Secure entrances, emergency response plans, and well-trained staff are foundational elements of a school safety strategy. However, schools need to go beyond traditional campus safety to provide a truly safe environment.
To ensure safety and security measures are keeping pace with an expanding threat landscape, private schools need to shore up gaps in physical safety, as well as extend protections against digital risks.
Here are the most vulnerable areas to evaluate:
Lack of Visibility into Student Movement
Many smaller schools may still be managing hall passes using manual methods, like a clipboard and paper passes. This can hinder responsiveness in the event of a lockdown or emergency. Without real-time visibility into student movement, school staff may waste precious minutes trying to quickly locate and account for students.
Visitor Management Gaps
Private schools are preferred because they promise a tight-knit and safe community. That promise, however, hinges on maintaining strict security. If visitor management controls are lax, schools are vulnerable to potential entry by unauthorized or dangerous individuals. Schools need an efficient and reliable way to verify visitor identities, confirm they’re safe to be on campus, and ensure students are released only to authorized parents or caregivers.
Exposure to Inappropriate or Harmful Content
The rise of technology use in schools presents new learning opportunities, as well as new safety threats. Without content filtering in place, students can accidentally or intentionally access inappropriate or harmful content online. School web filters (aka content filters) address this risk. But some school web filters provide only the most basic block and allow capability. This forces school IT and technology teams to implement overly broad restrictions, which often means access to educational content is restricted, as well. This frustrates teachers and students, and it places an inordinate burden on tech staff to try to overcome these limitations.
Cyberbullying Risks
Some families seek a private education specifically because they’re seeking a safe, bully-free space for their children. Keeping your school community free from bullying in a technology-driven world requires a broader approach to bullying prevention that encompasses cyberbullying. Technology that’s capable of detecting and addressing cyberbullying helps schools enforce a zero-tolerance bullying policy.
Increases in Self-Harm and Suicide
Sadly, no school is immune to the reality of student self-harm and suicide. While not exactly a school safety issue, such a crisis does shake a school community to its core. Schools are in a unique position to identify children who are demonstrating signs of mental and emotional distress. Furthermore, students struggling with mental health often leave clues in their online searches and interactions. When schools have a way to detect these distress signals, they can intervene before a situation gets worse.
Data Silos and Limited Insights
Edtech tools, like school web filters, collect large and diverse amounts of data. The data being collected can provide invaluable insights into school safety, school climate, student mental health, and more. Without an easy way to aggregate and analyze these data sets, however, school leaders and teachers aren’t able to take advantage of the insights that they hold. AI-powered data collection and analysis is overcoming this challenge to make data-driven decision making a reality.
Cybersecurity Threats
The data schools collect and store must be treated with the utmost respect to protect against cybersecurity threats and ensure student data privacy and security is maintained. Data privacy and security isn’t just a matter of cybersecurity, though; it’s essential to maintaining a school environment of trust and safety. When evaluating technology tools and data management practices, schools must carefully evaluate the measures being taken to ensure that data privacy and security are prioritized so they can maintain the safe and trust-based environment they’ve worked so hard to create.
Remember, in the competitive world of private education, a comprehensive approach to safety isn’t just about ticking boxes — it’s about creating an environment where students can thrive and families feel confident in their school choices.
This information is courtesy of Securly, which supports more than 20,000 schools with SafetyOS, a unified ecosystem for web filtering, student wellness, and classroom management that helps keep students safe and supported, www.securly.com.
