Parkland Dad Launches Nationwide School Safety Dashboard for Parents

Genesis of the School Safety Dashboard

• 💡 The nationwide school safety dashboard was created by Max Schachter, a father of a Parkland victim.
• 🎯 The project was born from Schachter's struggle to find and compare school safety incident data after the 2018 Parkland school shooting, encountering difficult-to-manage Excel spreadsheets.
• 🚀 The dashboard aims to provide an easy user interface for parents to compare school and district safety metrics.

Dashboard Features and Scope

• 📊 Parents can compare metrics such as the number of incidents of violence at a particular school against other schools in the same district and across different districts.
• 🌍 Initially developed for Florida, the dashboard has been expanded nationwide by collecting public data sets from every state in the country.
• 🗓️ The dashboard is set to go live nationwide, allowing any parent in the United States to access and analyze school safety numbers.

Broader Impact and Data Challenges

• 🎓 The tool is intended not only for parents but also for legislators, policy makers, and school board members to advocate for and implement school safety measures.
• 📈 Schachter hopes the data-driven approach will help identify underlying causes for trends, such as an uptick in suspensions or expulsions, and compare them with schools that have lower numbers.
• ⚠️ A significant challenge encountered was the inconsistency in public data reporting, with several states not reporting a variety of incidents down to the school site level.
• 🤝 The project is also seen as creating a pathway for a new form of advocacy for safer schools, aligning with the mission of his nonprofit, Safe Schools for Alex.