School districts have a wide variety of exposures and types of injuries. School districts have a wide range of injury rates per 1,000 enrollments. To provide districts insured by Liberty Mutual with feedback on how their results compare to other districts we conducted a study to look at causes of injuries, injury rates per 1,000 enrollments and specific actions that school districts can take to help reduce the injury potential by implementing programs and exposure specific control measures.
We identified the school districts by using loss data for policyholders identified in the SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) 8211 elementary and secondary schools and NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) 611 Educational Services. Around 200 schools or school districts were identified. The district sizes ranged from just under 200 students to well over 10,000 students. The median size was close to 2,000 students. Public sources of information were used to obtain the enrollment data allowing us to calculate injury rates and verify the policyholders were school districts.
Enrolled students, was selected as the injury rate measure. This allowed us a common measure that would be more constant than payroll. There are some potential distortions due to the programs and maintenance outsourcing. Schools with larger special education programs may have more exposure to specials needs staff injuries. Schools that contract for food service or maintenance would have lower injury exposures. The benchmarks were not adjusted to take these distortions into account.
Over 3,000 injuries were reviewed. All of the injuries occurred in 2008. The loss data was valued as of May 1, 2009. Injury costs were reviewed and are shown in the average cost per injury. Injury cost benchmarks are not included due to varying state worker's compensation laws that may have higher incurred costs in one state than another.
