education system puts forth.

Ann Cyr of the Carson City School District is no stranger to managing risk and safety. In 2019, CFO Alan Kalt of the Nevada Public Agency Insurance Pool and Public Agency Compensation Trust recognized Ann and her team with a Loss Control Excellence Award for outstanding work in managing risk and safety for the school district and outstanding and effective loss control measures. Ann has a long history of working in the district. She is dedicated to ensuring the safety of students, staff, and related service personnel alike.

“Our employees are able to report incidents and safety concerns through the app in real time, which allows my department to respond quickly. Forms that are required for reporting of workplace injuries have been built into the app, eliminating the need to route paper forms around to various sites.”

The Challenge

If you don’t work in the education system, you might not fully understand the nature of these operations. After all, it takes a lot more than a few teachers to run an effective school district. There are teachers, bus drivers, custodians, administration staff, and others like Ann working in the background to ensure safe and hazard-free learning environments and safe working conditions for nearly a thousand personnel.

“We had a lot of disparate forms in different locations and different departments, and none of it was being centrally stored or maintained.”

With so many different facilities, departments, and personnel, it can be difficult to unify and standardize incident reporting procedures and operations, especially when different departments are using different forms. Furthermore, due to the complexities of multiple facilities, departments, and personnel, past incident communications were not always as expedient as desired.

“Allowing the employee to report in real time prevents those delays which results in better investigations.”

Not only were communication processes slow and tedious, but forms and documents were also a challenge:

“Many of the forms required for injury reporting had been copied many times over the years, some were the wrong edition, they were difficult to read and employees completed these reports by hand. Using the app results in a more professional, legible report.”

The Solution: Implementing 1st Reporting

1st Reporting was the key to unlocking the challenges that the school district previously faced. Multiple departments now could use standardized digital reporting to ensure that not only injury-related incidents were reported professionally, but also other departments were able to join in the unified solution. 

“We were able to improve injury reporting processes, as well as our transportation incidents and safety and security incidents.”

Key Results & Benefits

Ann told us that incident reporting improved quickly now that they had the 1st Reporting app at their disposal.

“With everybody having it on their mobile devices, it’s just easier for them to just pull their phone out of their pocket and quickly answer a few questions and hit submit. When they do that, not only myself and my security technician are getting notifications, but also people at the individual schools or departmental directors that need to know about these things are also getting notified.”

By implementing the 1st Reporting application, the Carson City School District now gained a powerful mobile reporting tool that quickly streamlined the incident reporting process. It provided a means to bypass the challenges of handwriting and, thus, deciphering handwritten accounts. Furthermore, it offered an easy way for team members to quickly report incidents, enabling the safety team to jump into action without the delays of reporting on a paper-based system.

The customizable notification system in the 1st Reporting application also changed how their incident communications occurred, both streamlining and automating the communications process.

Furthermore, the application also enabled much easier trend analysis to ensure resource allocation was appropriately implemented.

“If you don’t have that data in a set somewhere, it’s difficult to use the information to guide resource allocation decisions.”

User Experience

Ann and the team at the Carson City School District found that the 1st Reporting application not only improved incident communications but also significantly improved the professionalism and quality of reporting.

“When business partners and other stakeholders request a copy of an incident report, it is much more professional looking for us to retrieve the report from 1st and print it or save it in electronic format, and send it to them, as opposed to pulling out a report that somebody has handwritten.”

The application also provided a faster means of getting incident information to the right people in real-time. This feature is handy for their fleet bus drivers, who could be in various locations depending on where an incident occurred on their route.

“If they’re stopped somewhere and they’re parked, they can access the app on their phone and report what happened, and they can even click on that little microphone and just talk into the phone and explain what happened on their bus, submit photos and hit submit. We can then respond to the accident location or begin the investigation right away.”

Impact on School District Operations

“Our departmental directors and our school administrators really like the convenience of the app.”

From faster incident communications to greater report professionalism, the Carson City School District saw a significant impact in improving its incident reporting processes. The communications were faster and more effective, and reporting became much more robust, given the multiple facilities and numerous potential locations where incidents might occur. Security personnel, custodians, drivers, and educators all benefit from a fast, customizable, and flexible incident reporting process – all possible because of the 1st Reporting application.

“I think our employees find the app convenient to use.”

Future Outlook & Summary

“It’s been very affordable and easy to use, and I have actually recommended it to other school districts.” 

At the end of the day, school districts aim to provide the best education possible with the budgets they have to work with. The 1st Reporting application isn’t just intuitive, convenient, and beneficial. It is also affordable, so schools can focus their efforts on improving education inside the classroom while also improving the safety and security of their academic facilities.

If you’re ready to transform your school district, organization, or workplace into a safer environment, try the 1st Reporting application or book a demonstration to see just how powerful and impactful our application can be for your team members and stakeholders.