Aberdeen School District 06-1, in South Dakota, serves roughly 4,500 students and 600 employees in 9 schools. The district adopted the SafeSchools Online Training System in 2014 to shift their safety and compliance training online. Since then, over 1,000 users have completed more than 21,000 SafeSchools Training courses!
The Need: A More Efficient Way to Deliver District-required Training to Staff
Before adopting SafeSchools Training, Aberdeen administrators were having a difficult time training employees due to limited resources and time. Aberdeen selected SafeSchools Training for the wide variety of training options, the convenience of being able to conduct training anywhere, at any time, and the documentation of required district trainings.
The Results: Significant Time-Savings for School Staff
Now, Aberdeen has decreased the amount of time required to prepare for and schedule staff trainings. In addition, the district has reduced the amount of money spent compensating employees for time spent outside of school to complete trainings. Plus, staff like the flexibility to complete training on their own time, when it’s most convenient for them, and that most of their SafeSchools Training courses are only 15 to 25 minutes.
Camille Kaul, Assistant Superintendent, estimates that SafeSchools Training has saved Aberdeen 40 hours a year in meeting time! She also notes, “SafeSchools Training is easy to use, has a great selection of courses, including the option to add your own custom items like a school handbook. The courses are engaging and appropriate in length, and the company has great customer service.”
The biggest benefit Aberdeen has seen from using SafeSchools Training? “This system gives us an easy way to keep track of required federal training and to provide additional training without sending staff out of town,” says Kaul.
Aberdeen administrators also use the Custom Course Tool in SafeSchools Training to deliver their employee handbook and district-specific policies.
Now the district can rest assured they are meeting required mandates, increasing efficiency, and saving valuable time and money. We applaud Kaul and everyone at Aberdeen for their success with SafeSchools Training. Keep up the great work!
To see how SafeSchools Training can help you increase efficiency, save valuable resources, and improve safety in your district, sign up for a free trial today!
Providing students with a positive, safe learning environment is always top of mind for districts and school administrators. But, with so many threats towards overall school safety, how can your district know what to focus on? Based on recurring themes from news headlines we’ve seen this past year, we’ve compiled a list of top safety concerns for back-to-school, which include: Bullying/Cyberbullying, Suicide, Vaping, Sexual Harassment, and Cybersecurity.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be diving into these topics in more detail on our blog and will provide strategies and tips from our SafeSchools experts to help you address these important school safety concerns to keep your staff and students safe.
While it’s important to train your school staff on required federal and state mandates, it’s also important to monitor school safety trends. We hope this list helps you as you plan your safety and compliance training for the upcoming school year. Our SafeSchools Online Training System can completely automate your staff and student training, saving you valuable time and money. Access high quality courses on important school safety topics by leading experts, in one convenient online system. SafeSchools Training offers courses for both staff and students on topics that support these back-to-school safety concerns, plus hundreds more on a wide variety of school safety topics.
Safety courses for staff include:
- Browser Security Basics
- Bullying: Recognition & Response
- Cyberbullying
- Cybersecurity Overview
- Email & Messaging Safety
- Hazing Awareness & Prevention
- Making Schools Safe & Inclusive for Transgender Students
- Making Schools Safe for LGBT Students
- Online Safety: Predators
- Password Security Basics
- Protection Against Malware
- Sexual Harassment: Student Issues & Response
- Sexual Misconduct: Staff-to-Student
- Youth Suicide: Awareness, Prevention & Postvention
For students, SafeSchools Training offers:
- Alcohol, Vaping & Drug Prevention
- Bullying & Cyberbullying
- Digital Citizenship
- Sexual Harassment
- Youth Suicide Awareness
To view our full course library, click here. Implementation is fast and easy and your subscription-based system can be set up in just a few hours. Safety training and compliance have never been easier or more efficient!
If you would like a free trial of SafeSchools Training, please fill out this form. For more information about SafeSchools Training in general, please contact us at [email protected] or 1-800-434-0154. We look forward to helping with your back-to-school safety needs!
Hartford Public Schools is the largest public school district in Connecticut, with over 20,000 students and 3,000 employees in 46 schools. Since 2017, staff members have completed almost 24,000 SafeSchools Training courses!
The Need: A User-Friendly System to Manage and Track Compliance Training
Why did Hartford select the SafeSchools Online Training System as their online safety and compliance provider?
“Being a large district, we needed a platform that could easily track completions of our compliance trainings, while also allowing us to create customized trainings specific to our district. The platform also needed to be user friendly for various levels of our staff to use it. We had tried other platforms before but they just didn’t offer exactly what we were looking for and left our team having to do a lot of extra work to make sure we were staying compliant,” states Rachel Stimpson, Performance Management Specialist.
Before adopting SafeSchools Training, Hartford held large group meetings for trainings, but they felt like it was a waste of valuable time. Plus, only 50% of their staff were taking the mandatory trainings. After using SafeSchools Training for two years, they now have a 97% completion rate! And, staff can now take their trainings online, when it’s most convenient for their schedule.
The Results: Increased Accountability and More Personalized Training
Rachel loves how user friendly the SafeSchools Training system is, “We have a variety of staff with varying levels of technology skills that need to take the trainings. SafeSchools Training is easy to navigate for everyone. As an admin, I also like how easy it is to set up courses and run reports to check our compliance ratings.” She also notes, “The site is very user friendly and easily allows us to track our compliance rates and notify staff when they need to complete a training. The catalog of available trainings is extensive and fits the needs of our large district perfectly.”
The biggest benefits Hartford has seen using SafeSchools Training? Their compliance rating has gone up over 50% using this platform, they can easily track who still needs to complete their training with reports, they can hold staff accountable by keeping clear data on which trainings they have taken versus which trainings they are supposed to take, and they can assign more trainings on an individual basis if there are certain staff members who need training in one area during the year.
Now the district can rest assured they are better training employees and preventing serious safety incidents before they occur. Keep up the great work, Hartford!
To see how SafeSchools Training can help you increase compliance, provide more personalized staff training, and improve safety in your district, sign up for a free trial today!
As the leading provider of online compliance training for school employees, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new SafeSchools Training safety courses for students! Our powerful, new, web-based courses cover the essential safety topics you need to educate your students on to keep them safe and to positively impact your school culture, including:
- Bullying & Cyberbullying
- Youth Suicide Prevention
- Alcohol & Drug Prevention
- Sexual Harassment
- Digital Citizenship
And, our courses are perfect for prevention training or remediation with students who have disciplinary issues.
Each short, age-appropriate, modular course features peer presenters, so students can more easily connect with each lesson. Administrators can assign courses to individual students to complete independently, use in a facilitated group setting with a staff presenter, or add our courses to your existing LMS. Each course includes helpful assessments, lesson plans, discussion questions and activities.
Click on the video below to watch an overview of our student courses.
Equip your students with the knowledge and skills they need, so they’re better prepared for the realities of school today with SafeSchools Training’s new student courses!
Our new student courses will be available in June in perfect time for the new school year. To preorder or to learn more, please call 1-800-434-0154 or email [email protected].
Every year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) releases its top ten citations. Unfortunately, the list remains relatively the same year after year. The top ten citations from 2018, listed with the most cited first, are:
- Fall Protection (general requirements)
- Hazard Communication
- Scaffolding
- Respiratory Protection
- Lockout/Tagout
- Ladders
- Powered Industrial Trucks
- Fall Protection (training requirements)
- Machine Guarding
- Personal Protective and Lifesaving Equipment (eye and face protection)
How can you ensure your school or district doesn’t receive a costly OSHA fine? The SafeSchools Online Training System can help train your staff on important OSHA-related topics. Courses include:
- Eye and Face Protection
- Fall Protection
- Forklift Safety
- Hazard Communication: Right to Understand
- Ladder Safety
- Lockout/Tagout: Energy Release
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
- Respiratory Protection
- Scaffolding Safety
- Welding, Cutting and Brazing Safety Awareness
Our SafeSchools Online Training System completely automates your staff training, saving you valuable time and money. Every employee training assignment and course completion is automatically documented in your SafeSchools Training System and is made available for compliance reporting in real-time. All reports can be exported to Excel instantly, with just a few clicks. Plus, your staff will love completing their courses online, when it’s most convenient for their schedules! Track individual or group face-to-face sessions in your SafeSchools Training System, too, by giving credit to employees who were in attendance.
Click here to request your free trial today to learn how SafeSchools Training can help you reduce your OSHA violations today.
Royse City Independent School District in Texas is home to almost 5,500 students and 800 employees in 9 schools. With other curriculum demands, district administrators found it challenging to find time to train staff on important safety and security topics. To motivate employees, administrators developed a new program that allows staff to earn badges and certificates upon completion of their training assignments in the SafeSchools Online Training System.
Royse Staff can earn up to four badges- CPR, Medical, Safety, and Security, by taking a variety of SafeSchools Training and district policy courses. To earn the CPR badge, employees must take two courses for a total of six hours of training. The Medical badge entails 15 courses for 3.65 hours of training. The Safety badge is 13 courses for 4.25 hours and the Security badge is 10 courses for 4.6 hours. Staff members that earn awards are also invited to a Board meeting to be recognized as well.
The results? Staff members have completed almost 23,000 safety courses in SafeSchools Training since implementing the program in 2016!
Now the district can rest assured it is meeting required training mandates and creating a safer learning environment for all staff and students. Keep up the great work, Royse City!
The Maine Department of Education has partnered with Vector Solutions to provide their SafeSchools Online Staff Training System and Bullying: Recognition & Response course to all schools in Maine. This course addresses Maine’s anti-bullying law and specifically highlights Maine DOE’s bullying policy and procedures.
Why did the Maine DOE select SafeSchools Training? The SafeSchools Online Training System completely automates staff training, saving administrators valuable time (and money). The system offers hundreds of courses on important school safety topics written by leading experts, all available in one convenient online system. Course completions are automatically tracked and compliance reports can be generated with just a few clicks! Plus, staff can complete their courses online, whenever it’s most convenient for their schedules!
To access this course, district or school leadership should contact Justin Moore at [email protected] or 1-800-434-0154.
Read the full press release here.
Students often know what’s happening in your district before you do. The SafeSchools Alert Mobile App makes it easy to stay connected to your school community so you can prevent serious safety incidents before they occur.
Using the app, free to download on iOS and Android with a SafeSchools Alert System subscription, students and adults can submit safety tips 24/7 to alert school officials about bullying, harassment, mental health concerns, and threats of violence. The convenient app makes it easy to keep track of all tips submitted, and push notifications let tipsters know when a reply has been sent to their tip and tracks all communication.
The SafeSchools Alert System automates many of the steps involved in tip resolution and allows administrators to easily delegate tips to colleagues who can investigate and manage tips to resolution. Administrative reports make it simple to monitor safety trends by victim, offender, building, and incident type.
Complimentary promotional materials such as fliers, posters, parent letters, and student handbook copy make it easy to communicate this potentially life-saving tool to your entire school community.
Watch an Overview of the SafeSchools Alert System
Together, using SafeSchools Alert, we can help to make your school community an even safer place to work and learn. For more information or a free trial of SafeSchools Alert, please contact us at 1-800-434-0154, [email protected], or www.SafeSchools.com.
Cyberbullies’ actions can have a greater and longer lasting effect than traditional physical bullying. Cyberbullying has quickly become a serious problem among children from elementary through high school. Cyberbullying leverages tools that students use most often to communicate among themselves and has increased because these tools are convenient and often free of adult oversight. They also provide the means to inflict immediate, devastating harm on the bully’s target. That’s because the bully’s message can be transmitted to and accessed by anyone in seconds, and traditional school safeguards are often ineffective. Cyberbullying has also been linked to depression, school violence, and suicide. Even if a few students participate in cyberbullying, it only takes one to do serious harm.
Check out our Cyberbullying Prevention Safety Tip video below for the definition of cyberbullying and tips to help keep your school safe.
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Here are more tips that can help control cyberbullying on your campus and keep your school safe:
- You should be familiar with your school’s bullying policy. Since cyberbullying fits the traditional definition of bullying, your school’s anti-bullying policies apply to cyberbullying.
- You should always report cyberbullying immediately. Teach your students to report cyberbullying immediately, as well.
- Always carefully preserve any evidence of cyberbullying, including text messages, voicemail messages, images, videos, webpages, and any other digital evidence.
- Recognize that students are sophisticated users of technology at a young age. Cyberbullying is not just a high school issue, it’s common in middle school and late elementary school as well.
- If you become aware of cyberbullying and fail to report it, you, as well as your school, may become subject to lawsuits and other legal actions.
- Some actions like threats of violence and distribution of explicit images do more than just violate your school’s bullying policy. They may also be against the law so don’t hesitate to report potential criminal actions by carefully following your school’s policy.
- Your school should also update its Acceptable Use Policy to prohibit cyberbullying from locations away from school.
The SafeSchools Online Staff Training System offers an Online Safety: Cyberbullying course to provide school staff members with basic information on cyberbullying, its impact on your school, and steps you can take to reduce the threat of cyberbullying.
Our SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System allows students, staff, and parents to anonymously report safety concerns to school officials 24/7/365. Staff are immediately notified of every tip and can easily track and manage incidents to resolution within the web-based system.
Please contact us at [email protected] or 1-800-434-0154 to learn more about SafeSchools Training or SafeSchools Alert.
We recently hosted a SafeSchools Training webinar highlighting best practices within the SafeSchools Training System for back-to-school.
Topics covered in the 30-minute webinar include:
- New and Updated Courses
- Updated Login Screen and Training Area
- Course Customizations
- Repeating Training Plan
- Best Practices for Employee Data, Training Plan Creation and Email Notification
To watch the recorded webinar, please click here. The session begins around the 1:44 mark.
Thanks so much for your time and the opportunity to serve you and your employees. If you have any questions, please reach out to our Client Success team at [email protected].
