School Safety and communication leader gathered insights and information directly from educators with crowdsourcing project.

St. Louis, Missouri: CrisisGo, the leading school safety, incident management, and emergency communication technology provider, announced its proprietary findings on COVID-19 impacts to school operations and planning gathered from an extensive crowdsourcing effort. The results include actionable best practices and guidance synthesized from responses from school and district leaders heavily involved in the response and planning for their organizations.

CrisisGo worked directly with Jeff Kaye, President of School Safety Operations, and widely recognized leader in the school safety and continuity of operations expert. Mr. Kaye supported the effort by supplying daily questions and helping to interpret and analyze thousands of responses received throughout four weeks of surveys. CrisisGo prompted the participation from hundreds of school leaders across the United States and collected just-in-time responses to a series of questions directly related to the pandemic impacts specific to K-12 schools.

"The crowdsourcing project was established to share the best practices among participants," said Jim Spicuzza, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer for CrisisGo. "It also allowed for venting on the lack of dependable information to make decisions, challenge participants with extremely difficult questions on next steps and encouraged all of those engaged to prepare for multiple scenarios that they may face this fall."

The information gathered and shared by CrisisGo can be used to help school district leaders be better prepared, have continuity of operations plans in place, and explore new ways to solve unprecedented challenges. Those challenges may include a resurgence of COVID-19, or other events such as a hurricane, or tornado, or other natural disasters – anything that results in an extended closure or disruption of standard operations. CrisisGo's crowdsourced data can help update and enhance response plans for all these incidents.

"We were extremely pleased with the high level of participation," said Mr. Kaye. "The volume of overall participants was great, and the high number of daily responses we received to each crowdsourcing question was especially encouraging. From this participation, we learned that only 35% of schools in our survey have considered or discussed delaying the opening of schools until such time as masks or face coverings are no longer required due to safety concerns not related to the COVID-19 virus. We also learned approximately 75% of districts have had their building-level health services personnel – school nurses – develop a plan to screen all students and staff."

CrisisGo is offering a free COVID-19 Return-to-School Kit as part of the company's pandemic response initiative. The Kit is comprised of feedback collected from this crowdsourcing project combined with a thorough analysis of CDC, FEMA, and state plans for schools. The Kit features best practices, tips, and other advice for all schools in the planning stages for re-opening and re-entry into facilities next year. This is valuable, vital information that can help shape and accelerate school plans to ensure the safety and health of students and staff returning to buildings and campuses. The Kit is available for free at https://www.crisisgo.com/offers/return-to-school-kit