Angel Cholka recalls being awakened by police lights in the middle of the night. She had no idea her daughter Madi had just texted a friend about plans to overdose on anxiety medication. Student wellness monitoring software on Madi’s school-issued Chromebook had picked up the concerning text and alerted the school’s counseling team. This initiated a rapid response by emergency personnel that saved Madi’s life.

This powerful story, which was featured in a December 2024 article in The New York Times, is just one of thousands of stories of how student wellness monitoring has helped schools identify students in crisis so that those students could receive critical intervention before it was too late.

The vast majority of these stories aren’t publicized out of respect for privacy (Securly alone has documented more than 2,000 cases where student wellness monitoring provided the alert needed to save a student in crisis). But that doesn’t change the sobering reality that millions of students are struggling with mental health challenges, and help is needed to identify and support them before crisis points are reached.

Mental Health: The Student Safety Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

The statistics about youth mental health are scary. Research conducted by the CDC reveals that one in five high-school students have considered suicide, and half of them—approximately 1.5 million students—have made an attempt. 

What makes this crisis particularly challenging is that it’s often invisible. Many students have become adept at masking their struggles, sharing their pain only through digital channels like web searches, social media posts, or text messages. This digital realm has become both a refuge and a risk. It may feel to students like a safe space to express their darkest thoughts, but without the right systems in place, their calls for help will go unheard.

How Student Wellness Monitoring Helps Schools Help Their Students

Schools occupy a unique position in addressing student mental health. For many students, school represents their primary community outside the home. As such, it should be a safe space where caring adults are able to notice when a child is struggling and offer support. However, the reality of staff shortages combined with growing student needs makes this increasingly challenging.

Traditional approaches to identification rely heavily on students speaking up or showing visible signs of distress. But we know that many students in crisis don’t raise their hands for help. With counselor-to-student ratios often exceeding 1:500, even the most well-intentioned counselors risk missing signs of distress, especially among students who express their pain in quieter ways.

Bringing Student Mental Health Out of the Shadows

The New York Times article didn’t just share student wellness monitoring “success” stories; it sought to explore if the technology’s pros outweigh the cons. Chief among the cons are concerns about student privacy.

Student privacy is a growing concern as edtech tools become pervasive and more data about students is being gathered and stored. Protecting students’ personal information is a valid concern worthy of thoughtful approaches, especially in the context of student safety and wellness. And the instinct to protect student privacy in their most vulnerable moments is understandable. Privacy protections help ensure that students’ sensitive personal information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, or expose them to judgment, discrimination, or even punishment.

But it’s also worth considering how efforts to shield students from exposure might be harmful, too. When privacy becomes synonymous with secrecy, isn’t it inadvertently reinforcing the isolation that makes mental health challenges so dangerous in the first place? In our efforts to protect students from exposure, could we be missing crucial opportunities to connect them with support?

Overcoming Concerns to Ensure Students Don’t Suffer in Silence

When the privacy conversation is reframed in this way, the challenge is no longer about whether to monitor or not, but about how to bring mental health challenges out of the shadows while also respecting students’ dignity and autonomy. Through this lens, we can ask different questions, like how do we create environments where students feel safe being vulnerable? How do we ensure that identification leads to support and not stigma?

Student wellness monitoring can play a vital role in this evolution. As one director of counseling services explained to The New York Times, student wellness monitoring is helping stretched support teams identify students who need help. The technology serves as an extra set of eyes and ears, helping counselors and support staff:

• Know which students need help
• Respond quickly to students in crisis
• Direct limited resources where they’re needed most
• Identify risks earlier, before they become critical

Student Wellness Monitoring That’s Responsible & Effective

Ultimately, the decision to use student wellness monitoring shouldn’t require making a choice between safety and privacy. Instead, the focus should be on how to implement this life-saving technology as responsibly and effectively as possible. 

Key considerations for schools include:

• Evaluating how a monitoring solution protects student privacy
• Evaluating how a monitoring solution improves accuracy
• Ensuring staff are trained and know how to respond to alerts 
• Communicating with families about the use and purpose of monitoring
• Creating a culture of safety and security, where monitoring is part of a larger ecosystem of support

Gain the Insight You Need to Better Support Your Students

Stories like Angel Cholka’s remind us of what’s at stake. While student privacy should be prioritized, it shouldn’t prevent schools from using tools that have proven effective at saving student lives.

It’s also critical to recognize that the intended purpose of student wellness monitoring is not surveillance or spying—it’s supporting student safety and wellbeing by identifying those students who are suffering in silence. When the right monitoring technology is implemented thoughtfully and responsibly, it does this job effectively without jeopardizing student privacy. 

If your school is seeking ways to better support student safety and wellness, a tool like Securly Aware student wellness monitoring can help.

To learn more, visit www.securly.com/aware.

If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, help is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 in the US, or calling 111 in the UK.