PASS Chairman Interview and School Guidelines Examined

As schools in the US face growing shooting incidents and student/staff safety issues, the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS) is providing free 80+ page guidelines to improve their security.

In this report, we explain who PASS is, what its goals are, and examine its 80+ page School Safety and Security Guidelines, including an interview with PASS Co-Founder and Chairman Chuck Wilson.

PASS Overview

PASS was started in 2014 by NCSA and SIA, and is led by Co-Founder and Board Chairman Chuck Wilson. Wilson said he was motivated to form PASS based on a meeting with Chicago Public Schools administrators, witnessing and discussing the many challenges they faced. CEO of SIA Don Erickson partnered with Wilson to unify SIA and NCSA's existing education security committees to create the new joint group, PASS.

Wilson is also an NSCA Charter Member and Executive Director since 1996, an association for commercial systems integrators, and was previously a systems integrator.

Wison described the PASS philosophy:

The philosophy of the PASS organization is to get the fundamentals of security, life safety down and start with policies and procedures and training and doing effective drills and having a district-wide plan that that the school administrators, the teachers, the community members can all get around

PASS was recently converted to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and offers its guidelines and resources for free to schools.

PASS Organization

There are ~40 members on the PASS Leadership Council and 6 members on the Board of Directors. While the Leadership Council includes many members from security industry companies, the Board of Directors includes a parent of a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, a school security officer, and a school superintendent:

So our board is pretty diverse. And we, you know, we we look at every aspect of school safety from that perspective.

Wilson said that in addition to the Council and Board of Directors, there are committees and guidance groups with specific areas of focus, including Oversight, Outreach, and Technical Committees, as well as the Education and Training Groups.

Wilson said that members spend 2-8 hours a week volunteering for PASS.

7,700+ Subscribers

Wilson said they have ~7,700 subscribers to the monthly newsletter, among 3 distinct user types:

But they have three different personas of who the subscribers are. So you when you sign up to get the past guidelines, you say who you are, for example, "I'm a school teacher, administrator, an integrator, etc". Most recently we had 7,700+ subscribers to our our monthly newsletter. So that's it's pretty amazing.

Wilson noted that their analytics indicated this is a 400% increase in downloads from a year ago.

Helping Schools With Security Fundamentals

He said that feedback he received from schools indicated that they felt security industry salespeople often raced to sell the latest and greatest, before getting the fundamentals done:

We see schools that had the latest and greatest surveillance technology, but they didn't even have a door intercom. So we said "No, wait a minute. Let's get the fundamentals done." First, let's not let's not try to race to sell something before the door people got there, before the access control people got there. Let's not take all of the money that they have available.

Wilson also noted that its guidelines are written for non-technical school staff:

It's a document that was written not for people that understand the technology, but for the educators and administrators. We use verbiage and language that they would understand. So it's not a technical bulletin like we would normally do for the benefit of our constituents in in the security life safety industry.

4 Partner Tiers - No Corporate Sponsored Marketing

While PASS lists over 60 partners, it does not offer corporate-sponsored marketing.

The manufacturers that support PASS, would love to have PASS print their logos all over the guidelines, and most documents like this, you open it up and then all the logos would be there. We just chose not to do that.

PASS Partnership is offered in 4 Tiers (Tier 4 is the highest), with financial donations on an annual subscription for Tiers 1-4 of $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, and $20,000 respectively.

Wilson noted that all partners go through a training program, which varies from half-day online, full-day in-person, up to 4-5 training programs per year.

Wilson said annual contributions are in the low hundreds of thousands, or less, but noted they are looking to hire a part-time director for managing and growing the partnership program.

Selective Partner Process

Wilson said that partner companies are vetted by PASS committees to filter out companies whose sales/advertising/marketing does not align with PASS's fundamental safety goals:

We turn away more partners than we actually accept right now because we have to make sure that the technology works as advertised. Their beliefs have to be similar to PASS in respect that we don't want people taking the guidelines, and then modifying them or going out of sequence with the fundamental stuff.

He emphasized the selective process for partners:

So we've had several past partner applications from companies who they want to use the guidelines when it's convenient to them not, but not when it's not and so we don't we don't allow them to be partners.

Further, Wilson said they want to make sure technology performance is in line with company advertising:

So if a company says their technology "works 100% of the time, never fails, best thing in the world" and we've seen testing where that's not true, then we just say "your application is on hold", because we have to have evidence that your advertising and your sales approach aligns well with the PASS guidelines.

No Evolv, Verkada

While Evolv and Verkada are significant disrupters in the US school security market, and Wilson confirmed that Evolv and Verkada have applied to become PASS partners, they have not been approved:

We did not reject them. But we just basically said "You have to do more, give us more information, show us more evidence that you would be the right PASS partner"

No Hikvision / Dahua / Sanctioned Companies

Further, PASS does not allow partnerships with US Government sanctioned companies, for example, Hikvision and Dahua:

Any company that's been sanctioned by the the US government to where they cannot do public works projects cannot be a PASS partner. So we have some issues with some international based organizations and then we try the best we can.

Growing List of Consultants

Wilson reported that they are building a list of security consultants that they commonly recommend schools reach out to, which are not security integrators or distributors.

We have a growing list of security consultants who we recommend that the schools reach out to and then they come and do a site visit and then in many cases, they'll give them a proposal for coming and doing a threat assessment or we call a threat risk or vulnerability assessment. And our consultants that have been trained by PASS, they know how to use CPTED scores, they know how to do local crime index variables they know how to do building by building assessment.

However, the list is not currently on the PASS website, but Wilson said it will be added in its next website update.

No Certification Planned

Wilson said that schools commonly request a PASS Certification, for an accreditation firm to come out and check the schools, but they do not plan to offer this:

We're a group of volunteers that created the guideline, and we said, "We're going to stop here." Then we went and created checklists, and we said, "We're gonna stop here." But what the schools are asking for is a plaque or sort of sticker for our window that says, "We are a PASS Tier 1 or Tier 2 or Tier 4 school" and then we would have an accreditation firm come out an auditing firm come out and go through that checklist and say, "Yes, they're good." We're at a crossroads with that where it would take us beyond a group of well-intended volunteers with all this history and experience in school safety.

He said this is something the Board may discuss in the future, noting schools' focus on state accreditation.

Guidelines Examined

The 83-page "Safety and Security Guidelines for K-12 Schools" (register and download here) describes a broad and high-level plan for schools to create a checklist for their own specific school district plans. The guidelines are light on technical specifics, but it does not rely on any specific manufacturer's recommendations or requirements.

The core of PASS's Guidelines is defining and managing the scope based on 4 tiers of recommendations/practices. However, it also states that many schools will not be able to implement TIER 4 measures and may not have a need to do so.

• Tier 1: Fundamental security features like physical barriers, locks, public address systems, cameras, and video recording for emergency responses.
• Tier 2: System maintenance plans and district-wide technology standardization, tactical response plans, bus video surveillance, etc.
• Tier 3: Remote district-wide electronic access control lockdown, mass notification systems, integrated intrusion alarm monitoring, etc.
• Tier 4: Video verification of duress alarm and intrusion alarms, access card bus check-in, visitor management background checks, LAN closet electronic access control, etc.
• Future / Enhanced technologies: Some technologies are mentioned but not in any of the 4 tiers, e.g., biometrics, vape detectors, and metal detectors.

Limited Technical Specifics In Guidelines

The guide only includes two quantified technical specifications (for security film and pixels for video).

The operational requirements for Person Pixels per face and Pixels per inch are conservative, though reasonable based on IPVM testing. Top-performing systems typically need ~30-40% fewer pixels than PASS specifies, but lower-performing systems fall within this range (converted to PPF):

• 150PPF for Identification - Facial recognition or identify specific individuals)
• 60PPF for Recognition - Differentiate people, for example, man or woman, the color of clothing, child or adult, etc.
• 12PPF for Detection - Determine if there is a person, object, or nothing.

Weapons Detection As An Example

Most of the guidelines do not narrowly specify types of products but rather introduce the various choices a school can consider, e.g., below is the full section on metal / weapons detectors:

Metal detectors. Traditionally, detection has been carried out through use of walk-through metal detectors (WTMDs) or hand-held metal detectors (HHMD), often with the latter as secondary screening. This will be most effective when the number of entry points to a building or sporting fields for events, etc. are limited to one or as few as possible. If a person transiting the WTMD triggersan alarm, they are quickly moved aside where security uses a HHMD to pinpoint the object in question without having to physically touch them. WTMDs combined with HHMDs provide a faster, more accurate and less intrusive than hand-held screening alone resulting in an overall better experience for students and staff. With HHMD alone, screening consistency and accuracy can varyamong individual screeners.

Passive detection. Several technologies are becoming available that allow contraband and weapons detection without intrusive or laborintensive screening—with the potential for tremendous positive impact on school safety. For example, terahertz and millimeter wave technology can detect a wide range of both metal and nonmetal items through a variety of materials and from a distance. Additionally, advanced image analysis in conjunction with video surveillance systems has been increasingly leveraged for weapons detection.

The upside is that this introduces various options but does not give clear guidance about which to use or detailed tradeoffs of these offerings.

However, this follows PASS's stated philosophy of ensuring that schools are only purchasing proven technology with an understanding of performance and how it fits into each school's operational safety plans.

Technical Toolkit Guidelines Coming

Wilson said that they are planning to release standalone technical documents with more specifics, some of which were included in previous versions:

the fifth version of the guidelines was 20 more pages. And so we pulled a lot of that technical stuff like that out.

While the Guidelines are significantly more broad than deep, it defines the areas that require more depth with recommendations to review state laws/regulations, NFPA 72, NFPA 3000 (active shooter response program), etc.

Volunteers Desired

Wilson added a call for more volunteers to help improve the guidelines:

we could use all the help we can get with having having people that are true experts in categories looking at things to see if there's ways that we can use better terminology or more updated standards or something.

IPVM plans to volunteer to help on the technology side.