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Pool Administrator
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.

The Claims Custodian

Matching grants of up to $1,000 from a school insurance pool's surplus funds allows schools to buy safety equipment.

Jim Graff, Chicago-based manager of a workers' compensation self-insurance pool for schools, is hoping that sweating the small things pays big dividends for his school district members.

Graff, a pool administrator with Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., manages the School Employees Loss Fund (SELF), provider of work comp coverage to about 80 northern Illinois school districts.

When he and his team began looking into a series of injury claims plaguing the pool, they soon pinpointed a handful of causes, among them teachers falling off chairs and desks while trying to reach high shelves or put up classroom material.

Graff's deceptively simple response: A grant program that has allowed schools to buy the kind of safety equipment--including stepladders--that can be found at the local hardware store.

"He's very creative and just wonderful to work with," said Ann Michels, an account manager with Cambridge-Sedgwick CMS in Chicago, the pool's third-party administrator.

Graff cites the fact that workers' comp "is a very process-driven line of insurance" where loss control depends on analyzing data and the facts and circumstances of accidents.

"The beautiful thing about having a 25-year-old program is that you have a lot of data," he said.
SELF got started with Gallagher's help during the liability insurance crisis of the mid-1980s, when Illinois school districts suddenly had a tough time finding affordable workers' comp coverage.
The pool has grown from about 36 original members, and now provides statutory coverage with a $750,000 per-occurrence retention and specific excess coverage above that amount, Graff said. The size of the fund has varied with membership, but now amounts to about $10.5 million in annual member loss contributions, he said.

A couple of years ago, a series of expensive claims from trip-and-fall incidents caught Graff's attention. In one case, a teacher fell and broke a shin. In others, a teacher and a custodian hyperextended knees. The custodian injured himself when he fell from a space heater where he'd been standing to wash windows. In all, the accidents cost the pool around $250,000, he said.

When Graff dug into the pool's claims data, he found a spike in claims around August each year, as teachers were getting classrooms ready for the beginning of the school year. With a little more work, he found that many injuries were caused by school employees standing on chairs and tables for added reach. Other clusters of claims came in winter months, with falls on stairs.

After talking the problem over at Gallagher and with pool members, Graff proposed a new program: matching grants of up to $1,000 from the pool's surplus funds to allow schools to buy safety equipment.

Under the program, schools are permitted to buy stepladders, salt kits to de-ice stairs and walkways in the winter, rubberized carpets to place at entrances to deal with wet floors, and digital cameras, so that school personnel can document conditions at the scene of accidents going forward.

All simple steps, but in some cases steps that were not being taken.

"We just want to make the schools safer; that's the bottom line," Graff said.

About 40 percent of the pool's members participated in the grant program last year, and Graff said he's hoping for 65 percent to 70 percent participation this year.

To measure progress, Graff and Cambridge-Sedgwick collected baseline loss data and are tracking claims at participating versus non-participating schools, benchmarking against current and previous payrolls to normalize the results.

To this point, it's looking good, they say.

"From what we've seen so far, all of the (participating) schools have shown an improvement," Michels said.

Graff estimated a 15 percent to 25 percent reduction in slip-and-fall claims at the participating schools for 2010, though he cautioned that it may be too early to draw conclusions. The program will continue for the 2011-2012 school year, and then Graff said he expects SELF's board to look at the results and decide whether to continue.

"We're going to be watching pretty closely," he said.

-- Douglas McLeod

A Contributor to Safer Schools

Jim Graff, pool administrator for Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., has done his part to contribute to public education.

At a time when school budgets are facing deep cuts, Graff found a way to contribute to the common good. He did so by examining the claims data, and then starting a matching grant program using the self-insured risk pool's surplus funds to pay for school equipment to make it safer for teachers and students.

He succeeded on two fronts. For starters, the money was paid out of surplus and used to pay for step ladders to help prevent teachers from climbing on chairs and falling while reaching for books and reference materials stored high above their heads in classroom cubbies.

The grant program also generated funds to buy floor mats and salt kits, which further reduced slip-and-fall injuries during frigid Midwestern winters. Graff's strategy was designed to reduce exposures to falls, and cut claims frequency. Within months, schools participating in the grant program saw reductions of between 15 percent and 55 percent in their slip-and-fall incidents.

Graff was chosen as a Responsibility Leader® because he overcame budgetary restrictions to create safer working conditions in public schools.

CEO and President
Awareity

Tipped off by the Importance of Foresight

Software designed to help colleges and other institutions identify troubled students or employees before they act is often a matter of life and death.

Anyone following the news has heard terrible stories of school and workplace violence, from the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre to cyberbullying incidents that have in some instances led to suicide. Rick Shaw, CEO and president of Awareity in Lincoln, Neb., is finding ways to stop such incidents from occurring.

Shaw has developed TIPS--for Threat Assessment, Incident Management and Prevention Services--software designed to help colleges and other institutions identify troubled students or employees, and to intervene before they harm themselves or others.

TIPS aims to counter a common security problem at schools, which is that the vast majority of incidents, ranging from threats to bullying to sexual assault, go unreported.

"You can't prevent situations you don't know about," Shaw said.

The system starts by making reporting easier, adding a button to an institution's own website that allows anyone to file an anonymous report. The reporting form features a drop-down list of various types of incidents--cyberbullying, for example--and asks for the date and time of the incident, the identities of the person being reported and any victims, and a description of the incident.

A school may designate teams of people to be automatically notified of certain types of reports, and the system allows team members to create a record of recommendations and actions taken, keeping track of which members view and add to the record and notifying members of new information.

TIPS also allows teams to upload material from outside sources, such as Facebook pages, and can be set to alert members for follow-up on individual cases. "When you forget to follow up with an at-risk individual, bad things can happen," Shaw said.

Threat assessment team members can include not only a school's counselors and safety officers but also its lawyers and local police, he said. Including legal counsel can protect sensitive information under attorney-client privilege, while the involvement of law enforcement may shield data from Freedom of Information Act requests, Shaw said.

The web-based TIPS system is remotely accessible by laptop or smartphone, meaning that team members can stay in touch wherever they are, said Claire Good, associate vice president and dean of students at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky., which has been using TIPS since February.

"The system made it so simple, so easy" to track individual cases, she said.

Awareity also responded quickly to requests to customize the system, Good said. Eastern Kentucky wanted, for instance, to combine incident reports with information from the company's Campus Aggression Protection System to show changes in the level of subjects' aggressive behavior.

"They didn't discourage anything I had to say," Good said. "They implemented it right away."

Shaw came to his new work with long experience in computer systems and computer network security, including stints as a manager at Electronic Data Systems--now part of Hewlett Packard Co.--and as a data specialist at MCI Inc., since acquired by Verizon Inc.

He started his own security company, CorpNet Security, in 1998, providing "white hat hacking" services to clients looking to spot weaknesses in their systems.

Throughout, he said, he came to realize that "people are the weakest link" in any security system, and that there were few tools available to deal with threats from an institution's own employees or from its students.

He founded Awareity in 2002, and the first product the company launched was a software platform called Managed Ongoing Awareness and Trust, or MOAT.

MOAT offers web-based employee training and documentation for compliance with an institution's own policies and with laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

From there, Shaw developed TIPS. About a dozen schools have adopted the system so far, he said, though its applicability extends beyond campuses. A handful of healthcare companies and banks also have implemented it, he said.

TIPS may prove especially useful for banks, he said, in preventing liabilities that could arise from the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

-- Douglas McLeod

Red Flags of Foresight

Rick Shaw remembers the horrific events at Virginia Tech so vividly.

It was April 16, 2007, the day 23-year-old English major Seung-Hui Cho stalked, shot and eventually killed 32 students and faculty, himself included, and wounded 25 others.

"My first reaction was, 'How big is it? How bad is it? This is horrible,' " Shaw said. "With my safety and prevention on the brain, my next thought was, 'Was this preventable?' "

The question for Shaw wasn't one of second-guessing the killer's actions; it was already too late for that. For Shaw, the question was how the tragedy could have been prevented.

In hindsight, he said, there are often "a lot of red flags," leading up to an incident, but hindsight isn't good enough. It's always too late. No victim was ever saved by the shield of hindsight.

That's where his Threat Assessment, Incident Management and Prevention Services (TIPS) Web-based software, designed to flag warning signs before an individual explodes, comes in.

Shaw is a Responsibility Leader® because he created a system to make campuses safer in a time when we desperately need them to be; his is an innovation clearly motivated by a desire to save lives.