Even though the year has only just begun, concerns about K-12 school safety remain top-of-mind for administrators, educators, and families. While incidents tend to dip when students are off campus, school leaders rarely stop thinking about how to strengthen their protocols. Not only to keep students safe, but to maintain trust and reduce anxiety across the community.
Increasingly, technology sits at the heart of that mission. Teachers and staff remain the first responders in an on-site emergency, but the tools that enable prevention, communication, and rapid response are maintained by an entirely different group of professionals: school IT teams.
Their job is becoming more difficult because disconnected, siloed safety tools don’t work. They slow down response, increase complexity, and consume time that should be spent on instruction or prevention.
According to the OECD, unconnected school systems create fragmented workflows that can consume up to 40% of administrators' time through manual reconciliation and duplicated effort. For IT teams, often just one or two people, this fragmentation creates hidden operational risk.
Today’s safety environment is also broader than in the past. A recent RAND survey found that schools manage unpredictable incidents daily, spanning:
Between January 2023 and January 2024, schools reported more than 750 swatting incidents, contributing to fear and disruption across communities. And while active shooters receive media attention, according to a recent RAND survey, bullying is the issue that worries educators most.
Physical security such as CCTV, smart badges, locked doors, and SROs still plays an important role but districts are rapidly layering in digital systems for prevention, early detection, and communication.
K-12 IT teams today must manage:
Meanwhile, 88% of tech decisions are made by principals, and only 12% of IT admins influence buying strategy. That gap contributes to tool sprawl and operational inefficiency.
The result: IT becomes reactive instead of proactive, spending most of its time on unplanned work instead of long-term improvements.
Recent K-12 safety surveys show that districts don’t want more point solutions, they want smarter, integrated systems:
The direction is clear: safety must be unified, not stitched together.
School safety is no longer a stand-alone initiative. It is part of a wider operational and cultural ecosystem that affects:
A single-platform approach eliminates silos by consolidating prevention, threat assessment, communication, visitor management, incident response, and data into one digital environment.
The benefits are immediate:
The Kokomo24/7® School Safety Cloud® delivers this unified platform experience, integrating seamlessly with district systems and supporting both current and next-generation technologies. It is designed to be:
Schools cannot prevent every emergency, but they can improve how they prepare, detect, and respond. Integrated platforms make that shift possible: turning safety from a reactive obligation into a coordinated strategy.
Because at the end of the day, keeping people safe is not optional. It is foundational. And the right technology makes it achievable.
Since 2018, Kokomo24/7®’s configuration-based platform has helped over 120 national and global organizations respond quickly to safety, wellness, and compliance needs. From visitor management to behavioral threat assessment and emergency alerts, Kokomo24/7® powers holistic school safety for a better everyday experience.