Why NCSI Cares About School Security
By Jeff Vincent
Director
National Center on School Infrastructure
At the National Center on School Infrastructure (NCSI), we start from a simple premise: the school building is not simply a backdrop to education; it is foundational for learning and teaching. The condition of a school's roof, HVAC system, classrooms, and grounds shapes whether students feel safe, whether they can concentrate, and whether they are likely to stay engaged and succeed.
That's why we joined the editorial board of School Safety Quarterly. NCSI is a national resource hub – sponsored by the US Department of Education – that supports states and school districts in the stewardship of America’s elementary and secondary public school facilities. Building capacity for improving school security sits squarely within our mission.
Keeping students, teachers, and staff safe is among a school's most fundamental responsibilities, but human-centered solutions that increase safety and security are difficult to implement. In part, this is because school security conversations often treat it as separate from, or worse, at odds with, the work of teaching and learning. We see it differently: A secure school and a functioning school should be one and the same. When security measures are bolted on without regard for how students, teachers, and staff use a school building, protocols get ignored and fail in exactly the moments they matter most. As Guy Bliesner, Idaho's school safety and security analyst (and a NCSI Advisory Committee member), put it well in a recent conversation with us: “Security is the protection of assets, and the first asset in a school is its people, the second is the educational environment itself. Measures that protect one at the expense of the other aren't really working.”
In our view, successful school security must be congruent with a school's daily operations and its core function. It cannot be an obstacle course layered on top of teaching and learning — it has to be part of how a school breathes. That means thinking about security the way we think about any other piece of facilities stewardship: as something that should be planned for from the start, integrated into master planning and capital projects, and designed around how teachers, students, and staff actually move through a building, not how a policy imagines they should.
Our public schools need thoughtful protection. NCSI aims to help move the field toward an integrated view where security is evaluated alongside, and in service of, everything else a good school facility is supposed to do for the students and communities who depend on it.
