And the SchoolDog School Safety Platform Is Proud to Be Part of the Story

When Risk & Insurance magazine set out to recognize the nation’s most effective workers’ compensation programs, they didn’t have to look far to find one worth celebrating right here in Georgia. The Georgia School Boards Association Risk Management Services (GSBA-RMS) was named a 2026 Theo Award winner, one of just 28 programs nationwide honored for excellence and service to workers. It’s a well-earned recognition of a program that has spent decades building something rare in public education: a statewide safety infrastructure that works for districts of every size.

We’re proud that SchoolDog’s school safety platform is part of that story.

A Fund Built to Serve All 180 Districts

Georgia is home to 180 school districts, ranging from Gwinnett County’s nearly 200,000 students down to rural systems where a few hundred students make up the whole community. Since 1992, the GSBA-RMS Workers’ Compensation Fund has served as a self-insured pool for member districts across that entire spectrum. 87 districts strong today, with Charles Taylor serving as third-party administrator since the beginning.

Running a school system means real, everyday physical risk: kitchen staff on wet tile, maintenance crews lifting and bending, custodial teams navigating crowded hallways between bells. Managing that risk consistently and equitably, especially for small districts without dedicated risk management staff, is the challenge GSBA set out to solve.

“One of our greatest areas of impact has been supporting smaller school districts that often lack the resources to provide this type of training on their own,” said Cliff Cole, GSBA’s Director of Risk Management. “By bringing these opportunities directly to them, we’re able to make a meaningful difference where the need is greatest.”

Where SchoolDog Fits In

At the foundation of GSBA’s prevention strategy sits the SchoolDog School Safety Platform, provided to every fund member K-12 district at no additional cost. The idea is simple, and that’s exactly the point: safety personnel walk their buildings with a phone in hand powered with the SchoolDog school safety app, flag hazards the moment they see them, and generate an immediate digital record that flows straight into a data log.

Cole, a former principal himself, put it best: “When you walk through a building, you see things over and over — they kind of go to the back of your mind. But if you take a snapshot immediately and get the results, that changes things.”

That’s the whole premise behind SchoolDog. Hazards don’t get fixed because someone noticed them once. They get fixed because there’s a system that captures the moment of noticing and turns it into action. Our recently added maintenance request feature builds directly on that idea, letting anyone, not just safety staff, report a cracked sidewalk or a damaged door and get it straight into the repair queue.

With SchoolDog’s school safety app, staff in GSBA-RMS member K-12 districts crowdsource and incentivize human vigilance, helping them to reinforce best practices that are already in place and laser in on potential vulnerabilities that could pose a threat to workplace safety.

Prevention as a Layered System

What makes GSBA’s program stand out isn’t any single tool. It’s how the pieces work together:

  • SchoolDog Solutions for real-time hazard identification and reporting
  • Vector Solutions, offering 350+ online training courses on slip, trip, and fall prevention, proper lifting, and other high-frequency injury topics, with full completion tracking
  • In-person training, led by GSBA-RMS’s safety and risk management team, delivered directly to the custodial, maintenance, and kitchen staff who face the highest physical risk
  • Monthly and mid-month communications — a safety bulletin on the 1st and a “Safety Scenarios” publication on the 15th that keep safety thinking active between formal trainings
  • Claims analytics from Charles Taylor, which turn trend data and root cause analysis into direction for where safety resources go next

That last piece matters more than it might seem. Data doesn’t just document what happened. In GSBA’s model, it actively steers where prevention dollars and attention go, so smaller districts with real risk get real resources, not just whatever’s convenient.

Results That Speak for Themselves

The numbers tell the story: loss costs have declined steadily, workers’ comp rates have come down for member districts, and dividend payments have gone out to participating members every year since 2022. Member satisfaction is at an all-time high, and the fund added seven new member districts in the past year alone.

For a small, rural district with no dedicated risk manager and a tight budget, that’s the difference between building a safety program from scratch and simply plugging into one that already works. SchoolDog, Vector Solutions, monthly communications, in-person training, and decades of claims expertise, all in one membership.

A Well-Deserved Win

GSBA-RMS’s Theo Award recognizes something we see every day in our partnership with them: that a thoughtful, consistent, technology-enabled approach to safety doesn’t just reduce claims. It changes the culture of how districts think about risk. As William Harrell of Charles Taylor put it, the program helps districts “identify risks earlier, strengthen safety practices, and deliver value for employees, students, and the communities they serve.”

That’s the mission SchoolDog was built to support, and we’re honored to keep building alongside GSBA-RMS as they continue raising the bar for what a statewide school safety program can be.

Book a demo with our team today to learn more about how SchoolDog Solutions helps districts turn everyday walkthroughs into real prevention.