Supporting your students’ mental health and wellness is more important than ever. For students to thrive and achieve their potential, they need to feel safe and secure. Yet, we know that too many students are struggling. This is where a student wellness monitoring solution can provide invaluable support.
Know Which Students Need Help Now with Student Wellness Monitoring
You want to be sure students get the support they need, when they need it the most. But unless a student reaches out to you for assistance, you may have no indication that they’re struggling.
Despite their best intentions to support students in need, student services teams are stretched thin. School psychologists, counselors, social workers, and safety specialists can only do so much on their own. With limited time and resources, it can feel impossible to know for sure which students are suffering.
You can know with a student wellness monitoring solution.
Student Wellness Monitoring Alerts You to Signs of Student Suicide, Violence, and Bullying
Capable of detecting signs of risk across a range of safety, mental health, and wellness concerns, a student wellness monitoring solution alerts school staff to signs of student distress in emails, IMs, social media posts, web searches, and more. As risk signals are identified, teams are alerted so they can investigate and respond in a targeted and efficient way.
Student wellness monitoring is an invaluable tool, helping K-12 schools support students’ safety and wellness, even when mental health resources are in short supply. But not all monitoring solutions are created equally.
7 Essential Requirements of Student Wellness Monitoring Software
When evaluating a student wellness monitoring solution for your school, you’ll want to develop a list of requirements to ensure the solution meets your needs. Here are seven capabilities you’ll want to evaluate, as well as why they’re important.
1. Detects a comprehensive set of student safety and wellness risks
When investing in a student safety and wellness monitoring solution, you want it to cover as many risks and threats as possible. Evaluate a provider’s ability to detect a range of distress signals, including indicators of:
- Self-harm
- Suicide
- Drug use and overdose
- Depression
- Grief
- Violence
- Bullying and cyberbullying
- Eating disorders
- Pornography
- Gambling
2. Analyzes students’ online activities across a range of vectors
To identify students who may be struggling in silence, you need visibility into a wide range of online activities and content. Make sure a student wellness monitoring solution analyzes student activity across social media, email, documents, conversational AI, and web browsing, as well as across all operating systems and school-issued devices.
3. Relies on AI-driven analysis as the first line of defense
Not all student monitoring solutions work in the same way. Some rely on human reviewers to search students’ online activities for signs that a student may be at risk. Others rely on sophisticated AI-driven software to detect these signals, with the option of adding expert human review.
Using software instead of human reviewers as the first line of defense provides peace of mind that you’ll be notified quickly of critical situations. It also ensures student data privacy is prioritized and maintained.
4. Provides 24/7 alert management and rapid emergency notification
Many schools want to ensure students are safe and secure both when they’re at school and outside of school hours. However, they may not have the resources to analyze alerts themselves or may not want to burden their teams after hours.
AI-powered student wellness monitoring that’s augmented by human analysis lets you determine the level of support you need. That could be 24/7 or during specific hours only. You get the help of trained experts to review your alerts, assess the level of risk, and notify designated school personnel. You can also ensure your students are always supported without overburdening your own team.
When a student is contemplating suicide or self-harm, the ability to respond immediately is crucial. You want to inquire about typical response times to be sure you’ll be notified in minutes of critical-risk situations.
5. Supports early identification of safety and wellness concerns
AI-driven student wellness monitoring software can scan large volumes of data for a range of distress signals in real-time. This capability is critical when quick intervention is needed. However, student wellness monitoring software should be able to do more than just alert schools of immediate student risks.
The ultimate goal is to identify students who are struggling as early as possible, long before they reach a breaking point. To do that, you need a monitoring solution that helps you keep a constant pulse on student safety and wellness, and easily identify students in need of support. Student wellness monitoring that provides Student Wellness Level monitoring helps support staff triage student cases and allocate resources most effectively.
To learn more, read the blog.
6. Includes automated, preventative tools
Student wellness monitoring software can help prevent suicide, self-harm, cyberbullying, and violence by alerting school staff to students who represent a risk to themselves or others. AI-powered student wellness monitoring software that’s capable of automating real-time intervention takes prevention a step further and can even save lives.
Bullying Prevention: Detects hurtful language in messages as they’re being written and prompts students to “think twice” before they hit send. Being able to intervene in real time is the only way to stop bullying and cyberbullying before it happens.
Wellness Intervention: Detects increasingly concerning online activities and automatically presents the student with a pop-up message in their web browser to offer support and links to helpful resources. Proactively providing a struggling student with mental health resources and encouraging them to reach out for help has the potential to save lives.
7. Provides critical data insights
AI-driven student wellness monitoring software scans large volumes of student data. The applications of this data aren’t limited to identifying student risk signals, though.
The data collected by a student wellness monitoring solution can provide rich insights into student safety and wellness. When paired with automated data collection and analysis, this real-time data empowers schools to make data-driven decisions. This data can be tailored to identify MTSS and PBIS interventions, assess SEL/CASEL competence, and support a host of other needs.
To learn more, read the blog.
Support Student Safety, Wellness, and Mental Health
To support the safety, wellness, and mental health of your students, you need to have visibility into how they’re really doing. Student wellness monitoring provides the early indicators and insights you need to support students, even when your resources are limited.
The capabilities detailed here are essential. However, there are also compatibility requirements, student data privacy considerations, and other technical must-haves that your IT team will want to evaluate before choosing a student wellness monitoring solution.
Our complete buyer’s guide provides everything you need to make the right choice for your school.
