Georgia School Boards Association (GSBA) was named among the recipients of the prestigious Theo Award, which honors organizations demonstrating excellence in workers’ compensation, injury prevention, and program innovations across industries.
This recognition highlights GSBA’s success in elevating an already strong workers’ compensation program into a data-driven, scalable model that’s improving outcomes for school districts across the state. In partnership with Charles Taylor, GSBA formalized a statewide safety and risk control strategy built to protect students, staff, and facilities for the long term.
Background
GSBA provides comprehensive, school-focused risk solutions for Georgia’s districts, with an emphasis on proactive risk identification, early intervention, and strong safety culture development. Through expert guidance, targeted training, and continuous support, GSBA helps districts strengthen resilience, reduce exposure, and maintain safe learning environments statewide.
Challenge
The workers’ compensation landscape keeps growing more complex, shaped by rising medical costs, evolving regulatory demands, workforce shortages, and an aging workforce. Even organizations with strong safety cultures have to keep innovating to maintain performance and guard against complacency.
GSBA had long operated within a proactive, prevention-focused framework, but sustaining best-in-class results called for something more structured and scalable. The challenge wasn’t fixing a reactive system. It was elevating an already strong program into one that could deliver measurable, repeatable impact across the entire state.
Solution
GSBA expanded and formalized a comprehensive safety and risk control program built around the operational realities of school districts. Claims are administered by Charles Taylor, whose analytics and reporting give GSBA critical insight into trends, root causes, and emerging risks. Those findings help drive targeted, proactive safety interventions.
The strategy includes using claims analytics to identify trends and design safety initiatives, increasing member engagement in safety services and structured training, and providing accessible, high-quality safety resources to every affiliated district. GSBA also distributes monthly safety and risk control communications on the first of each month and publishes its Safety Scenarios bulletin on the 15th to reinforce continuous learning and situational awareness.
Key partnerships and technology have strengthened these prevention efforts further, with Charles Taylor’s claims expertise helping keep data analytics and claims management aligned with the broader prevention strategy.
As member participation has grown, districts have adopted more consistent safety practices, helping build a statewide culture centered on prevention rather than reaction.
Results
This coordinated, data-driven approach, supported by GSBA leadership and Charles Taylor, has produced measurable improvements across the program. Loss costs have decreased over the past decade, resulting in lower workers’ compensation rates for participating members. Dividend payments have been issued to participating members every year since 2022, and member satisfaction is at an all-time high. Safety performance and claims exposure continue to improve as more districts adopt GSBA’s guidance and resources.
For Cliff Cole, Director of Risk Management at GSBA, the recognition reflects the people at the center of that work.
“What makes this recognition especially meaningful is knowing the work behind it is helping protect the people who serve our schools every day. We’ve built this program by listening to our members, learning from the data, and working closely with partners like Charles Taylor to keep improving.”
GSBA’s model shows how a proactive, collaborative safety strategy can meaningfully improve workers’ compensation results while strengthening the well-being of school communities statewide. This year’s Theo Award recognizes the work GSBA has done to build and continuously strengthen that program.
