The question every principal asks: how many people do I need, and for how long?
The formula
One safety planner per 160 students, across a four-day screening week.
That comes from three numbers, and a school can change any of them:
- Four hours of planner time a day. Nobody does this all day.
- About an hour per student, door to door. The conversation, the plan, the call home, the care coordination row and the debrief. The conversation itself is shorter; the hour is what the student actually costs.
- A planning assumption of 10 percent High Risk.
That 10 percent is deliberately conservative. Real High Risk rates run well under it, typically between 2 and 5. Plan for 10 and be pleasantly surprised. A team staffed for 2 percent that meets 5 percent on Tuesday breaks the two-hour standard on Wednesday.
What that looks like
Four days, because most schools do a grade a day and keep Friday for the students who were absent.
| Planners | Safety plans in the week | Students it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 16 | 160 |
| 2 | 32 | 320 |
| 3 | 48 | 480 |
| 4 | 64 | 640 |
| 5 | 80 | 800 |
| 6 | 96 | 960 |
| 7 | 112 | 1,120 |
Find your enrollment in the right-hand column and read across. If you sit between two rows, take the higher one.
Four plans in a day is one planner's four hours, and it is also what Module 12.4 calls a lot. That is not a coincidence. The hour per student is what keeps the two numbers agreeing, and a school that pushes past four plans a planner is spending something the table cannot show.
Then name twice as many
The table is working capacity. The roster is double it.
Every planner needs a named backup, so a school covering 480 students names six people and schedules three. The backup is not optional: it is the difference between a hard Thursday and a broken standard, and somebody will be out sick.
> ✓ Take Action. Write both lists on the work plan. Planners, by name. Backups, by name. A backup who finds out on the morning is not a backup.
Worked example
A school of 500 students, screened across four days.
- Plan for 50 High Risk across the week. Realistically expect 10 to 25.
- At an hour each, that is a ceiling of about 50 planner-hours, and a realistic load nearer 15.
- Four planners, four hours a day, four days is 64 planner-hours. Covers the planning assumption with room, and covers the realistic load several times over.
- Three planners is 48 hours. Fine for what will actually happen, two hours short of the conservative ceiling.
- Two planners is 32 hours. Adequate for the realistic load, well short of the planning assumption, and it breaks entirely if one is out sick.
So: four planners and four named backups. In year one there are often more hands than that, because SAFER is in the building. The table is what the school needs when SAFER is not.
The thing the table cannot protect you from
Capacity across a week does not protect the two-hour standard inside a single morning.
If a whole grade screens in one period, every High Risk student from that grade appears at once. A team with plenty of hours left in the week can still have four students waiting and two planners free.
> Staff for the biggest single period, not for the week's average. Same instinct as staffing for day one rather than the average day, one level finer. See Module 3.4.
Critical Reflection. Look at your actual roster for the week you are considering. Not the roster on paper. Who is already committed to an IEP meeting, a 504, a field trip, a personal day? The people who build safety plans are the same people who do everything else.
Who can do this
A safety planner needs the training. They do not need to be a therapist. See Module 5.5.
Candidates, in rough order of how often they work out: school counsellors, district therapists or social workers, SAFER team members, local agency clinicians brought in for the week, school psychologists.
✓ Take Action. Name your planners now, by name, on the work plan. Then name a backup for each one. The backup is not optional; it is the difference between a hard Thursday and a broken standard.
The two jobs that are not planning
Someone owns the queue. Watching the board, assigning students, making sure nobody is waiting past the standard and nobody gets pulled twice. This is a real job and it is full-time during a screening block.
Someone owns the planners. Reading the wellbeing question on the debrief form, and empowered to tell a planner to stop for the day. Not the same person as the queue owner, who is busy, and structurally the wrong person to ask because they need the planner to keep going. See Module 12.4.
