In the education world, bullying prevention has become a major focal point over the last few years, and there’s no longer a question about the dangers to students, and the entire school community, if bullying is left unchecked. Bullying can lead to low self-esteem, mental and physical health problems, poor grades and attendance issues, and even suicidal thoughts.

Bullying by the Numbers

• Studies show that every 7 minutes a child is bullied at school, and every year 19,000 bullied children attempt suicide.
• More than 70% of kids, teachers, and staff have seen bullying at school.
• Bullying happens: 
  • 29.3% in the classroom.
  • 29% in the hallway or near lockers.
  • 23.4% in the cafeteria.
  • 19.5% in the gym.
  • 12.2% in the bathroom.
  • 6.2% on the playground/recess.
• Half of students who are bullied for being LGBTQ skip school to avoid tormentors.
• 69% of students believe that teachers and staff won’t do anything about bullying even if they see it.
• When bystanders intervene within 10 seconds, bullying usually stops 57% of the time.
• 1 in 4 students reports that his or her education suffered from an unsafe school climate.

Statistics from StopBullying.gov

Legislation, laws, and mandates have been passed across multiple states to help prevent bullying. And school districts are spending significant energy and resources on bullying prevention programs, to comply with mandates, but more importantly, to create a positive, supportive school culture where students feel safe to learn and grow.

Implementing a Successful Bullying Prevention and Response Program in Your District

Implementing a complete bullying prevention program can be a massive undertaking for a school district to try and put together, but committing to educating students and staff early and often, as they head back to school and throughout the year, can help stem the problems before they grow.

At Vector Solutions, we are honored to work with several nationally recognized bullying and suicide prevention experts who have written many of our SafeSchools Training staff and student online courses. These expert-authors have provided these recommendations to help schools and districts implement successful bullying prevention programs. 

Dr. JoLynn Carney and Dr. Richard Hazler, the authors of our SafeSchools Online Staff Training System’s Bullying: Recognition & Response and Conflict Management courses, have put together four elements they believe will help with a successful bullying recognition and prevention program:

1. Isolation Reduction: A student who sits alone at lunch, avoids speaking to others, or makes poor eye contact could be an indicator that the student is a victim of bullying. Teach students to befriend other students who display those characteristics. The more that peers and staff members show support to ALL students, the faster bullying can be stopped before it even begins.
2. Empathetic Knowledge and Investment: Bullying can be prevented when victims/targets start being viewed as regular people, instead of “others” or “outsiders.” Creating empathy among your students is essential for any bullying prevention plan.
3. Community as a Team: The more support that you can get from your school community for bullying prevention, the better. School-wide assemblies, team building activities, pep rallies, banners, posters, contests, and daily reminders can all be used as tools to help bring your school community together against bullying.
4. Ongoing and Organized Investment: Bullying prevention isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing task that you must evaluate regularly to determine what’s working and what’s not working well.

In addition, Dr. Scott Poland, internationally recognized expert on school psychology issues and author of several SafeSchools Training courses, including Bullying: Recognition & Response; Youth Suicide: Awareness, Prevention and Postvention; Cyberbullying, and others, offers the following recommendations educators can implement to improve their prevention efforts:

• Implement a school-wide program where all staff cooperates towards the common goal of reducing bullying.
• Teach staff to recognize bullying and to take immediate action to stop bullying when it occurs.
• Implement programs designed to reach bystanders and to gain a commitment from them to take action to stop the bullying instead of standing by and allowing bullying to take place. Research has found that the more bystanders are present then the less likely it is that someone will intervene. 
• Survey students to determine the extent and nature of the problem and to solicit student recommendations to reduce bullying, and increase staff supervision in areas where bullying occurs the most. 
• In instances of cyberbullying, the administration needs to investigate the messaging, involve parents and maybe even law enforcement. The investigation will include interviewing the victim, perpetrator and any witnesses and will likely result in consequences for the perpetrator.

How SafeSchools Can Help

No child should go to school in fear and we believe that technology can be an important part of the solution. The SafeSchools Online Training System includes a variety of expert-authored courses dedicated to helping your staff and students prevent incidents of bullying, including:

• Bullying: Recognition & Response*
• Bullying & Cyberbulling (Student Course)
• Conflict Management: Student-to-Student
• Cyberbullying
• Hazing Awareness & Prevention
• Making Schools Safe for LGBT Students
• Making Schools Safe & Inclusive for Transgender Students

*State-specific versions of this course are available. 

We also offer our SafeSchools Alert 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. 

With preventative education, training, and preparedness, we hope that we can all work together to make this school year the safest on record.

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:

According to a new study, 76% of high school principals surveyed say they do not have a procedure or policy in place to respond to a teen dating violence incident. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that about 1.5 million high school students experience abuse from a dating partner. Next month is National Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month so it’s a good time to educate your staff on the warning signs of teen dating violence.

The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence has a number of great resources for your school staff to help promote teen dating violence prevention among their students.Besides raising awareness on the topic, it’s helpful to know warning signs of domestic abuse. Common signs and symptoms that a student may be the victim of dating violence include:

• Bruises.
• Unlikely explanation for injuries.
• Wearing heavy makeup to cover up bruises or wearing inappropriately heavy clothing to cover bruises.
• Missing class or withdrawing from campus activities.Injuries that occur with increasing frequency or severity.

Teen dating violence is often kept a secret because the parties involved tend to be inexperienced with dating relationships, have romanticized views about love, feel pressure from their peers to be in a relationship, and want to be independent from their parents.

Always carefully follow your district’s policies and procedures regarding reporting on violence.

To help prevent dating violence, your district can provide students with information about the characteristics of healthy relationships and warning signs of violent relationships. By learning about dating violence, and increasing your awareness about its impact on students, you are already taking an important step in reducing this danger.

The SafeSchools Online Staff Training System includes an informative Dating Violence: Identification and Prevention course geared to help your staff recognize the signs and symptoms of dating violence.

School districts are warning parents about a widely discussed social-media app that purports to instruct preteens to carry out increasingly dangerous tasks and self-harm over 50 days, ending in suicide. Users are also encouraged to tag friends on social media and challenge them to participate in the game. Common Sense Media has called the game “one of the scariest and most mysterious YouTube challenges” kids will try.

Many school administrators have already sent letters to parents, warning them about this game and the warning signs their children may be participating in it. Experts also suggest:

• Asking younger children if there are any new games or popular challenges that they or their friends are hearing about or playing on social media or online.
• Searching for hashtags like #BlueWhaleChallenge and/or photos of a blue whale on kids’ social media accounts.

The American Association of Suicidology also has resources on suicide identification and prevention.

Across the U.S., thousands of students have been sexually assaulted, by other students, in high schools, junior highs and even elementary schools – a hidden horror educators have long been warned not to ignore.

A yearlong investigation by the Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015. And although that figure represents the most complete tally yet of sexual assaults among the nation’s 50 million K-12 students, it doesn’t fully capture the problem because such attacks are greatly under-reported, some states don’t track them, and those that do vary widely in how they classify and catalog sexual violence.

Sexual violence that AP tracked often was mischaracterized as bullying, hazing, or consensual behavior. It occurred anywhere students were left unsupervised: buses and bathrooms, hallways, and locker rooms. No type of school was immune, whether it be in an upper-class suburb, an inner-city neighborhood, or blue-collar farm town.

Schools frequently were unwilling or ill-equipped to address the problem, AP found, despite having long been warned by the U.S. Supreme Court that they could be liable for monetary damages. Some administrators and educators even engaged in cover-ups to hide evidence of a possible crime and protect their schools’ image.

To help protect your school against costly lawsuits, but most importantly, to help keep students safe, our SafeSchools Alert Tip Reporting System allows students, staff, and parents to 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.

For a demonstration, please call 1-800-434-0154 or email [email protected] today.