Every 7 minutes, a child is bullied. An estimated 160,000 students skip school every day due to fear of bullying. And most alarmingly, bullied students are 2.5 times more likely to attempt suicide. For school administrators and educators, these aren’t just numbers: they’re a call to action for bullying prevention.
Bullying is no longer just a discipline issue, it threatens your ability to create a safe environment for students to learn and grow.
Read on to learn how combining traditional methods of bullying prevention with new technology tools can improve bullying identification and prevention.
Traditional Bullying Prevention: A Solid Foundation
Schools have been implementing strategies to prevent bullying for years, including:
- Clear anti-bullying policies and procedures
- Staff training on recognizing and addressing bullying
- Student education on empathy and conflict resolution
- Counseling services for both victims and perpetrators
- Parent and community engagement initiatives
These traditional methods form the foundation for creating a positive school climate. However, they often rely heavily on what school staff can directly observe or what students voluntarily report.
Teachers and staff can’t be everywhere, though. Also, not all students seek help when they’re being bullied. Whether because they fear retaliation, are embarrassed, or blame themselves, there are students right now who are suffering in silence.
Furthermore, technology introduces new ways to inflict bullying through cyberbullying. These digital attacks may be hidden from teachers’ view and can be deeply personal. For all of these reasons, schools need new ways to combat bullying and the trauma it causes.
Double Down on Bullying Prevention with the Help of Two Technology Tools
In addition to traditional anti-bullying measures, innovative educational technology tools can significantly enhance your bullying prevention measures. Securly offers two solutions that work alongside your existing strategies to provide a comprehensive defense against bullying.
1. Securly Aware: Your 24/7 Digital Safety Net
Imagine having a vigilant assistant that never sleeps, constantly monitoring your students’ digital interactions for signs of bullying and other emotional distress. That’s Securly Aware, an AI-powered student wellness monitoring solution.
Acting like an always-on extra set of eyes and ears, Securly Aware scans your students’ digital interactions for risk signals of bullying—as well as self-harm, suicide, depression, and violence—that might otherwise slip through the cracks. When it detects these risks, it alerts school officials so they can investigate and intervene quickly, before a situation escalates.
Securly Aware’s innovative ThinkTwice feature also provides an effective defense against cyberbullying. Capable of detecting hurtful language as it’s being typed, ThinkTwice prompts students to reconsider before sending emails and messages that contain bullying language. This simple intervention could be all that’s needed to prevent many instances of cyberbullying before they occur.
In addition to alerting schools of risk signals, Securly Aware helps you monitor your students’ overall well-being so you can address brewing issues quickly. Each student is assigned a Wellness Level based on the presence or absence of risk signals in their online interactions. You can monitor Wellness Levels at the school level to assess school climate, as well the student level to identify students whose wellness levels are critical or trending negatively.
By helping you know how your students are really doing, Securly Aware gives you the insights you need to address issues quickly and foster a positive, supportive environment where every student can thrive.
2. Securly Pass: Regain Control of Student Movement
Secret student meetups during class are never a good thing. These clandestine get-togethers in the bathrooms and hidden corners are commonly the breeding ground for dangerous and risky behaviors, including bullying.
Securly Pass is a digital hall pass that tracks hall pass requests and approvals. You gain real-time visibility into which students are using hall passes, why, and for what locations.
With a reliable record of hall pass usage, you can investigate reports of bullying to see which students were using hall passes at that time. You can also identify patterns that indicate bullying so you can address them proactively. Are certain students frequently in the same unsupervised areas? Are there locations in your school that seem to be hotspots for concerning behavior?
To reverse these patterns, you can set limits on hall pass usage at a schoolwide, grade, or student level. If you need to keep certain students apart, for example, Securly Pass lets you restrict them from requesting passes at the same time. And should you need to address bullying with a student’s family, you have a reliable electronic record of their hall pass usage to validate their involvement, as well as defend disciplinary actions.
Equally important, implementing Securly Pass reinforces expectations about conduct and accountability, and encourages students to take ownership for their behavior. In fact, many schools report significant reductions in hall pass use after implementing Securly Pass.
Implementing a Comprehensive Approach to Combat Bullying and Cyberbullying
When you integrate these technological solutions with your existing bullying prevention strategies, you create a multi-layered defense against bullying:
- Let Securly Aware be your digital eyes and ears, catching hurtful or threatening online interactions that human observation can’t detect
- Use the insights from Securly Aware to inform and refine your bullying prevention policies, making them more targeted and effective
- Deploy Securly Pass to formalize expectations around hall pass usage and impose restrictions to thwart bullying attempts
- Train your staff to leverage these tools effectively, creating a seamless blend of human insight and technological support
- Engage students and families in meaningful discussions about bullying and cyberbullying, even using real examples if needed (anonymized, of course) to drive home the need for a strong anti-bullying policy and prevention tools.
Strengthen Your Bullying Prevention Measures with Securly
School administrators and educators carry a heavy responsibility for providing safe and inclusive learning environments. Technology tools like Securly Aware and Securly Pass are giving them the help they need to more effectively identify and prevent bullying, and foster a positive school climate and culture.
To learn more, visit www.securly.com.