Self-Audit and Sustainment

An important element – both to answering questions about progress, and providing feedback to staff, students, parents and other school stakeholders, is data. Therefore, it is important in the early stages of building a child safety framework to also think about the questions that need to be periodically answered, the data that need to be collected to answer those questions, and opportunities and methods to measure quality, improvement, and outcomes. Some questions – among others – that might help frame your thought process about data collection and analyses are:

• How many people are there in the school (and in each job classification) who require the safety training?
• How many of those have received the required training?
• How many are left to train? (by which you can be aware of organizational elements that are excelling or lagging)
• How many abuse reports have been filed? What types? (Who is collecting the incident reports?)
• Have race and ethnicity data on the reports also been collected
• Were the incident reports handled properly? (Did the person aware of the incident know what to do, and do it within school policy and state guidelines and time frames?)
• Have the safety materials been distributed?
• Has everyone who received the required training also received a background and criminal history check?
• Have all members of the organization received and signed the Code of Conduct?
• Do staff, faculty and volunteers in direct contact with students know what to do in an emergency, whom to contact, what to report, the resources available to them?
• If students are also part of the training initiative, are they learning and using the skills that the program is intended to teach?
• What other criteria will you use to judge program performance?
• What standards of performance on the criteria must be reached for the program to be considered successful?
• What conclusions about program performance are justified based on the available evidence?
• How often will you conduct data collection?

In short, sustaining the significant accomplishment of establishing a child abuse prevention framework requires more than just implementing it. It requires an ongoing commitment to continuously assess the efficacy of what has been accomplished and to regularly communicate progress and outcomes to all elements of the school community.

The website of the Child Welfare Information Gateway has a comprehensive list of evaluation methodologies, including some state and local examples, on its page entitled Tools for Evaluating Prevention Programs. ¹⁷⁵ The Safe Kids Thrive website also provides guidance on program Analysis, Review, and Self-Audits: Collecting Data ¹⁷⁶ that also includes a section on Incorporating Training Programs into Organizational Culture ¹⁷⁷ as well as a sample data collection tool.

¹⁷⁵ https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/preventing/evaluating/tools/

¹⁷⁶ https://safekidsthrive.org/prevention-topics/sustainability/analysis-review-and-self-audits-collecting-data/

¹⁷⁷ https://safekidsthrive.org/prevention-topics/training/incorporating-training-programs-into-organizational-culture/