As educational institutions prepare for summer and the back-to-school season, a lot of uncertainties remain. What will schools look like when (or even if) they reopen? How will schools offer PD to their staff? What about complying with state and federal training mandates? Will face-to-face training and PD still be an option?

Making a Smooth Transition to Online Training

As you adjust your safety and compliance training plans, an affordable, easy-to-implement alternative is to utilize online courses. You can easily automate your staff training AND policy acceptance online with the SafeSchools Online Training System, which features automatic training plans that are customizable by role, location, or individual training needs, new hire training plans, email notifications, easy real-time reporting, and built-in policy acceptance to simplify training management. Here are five ways SafeSchools Training can support your transition to online training:

1. 100% School-Focused Training. Access and assign hundreds of courses, all written by leading K-12 experts. Each course includes scenarios in school settings so the content is relevant and applicable. Our courses can help you maintain compliance with state and federal training mandates, including OSHA, Title IX, Mandatory Reporting, FERPA, and more, even in a remote learning environment.
2. Full Automation. Your administration can schedule and completely automate your staff training and policy acceptance through our easy-to-use online system. Every course completion is tracked automatically and reports are delivered right to your inbox.
3. Policy Acceptance and Custom Course Creation. Upload and track district- or school-specific policies right alongside your staff training. Our Custom Course Tool allows schools/districts to create their own courses in our system and assign them to staff. These features can easily help your school or district distribute new information or policies related to COVID-19 to your staff.
4. Flexible and Convenient. Your staff will appreciate the flexibility of taking their assigned training when it’s most convenient for their schedules, from any web-enabled device.
5. On-Demand Access to Training Content to Meet Rapidly Changing Needs. As you deal with rapidly changing plans and new guidelines, you may need new or different training resources for your school staff. Our new Coronavirus courses can help you address topics, such as CDC guidelines for using cloth face masks, disinfecting common work areas, and managing stress and anxiety. And new Trauma-Informed Practices courses in our Exceptional Child course library can help you address the growing concerns around student mental health and trauma that may result from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Districts Around the Country Successfully Use Online Training

Our customers have turned to SafeSchools Training to help them continue to provide important training to their staff during this time more than ever. We’ve had over 25 million online course completions in the past 12 months! Which is a 34% increase over the previous year. In fact, we had a record-setting number of course completions in March and April.

One of the questions that we get asked the most is “what are your top taken courses?” Here are the top 15 courses with the most completions from the first half of 2020: 

1. Coronavirus Awareness
2. Bloodborne Pathogen Exposure Prevention
3. Sexual Harassment: Staff-to-Staff
4. Bullying: Recognition & Response
5. Child Abuse: Mandatory Reporting
6. Common Illness Prevention
7. Youth Suicide: Awareness, Prevention and Postvention
8. FERPA: Confidentiality of Records
9. Slips, Trips and Falls
10. Email and Messaging Safety
11. Stress Management
12. De-Escalation Strategies
13. Discrimination Awareness in the Workplace
14. Back Injury and Lifting
15. Coronavirus: Preparing your Household

Other top courses include Communication Styles and Skills, Active Shooter, First Aid, Student Mental Health, Diversity Awareness: Staff-to-Staff, Students Experiencing Homelessness: Awareness and Understanding, Cultural Competence and Racial Bias, Sexual Misconduct: Staff-to-Student, Fire Extinguisher Safety, and Disruptive Student Behavior.

To learn how SafeSchools Training can help your school or district with safety and compliance training, email us at [email protected]. You can also request a free trial.

On-Demand Webinar with Dr. Scott Poland

Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for teens in the U.S., and suicide rates have doubled for middle school aged girls in the last decade. The 2017 YRBS results from the CDC found that 7.4% of high school students surveyed admitted to making a suicide attempt in the last 12 months, and the few states that surveyed middle school students found that 10% made a suicide attempt in the last 12 months. This webinar outlines a comprehensive youth suicide prevention plan for schools, and will help school personnel understand how to support suicidal or grieving students if a suicide has tragically occurred in their school community in order to reduce suicide contagion.

Youth Suicide Webinar Topics

1. Protective factors and primary prevention programs to prevent youth suicide.
2. Key myths about suicide.
3. Designing a comprehensive best practices model for suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention in the schools.
4. The relationship between self-injury and suicide.
5. Best practices in suicide postvention.
6. Lessons from a number of legal cases where schools were sued following a youth suicide.
7. Understanding the complex relationship between bullying and suicide.

Complete the form below to view the webinar recording. 

About the Presenter – Dr. Scott Poland

Dr. Poland is a Professor at CPS and the Co-Director of the Suicide and Violence Prevention Office at Nova Southeastern University. He is an internationally recognized expert on school crisis and youth suicide and has authored five books on the subject. He previously directed psychological services for a large Texas district for 24 years and is a past President of the National Association of School Psychologists and a past Prevention Division Director for the American Association of Suicidology. He recently authored the Suicide Safer School Plan for Texas and the Crisis Action School Toolkit on Suicide for Montana. He was a founding member of the National Emergency Assistance Team and has assisted schools/communities after tragedies such as school shootings, suicides, and acts of terrorism. He has received the Houston Wage Peace Award and the Parkland Helping the Community Heal Award. Dr. Poland is the author of SafeSchools Training Staff and Student Courses on bullying, suicide, threat assessment, and managing the aftermath of tragedy.

Last year, we saw an uptick in news stories on educational institutions and cyber attacks. That aligns with a report from the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center featured in Education Week that found that in 2019 cyber attacks on schools had tripled. The report partially credits the increase to more schools being so reliant on technology. Unfortunately, cyber attacks don’t show any signs of slowing down, and during this stressful time of the coronavirus pandemic, hackers and cybercriminals are taking advantage of people’s fears by using coronavirus-related phishing email schemes.

Coronavirus-Related Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks can happen when a hacker sends a mass email to staff, pretending to be a district official and asking, for instance, for help in purchasing gift cards. But emailers can also go after employee payroll information, in order to steal employees’ identity and tax information. In the case of these new coronavirus-related attacks, these emails are meant to look like official alerts from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as trusted personnel like health specialists and even your workplace management team.

As we all are trying to stay up-to-date on coronavirus news, this makes us even more susceptible to these scams.

Here are some tips to spot a phishing email:

• Legitimate government agencies will never ask for sensitive information via email. You should never give out personal information to an unfamiliar source via email.
• If the sender is urging you to take an immediate action and provide personal information, the email is most likely a phishing attack.
• Before clicking on anything, verify that the email, sender, and link are legitimate.
• Spelling and grammatical errors are very common in phishing emails.
  
• Most phishing emails use generic greetings and probably won’t use your name.
  
• If the email contains information on a vaccine or treatment, delete it. You wouldn’t find out about a treatment or vaccine via an email from an unknown source.
• Do not donate if you are asked to send cash or wire money.
  

Example of a phishing email from someone posing as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), and asking recipients to donate money to a coronavirus fund.

Employee Training is Critical to Help Prevent Cyberattacks

While this is a time to come together and support one another, unfortunately cyber crime doesn’t stop. And, cybercriminals follow the headlines to try and capitalize on the public’s fears. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued an advisory to not click on any links from unknown sources. You should always get COVID-19 information from verified and trusted sources, like the CDC, WHO, and credible news organizations.

Your employees are part of your security solution (the most important part!) not the problem. A strong cybersecurity profile, just like any other aspect of your business, necessitates having a clear plan and training. Employees need to understand what the correct process is for communicating data and to avoid risky behaviors. Here is a helpful blog post from Vector Solutions on how to protect your remote workers from cybersecurity threats.

How SafeSchools Can Help

The SafeSchools Online Training System includes a suite of IT courses to help educate your staff on cybersecurity:

• Browser Security Basics
• Cybersecurity Overview
• Email and Messaging Safety
• Password Security Basics
• Protection Against Malware

For students, we offer Digital Citizenship courses for grades 6-8 and grades 9-12.

There is a mental health crisis in America, and many of America’s high school students are struggling. Fortunately, the government is recognizing the importance of this crisis. For example, the New York Times reported that Oregon and Utah passed new laws last year that allowed students to take sick days due to mental health. That there is now a need for such measures underscores the seriousness of the effects of mental health in education across the country.

These effects include mood swings, unpredictable behavior, discipline issues, and even school avoidance altogether. This has led to the increased importance of research shared by Maryville University that has found many connections between a student’s mindset and their education. The more a student struggles due to mental health issues, the more likely it is their education suffers, which in turn can become a deadly cycle. Depression and substance abuse are linked to over 90% of all suicide cases worldwide, and many students are part of that statistic. This is why schools need to give their students the necessary intervention to help them cope better with their sensitive situations. The suggestions below can help schools institutionalize support for students going through mental health issues.

Talk About Mental Health

Mental health issues must be talked about openly. As such, professor Damien Page of Leeds Beckett University recommends integrating mental health into the school curriculum. Doing so will increase everyone’s understanding of mental health and reduce the stigma associated with mental health struggles. Schools must start incorporating discussions about mental health, and make sure it is talked about in the same way as physical education and healthy eating. In this way, they can adopt a thorough approach to discussing mental health that supports all pupils.

Strengthen the School’s Mental Heath Care Program

Given the rising number of students who may want expert intervention on their conditions, it is crucial that schools augment their mental health care staff with more experts. In this way, they will be able to accommodate and help more students. For instance, they should consider collaborating with the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, the Center for School-Based Mental Health, or the Healthy Students, Promising Futures Learning Collaborative as they can help enhance a school’s mental health care program. Schools might also consider programs such as our Online Training System. This system offers a range of expert-authored courses that guide teaching staff on how to prevent incidents of suicide.

Start School a Bit Later

Support can come in many forms. Sometimes, making things a bit easier for your students is already a way of supporting them. 93% of high schools and 83% of middle schools start classes too early, and this has led doctors at the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend starting school no earlier than 8:30 AM. With this slight adjustment, students will be more likely to get the right amount of sleep for their age. Enough good sleep, of course, is known to foster mental and emotional resilience, as well as boost a person’s mood and enhance their well-being.

Establish Programs for Students’ Physical Health

People who are physically healthy are more likely to be mentally healthy too. So, address your students’ physical health needs as well. That means a public school should provide healthy meals daily, as students who regularly take healthy meals are more energetic and more attentive in class, and are less likely to experience food insecurity (a key cause of stress). Schools should also have a well-developed physical education program, one that gives students plenty of opportunities for physical activity. That’s because any form of exercise can improve one’s well-being. This, in turn, helps enormously in strengthening their mental health.

A Concerted Effort is Needed

Schools are the second home of students, and can play a big role in terms of helping students with their mental health. It is a role that will require a concerted effort among teachers and school administration so they can institutionalize programs such as those discussed above. This responsibility is one that schools need to step up to, especially given the potential trade-off: the chance to develop young men and women into responsible and mentally strong adults.

Written by Elizabeth Pate exclusively for SafeSchools.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and it’s vital school staff and administrators recognize potential mental health issues in students.

The statistics surrounding mental health are alarming. Here are some statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health:

• One in five children ages 13-18 have or will have a serious mental illness.
• 50% of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by age 14.
• 90% of those who died by suicide had an underlying mental illness.
• In 2017, suicide was the 2nd leading cause of death among people ages 10 to 34. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

The National Institute of Mental Health is a great resource for information on mental health as well as ways to get help.

It’s important for your staff to know and understand the link between student behavior and mental health. A student’s mental health affects his or her classroom behavior. When a student causes disruption in the classroom, it can often be an indicator of more serious issues.

Mental Health Awareness Tips

How can your staff identify and help a student with a potential mental illness? First, awareness is key. Be aware of the warning signs and changes in student behavior. If you have access to a school psychologist, he or she can be a valuable resource for students who may have potential mental health needs. If there isn’t a school psychologist readily available in your school or district, there should be a district policy or procedure you should follow to help students with potential mental health issues.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, warning signs of a mental illness include:

1. Feeling very sad or withdrawn for more than a two week period.
2. Trying to harm or kill oneself, or making plans to do so.
3. Severe mood swings.
4. Drastic changes in behavior, personality, or sleeping habits.
5. Out-of-control, risk-taking behaviors that can cause harm to self or others.
6. Sudden overwhelming fear for no reason, including a racing heart, physical discomfort, or fast breathing.
7. Intense worries or fears that get in the way of daily activities.
8. Significant weight loss or gain.
9. Repeated use of drugs or alcohol.
10. Extreme difficulty in concentrating or staying still that can lead to issues in school.

How SafeSchools Can Help

We’ve created a Mental Health Awareness Tip Sheet to help you identify potential cases of mental illness. Click here to download.

Here at Vector Solutions, developers of SafeSchools, we strive to make schools a safer and more inclusive place for all staff and students. That’s why we’ve developed solutions to help your district meet those goals.

Our SafeSchools Online Training System offers courses to help schools train their staff and students on important mental health related topics, including: 

Staff Training

1. Bullying: Recognition & Response
2. Cyberbullying
3. Making Schools Safe & Inclusive for LGBTQ Students
4. Making School Safe & Inclusive for Transgender Students
5. Student Mental Health
6. Youth Suicide: Awareness, Prevention & Postvention 

Student Training

1. Bullying and Cyberbullying (Grades 6-8)
2. Bullying and Cyberbullying (Grades 9-12)
3. Depression (Grades 9-12)*
4. Good Decision Making (Grades 9-12)*
5. Healthy Relationships (Grades 9-12)*
6. Resolving Disagreements (Grades 9-12)*
7. Stress & Anxiety (Grades 9-12)*
8. Youth Suicide Risk (Grades 6-8)
9. Youth Suicide Risk (Grades 9-12)
   

*Coming Fall 2020

We also offer SafeSchools Alert, our online tip reporting system that allows students, staff, and parents to confidentially report safety concerns to your administration 24/7/365 via mobile app, text, phone, email, and website.

For a free trial of SafeSchools Training or SafeSchools Alert, please fill out this form.

According to the American School Bus Council, an estimated 480,000 school buses carry 26 million children – more than half of America’s schoolchildren – each day, making school buses the largest form of mass transit in the U.S. and driver training a top priority for school districts. Our bus drivers have a great responsibility to keep our kids safe.

We know many drivers are not transporting students during this time with school closures, but this might be a good opportunity to address some of your drivers’ key training needs.

The National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) conducted a survey about how prepared transportation staff feel about bullying on the school bus. Here are a few key statistics from that report:

The most requested additional training topics, from the survey results, were: 

• Reporting responsibilities.
• Best practices for managing students and student behavior.
• How to defuse crisis situations.
• Better knowledge of community and social issues.

Cheryl Spittler, a school climate expert who has trained thousands of bus drivers in behavioral management, suggests three easy strategies school bus drivers can use to help maintain order on their bus: 

1. Get to know the students on your bus. “By getting to know your students and creating a safe space where they feel you are truly interested in them as individuals, they are more open to sharing potential concerns and are also more likely to comply with school bus rules,” said Spittler.
2. Be on the lookout for positive behavior as well as negative behavior. While it’s important to scan for harmful behavior such as bullying, it’s also important to acknowledge positive behavior from students (stepping in when someone is getting bullied, helping a younger student with their backpack, etc.).
3. Utilize anonymous tip boxes or an anonymous reporting system. A school bus is an extension of the school, so make sure your students are aware that they can also report safety concerns that occur on the school bus. Spittler emphasizes, “Make sure you’re always checking it, keeping it confidential and following through with them.”

How SafeSchools Can Help

Our SafeSchools Online Training System offers a suite of transportation-related courses. Staff can complete training on their own time, from any web-enabled device. Track group training as well with our Offline Training Tool!

We’ve partnered with the School Bus Safety Company (SBSC), the #1 provider of specialized school bus safety training, to deliver their expert-authored courses online through SafeSchools Training. Proven to reduce accidents by nearly 50%, these engaging courses include key practices that every bus driver should know to keep your students safe! Course categories include:

• Bullying Prevention
• Driver Training Course
• Training for CDL Written Test
• Transporting Students with Special Needs

SafeSchools Training customers may purchase the School Bus Safety Company courses as an optional Course Library add-on to their training system. Not a SafeSchools Training customer yet? Purchase just the SBSC courses, delivered through our award-winning online training system.

SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System

We also offer SafeSchools Alert, our online tip reporting system that allows students, staff, and parents to confidentially report safety concerns to your administration 24/7/365 via mobile app, text, phone, email, and website.

For more information on how SafeSchools can help your transportation staff improve student safety on the school bus, contact us at 1-800-434-0154 or [email protected].

As the debate continues around when and how schools will reopen following the COVID-19 pandemic, education leaders are focusing their discussions on what it will look like when they do. When schools do reopen, things will likely not immediately return to “normal” as schools may need to alter activities to maintain social distancing guidelines and avoid gatherings of large groups of students and staff.

These changes will no doubt have an impact on planned professional development activities during the coming months. While the end of the school year and the summer months are frequently used for PD in preparation for the following year, many planned activities may have to be cancelled or altered.

How Online Courses Can Help Districts Provide Remote Professional Development

As you adjust your PD plan, an affordable, easy-to-implement alternative is to utilize online courses. You can even pair online course content with virtual web conferencing to support more in depth professional learning. And in this time of ever-changing plans, turning to a trusted provider with expert-authored courses on a wide range of topics, can help you navigate this transition and roll out PD quickly to your remote staff.

• Address safety and compliance training needs with SafeSchools Training.
• Provide paraeducators, classroom teachers, and other school staff with PD on addressing the unique needs of students with exceptionalities with Exceptional Child
• Deliver specialized training to your bus drivers with the School Bus Safety Company

All of these course libraries can be delivered through our award-winning Online Staff Training System, which features automatic training plans which are customizable by role, location, or individual training needs, new hire training plans, email notifications, easy real-time reporting, and built in policy acceptance to simplify training management.

To learn more about how we can help support your upcoming training needs and find out about our multi-product discounts, please contact us at 800.434.0154 or [email protected] or Request a Free Trial!

In February, the U.S. Department of Education announced a new Title IX enforcement initiative, led by the Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The objective of this new initiative is to fight the rise of sexual assault in K-12 public schools.

Title IX requires that schools and districts take appropriate steps to address sexual discrimination. The requirements of Title IX apply to incidents of sexual misconduct, including incidents that involve both student-on-student misconduct and staff-on-student misconduct. According to data from the OCR, the number of K-12 sexual harassment and violence complaints is nearly 15 times higher than it was 10 years ago, with 9,700 incidents of sexual assault, rape, or attempted rape reported in public elementary and secondary schools in the 2015-2016 school year.

The new Title IX enforcement initiative will include the following activities: 

• Compliance Reviews – OCR will conduct nationwide compliance reviews to examine how sexual assault cases are handled in schools and districts.
• Public Awareness and Support – OCR will focus on increasing the awareness of sexual assault in K-12 schools among educators, school leaders, parents, and families.
• Data Quality Reviews – OCR will partner with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and will work with districts to ensure that incidents of sexual assault/sexual offenses are being accurately recorded and reported.
• Proposed Civil Rights Data Collection – OCR has proposed to more universally collect more detailed data on sexual assault.

While there are still questions regarding how proposed Title IX regulation changes will impact K-12 schools, it is clear from the new enforcement initiative, that K-12 school districts and schools should review their existing policies and procedures regarding how to address, resolve, and report sexual assault incidents at their schools. In a recent article published in District Administration, Brett Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA), suggested that, “Schools and districts need to form committees, task forces and Title IX teams now, so that administrators can study the regulations and commentary when they are published and change what needs to be changed.” 

How SafeSchools Can Help

The SafeSchools Online Training System includes a variety of courses to help schools increase the awareness and understanding of issues related to sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault for both staff and students, including: 

Staff Courses

• Dating Violence: Identification and Prevention
• Sexual Harassment: Staff-to-Staff
• Sexual Harassment: Student Issues & Response
• Sexual Misconduct: Staff-to-Student

Student Courses

• Sexual Harassment (Grades 6-8)
• Sexual Harassment (Grades 9-12)

SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System

With our SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System, students, staff, and parents can confidentially report safety concerns, including harassment, intimidation, bullying, mental health concerns, weapons, and threats of violence to your administration via mobile app, web, email, text, or phone.

For more information on how our Staff or Student Training or Tip Reporting System can help you address sexual harassment and assault in your district, contact us at 1-800-434-0154 or [email protected].

Increasing Efficiency & Accountability by Managing Compliance Training Online

Catawba County Schools, in North Carolina, adopted the SafeSchools Online Training System in 2016. Catawba serves roughly 16,000 students and 2,100 employees in 28 schools. Since adopting the program, over 3,000 users have completed almost 82,000 SafeSchools Training courses! Before adopting SafeSchools Training, Catawba administrators were having a difficult time finding a way to conduct required compliance training and other needed safety training. The district was also seeking a way to reduce workers’ comp claims. Now, the SafeSchools Training System gives Catawba an easy way for employees to complete training on their own time, as well as a way to hold staff accountable with reports to check compliance.

Customization and Automation Help District Meet Specific Training Needs

Dwayne Finger, Director of Safety, Facilities & Athletics, likes that the SafeSchools Training System is easy to access, provides automatic email reminders of assignments, offers clean record keeping, and has numerous course offerings. Plus, staff like the convenience of completing their training on their own time, when it’s most convenient for them. Catawba administrators also use the Custom Course Tool in SafeSchools Training to deliver district-specific policies. In addition, administrators also like that they can assign supplementary job-specific training to individuals or groups (like cafeteria workers, transportation, maintenance departments, etc.).

Significant Reduction in Workers’ Comp Claims Has a Big Impact

The biggest benefit Catawba has seen from using SafeSchools Training? A 45% reduction in workers’ comp claims in just 3 years! The reduction in workers’ comp has also reduced the district’s insurance rates. “SafeSchools Training has easily paid for itself twice over, if not more,” says Finger. To specifically help lower their workers’ comp claims, the district utilizes the Back Injury and Lifting, Playground Maintenance and Inspection, Playground Supervision, and Slips Trips, and Falls courses, as well as assigning many other courses to help educate employees and improve safety.

“I would highly recommend SafeSchools Training to other districts. It saves time and money on needed and required staff development. It has reduced our workers’ comp claims in almost half over a three-year period, reports are easily accessible, and the email reminders keep staff informed on needed staff development,” Finger notes.

Now the district can rest assured they are meeting required mandates, increasing efficiency, and saving valuable time and money. We applaud everyone at Catawba for their success with SafeSchools Training.

To learn more about how SafeSchools Training can help you reduce workers’ comp claims and improve safety and compliance in your district, contact us at 800-434-0154 or request a demo today!

You may have heard students talk about dabbing, and thought they were referring to the popular dance. But, dabbing is a discreet way to ingest marijuana concentrates, that looks a lot like vaping and is growing more popular with students. Dabbing involves inhaling vapors of highly concentrated THC, the chemical in marijuana that makes users feel high and carries some major health risks for students.

The Dangers of Dabbing

The most dangerous part of dabbing, short-term, is that it can cause heart palpitations, anxiety, and panic attacks. Long-term use can cause addiction or dependency problems, along with issues surrounding learning and thinking.

Dabbing also exposes students to dangerous toxins – high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, and methacrolein, a noxious irritant, in the vapor. But exposure to toxins isn’t the only risk, the amateur heating process, known as “blasting,” also comes with fire risks comparable to those of manufacturing methamphetamine.

For more information, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46wQzfIl0dw.

Read our recent blog post for ways to encourage students to put down the e-cigarettes.

How SafeSchools Can Help

The SafeSchools Online Training System includes a variety of expert-authored courses dedicated to helping you address the use of e-cigarettes, and other drugs, with your staff and students:

• Student Drug and Alcohol Abuse (Employee course)
• Alcohol, Marijuana, Vaping, and Other Drugs (Student course)

We also offer our SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System that allows students, staff, and parents to confidentially report safety concerns, including the use of alcohol, e-cigarettes, or other drugs, to your administration 24/7/365 via mobile app, text, phone, email, and website.