Earthquake events are inevitable but the consequences of earthquake disasters are partially
controllable using an effective risk management system, since the seismic risk is the interaction
of ground shaking intensity with the built environment. A systematic risk-based method is
proposed for assessing the resilience capacities of school buildings exposed to varying levels of
seismic risk. This approach screens and monitors the equivalent seismic performance of buildings
by the means of new composite risk index (FSRi). The process of performance assessment of
existing buildings is usually performed through walk-down surveys and associated with expert
judgments which are often highly subjective. The pervasive nature of uncertainty within the risk
assessment process often ignored or not completely reflected within the existing models. To
handle the uncertainty associated with risk attributes, fuzzy set theory was used to characterize
the uncertain qualitative information. The application of the model was applied to retrofitting
school buildings in Iran. The screening results reveal that the composite risk index (FSRi) does not
necessarily follow its factors’ trends and therefore relying on sole factors such as hazard and
vulnerability may mislead the decision making process . Therefore seismic mitigation decisions
should be made in compliance with the multi dimensional aspects of seismic risk as an
aggregated index rather , such as FSRi.