Stalbaum
BCSC officials provided information Monday about a first-of-its-kind Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) report that gathered data showing instances where school employees were physically injured by students while on the job last school year.
BCSC reported 142 incidents, the second highest total included in the report, behind only Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp., which had 149 incidents.
But more than 100 public school districts didn’t report any data at all, and those who did weren’t as comprehensive in their reporting as BCSC, school district officials said.
A law passed in 2023, outlined in IC 20-26-5-42, says that each public school provide the data to IDOE annually. However, Indiana Code doesn’t give IDOE any statutory enforcement authority to ensure compliance, something that may change next legislative session.
BCSC Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources Erin Stalbaum broke down the data and talked board members through BCSC’s reporting process.
“We have a very comprehensive and inclusive workplace culture where we are wanting to report every incident for safety purposes,” Stalbaum said. “We send all of these reports to our workers compensation providers, and we work with our workers compensation providers to understand the disaggregation of all these different types of claims that we send their way.”
The report, generated through IDOE’s Data Exchange, collected data on three types of incidents, in addition to the total number of unique incidents, which include:
- The number of incidents where a school employee’s injury was required to be reported to the public school’s worker’s compensation carrier.
- The number of incidents where a school employee’s injury caused them to miss all or part of one or more work days.
- The number of incidents where a school employee’s injury was required to be reported to the public school pursuant to the school’s reporting policy.
- The total number of unique employee injury incidents involving one or more of the above incident types.
BCSC’s data entry lists 142 incidents across all of the categories, with the exception of the second column regarding injuries suffered by teachers that caused them to miss work, which only had a hyphen. That’s because BCSC reported zero such instances last year, according to Stalbaum.
Of the 142 incidents, 124 were information-only first reports of injury, 18 were medical-only first reports of injury and there were zero indemnity-only first reports of injury during the 2023-24 school year.
Information-only refers to “anytime a student and staff member had an incident that the staff member went to our nurse, and our school nurse reported this incident in our reporting system,” according to Stalbaum.
“Let’s say that a staff member opens the door for students, and students are going out the door to recess, and a staff member and the student bump into each other upon exiting the door (or) the staff member might bump into the door,” she said.
The staff member may go to the school nurse to get an ice pack or bandage, she said. Or, “maybe it’s just, ‘Hey, I bumped into the door, a student bumped into me and I bumped into the door’ — that would be included in the information-only claim.”
The 18 medical-only first reports of injury refers to times when a staff member reports an injury and receives medical treatment, but does not lose any time from work.
BCSC opted to report all 142 information-only incidents, whereas other school corporations in Indiana only reported medical and indemnity claims, according to BCSC officials.
Staulbaum said they plan to talk “with the Indiana Department of Education to further define the reporting parameters for this report” the next time around.
According to BCSC Superintendent Chad Phillips, there may also be legislation coming next session that will make what IDOE is looking for more clear.
“Information that I’ve heard is we should expect to see legislation this spring to clarify the intent of the legislative action from before, and exactly what the ramifications are if districts do not submit them,” he said.
In terms of looking forward, Staulbaum said BCSC meets quarterly with their workers compensation provider to analyze trends and look for means of improvement. In addition, employee injury data will be integrated into the district’s performance dashboard “sometime in the next quarter,” Phillips said.
Board member Todd Grimes, District 3, observed the report is “far from comparing apples to apples” going on to say, “I’ve been in the business long enough to see plenty of school education data paint less than an accurate, consistent picture, and this obviously more than fits that category.”
Board member Dale Nowlin, District 5, said he was dismayed that IDOE would even release the report given the data requested was not uniform for school districts across the state.
“I have to say it’s terribly disappointing that the DOE would even put out such an incomplete and misleading report. I don’t know if your conversations with them have gone far enough with them to know if their intention was for school districts to do what we did, or to do what some of the other districts did in terms of just reporting (indemnity and medical-only first report of injuries).”
That question is still being defined, but that has not been completely defined for us yet, Stalbaum responded.
Wheeldon, who works as a plant manager for Cummins, recognized the reporting process as “very OSHA-like.”
“There’s actually ratios that people will try to look for — you want (information-only incidents) to be healthy, because it tells you that you have a good safety culture. And I will say, having worked in a manufacturing site for many years, getting a good safety culture is like nine-tenths of the battle,” Wheeldon said. “… I know we have a lot of work to do— a count of one is too many. But it’s good to see numbers that we can work with and improve upon.”
