An “gezelligheid” moment on the evening of December 5th (Sinterklaasavond). Adults gather after children go to bed with gifts (remember children?), enjoying strong coffee generously laced with genever or another jenever-like spirit, often spiced with cinnamon or anise. Sometimes topped with whipped cream, it warms the festive mood while singing traditional Sinterklaas songs and sharing stories of Sint and his Zwarte Pieten who arrive on a boat from Spain.
Tomorrow Sinterklaas will arrive in the Netherlands from his home in Spain, bringing presents and special treats for children. Learn more about the celebrations to welcome his arrival in #Amsterdam and this amazing Dutch holiday: https://t.co/Guioc6M5Zipic.twitter.com/6HYoMrPNnO
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Today we unpack the latest in codes, standards, guidelines, recommendations and safety legislation that set the standard of care for the design, manufacture and maintenance of interior fixtures such as carpet, furniture, bookshelves and ceiling tiles, plumbing fixtures — a large part of what construction industry professionals find in CSIGroup MasterFormat Division 12 — Furnishings. — i.e. “Things that are not nailed down” Such things can elude infrastructure budgets that are dominated by real assets fixed in place.
Other accredited standards developers in this domain:
In large research universities, it is common for building service personnel engaged in keeping facilities clean and tidy to constitute the largest proportion of permanent employees.
100 years ago, the Supreme Court made it clear in Pierce v. Society of Sisters: raising children is the responsibility of parents, not the government.
100 years later, the Trump Administration remains committed to protecting parental rights. pic.twitter.com/yduXdLShty
— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) June 1, 2025
“…O chestnut tree;, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bold? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
We sweep through the world’s three major time zones; updating our understanding of the literature at the technical foundation of education community safety and sustainability in those time zones 24 times per day. We generally eschew “over-coding” web pages to sustain speed, revision cadence and richness of content as peak priority. We do not provide a search facility because of copyrights of publishers and time sensitivity of almost everything we do.
Our daily colloquia are typically doing sessions; with non-USA titles receiving priority until 16:00 UTC and all other titles thereafter. We assume policy objectives are established (Safer-Simpler-Lower-Cost, Longer-Lasting). Because we necessarily get into the weeds, and because much of the content is time-sensitive and copyright protected, we usually schedule a separate time slot to hammer on technical specifics so that our response to consultations are meaningful and contribute to the goals of the standards developing organization and to the goals of stewards of education community real assets — typically the largest real asset owned by any US state and about 50 percent of its annual budget.
1. Leviathan. We track noteworthy legislative proposals in the United States 118th Congress. Not many deal specifically with education community real assets since the relevant legislation is already under administrative control of various Executive Branch Departments such as the Department of Education.
We do not advocate in legislative activity at any level. We respond to public consultations but there it ends.
We track federal legislative action because it provides a stroboscopic view of the moment — the “national conversation”– in communities that are simultaneously a business and a culture. Even though more than 90 percent of such proposals are at the mercy of the party leadership the process does enlighten the strengths and weakness of a governance system run entirely through the counties on the periphery of Washington D.C. It is impossible to solve technical problems in facilities without sensitivity to the zietgeist that has accelerated in education communities everywhere.
Michigan Great Lake Quilt
Michigan can 100% water and feed itself. Agriculture is its second-largest industry.
“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow,
yet we forget that he is someone today.”
– Stacia Tauscher
Today we run a status check on the stream of technical and management standards evolving to assure the highest possible level of security in education communities. The literature expands significantly from an assortment of national standards-setting bodies, trade associations, ad hoc consortia and open source standards developers. CLICK HERE for a sample of our work in this domain.
School security is big business in the United States. According to a report by Markets and Markets, the global school and campus security market size was valued at USD 14.0 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 21.7 billion by 2025, at a combined annual growth rate of 7.2% during the forecast period. Another report by Research And Markets estimates that the US school security market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 8% between 2020 and 2025, driven by factors such as increasing incidents of school violence, rising demand for access control and surveillance systems, and increasing government funding for school safety initiatives.
Because the pace of the combined annual growth rate of the school and campus security market is greater than the growth rate of the education “industry” itself, we’ve necessarily had to break down our approach to this topic into modules:
Security 100. A survey of all the technical and management codes and standards for all educational settings — day care, K-12, higher education and university affiliated healthcare occupancies.
Security 200. Queries into the most recent public consultations on the components and interoperability* of supporting technologies
Video surveillance: indoor and outdoor cameras, cameras with night vision and motion detection capabilities and cameras that can be integrated with other security systems for enhanced monitoring and control.
Access control:doors, remote locking, privacy and considerations for persons with disabilities.
Panic alarms: These devices allow staff and students to quickly and discreetly alert authorities in case of an emergency.
Metal detectors: These devices scan for weapons and other prohibited items as people enter the school.
Mass notification systems: These systems allow school administrators to quickly send emergency alerts and notifications to students, staff, and parents.
Intrusion detection systems: These systems use sensors to detect unauthorized entry and trigger an alarm.
GPS tracking systems: These systems allow school officials to monitor the location of school buses and track the movements of students during field trips and other off-campus activities.
Security 300. Regulatory and management codes and standards; a great deal of which are self-referencing.
As always, we reckon first cost and long-term maintenance cost, including software maintenance for the information and communication technologies (i.e. anything with wires) installed in the United States. Cybersecurity is outside our wheelhouse and beyond our expertise. In order to do any of the foregoing reasonably well, we have to leave cybersecurity standards to others.
Education Community Safety catalog is one of the fast-growing catalogs of best practice literature. In developing district security plans, K-12 school leaders stress that school safety is a cross-functional responsibility and every individual’s participation drives the success of overall safety protocols. We link a small sample below and update ahead of every Security colloquium.
* Interoperability refers to the ability of different technologies or systems to communicate and work together seamlessly. In the context of school security technologies, interoperability can help improve the effectiveness of security systems and make it easier for school personnel to manage and respond to potential security threats. Here’s what we look for:
Standardization: By standardizing communication protocols and data formats, school security technologies can be made more compatible with each other, making it easier for different systems to communicate and share information.
Integration: School security technologies can be integrated with each other to provide a more comprehensive security solution. For example, access control systems can be integrated with video surveillance systems to automatically trigger alerts when an unauthorized person enters a restricted area.
Open Architecture: Open architecture solutions enable different security systems to be connected and communicate with each other regardless of their manufacturer or supplier. This approach makes it easier to integrate different technologies and avoid vendor lock-in.
Cloud-based Solutions: Cloud-based security solutions can enable interoperability by providing a centralized platform for managing and monitoring different security systems. This approach can also simplify the deployment of security technologies across multiple locations.
Collaboration: School security technology providers can work together to develop interoperability standards and best practices that can be adopted across the industry. Collaboration can help drive innovation and improve the effectiveness of security systems.
Kelechi M. Ikegwu – Evelyn Sowells – Howard Hardiman
Department of Computer Systems Technology, North Carolina A&T State University
ABSTRACT. The horrific and tragic deaths that have resulted from infamous school shootings have deprived Americans of the sense of security in what has traditionally been a nurturing and safe environment. This paper will discuss different preventive methods for school shootings. The most current preventive methods are examined for fitness based on a variety of school shootings that have occurred in the past. Then a framework for a new school shooting protection device is proposed and evaluated. Concepts from computer vision, anomaly detection, and electromagnetic propulsion are discussed with respect to the proposed framework. Ideally, the goal of the framework presented in this paper is to prevent deaths and injuries from occurring during a school shooting. With the framework, an efficient and comparatively affordable preventive method could be released in the near future.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
