Ensuring Student Safety and Wellness in K-12 Schools
Ensuring students are safe and holistically supported is a pressing concern for K-12 district and school administrators. As concerns about students’ health and wellbeing persist, schools are being looked at to help close the treatment gap that exists today with how they support student safety and wellness.
However, this imperative isn’t easily met. Many schools don’t have the resources needed to proactively identify and support student safety and wellness challenges. School counselors are stretched thin trying to support an average of 385 students each, with some supporting dozens and hundreds more. Even schools that have the allocated budget for mental health resources often struggle to find professionals to fill open roles.
The disparities between students’ mental health needs and the lack of resources to meet them leaves many students without the support they need. It also places an enormous burden on educators and administrators.
3 AI-Powered Tools that Help Schools Support Their Students’ Safety and Wellness
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational settings can stir up concerns about academic integrity. However, few would disagree that schools need to figure out how to judiciously integrate AI into their learning environments or risk leaving students unprepared.
Beyond student applications of AI, there are many other ways AI can be applied in schools, including to support student safety and wellness. Here are three ways AI is helping resource-constrained student service teams be more effective and efficient.
Always-On Student Wellness Monitoring
AI-powered student wellness monitoring like Securly Aware utilizes sophisticated technologies and advanced algorithms to monitor students’ online activities for distress signals. By analyzing students’ interactions across email, social media, web searches, websites, and drives/files, student wellness monitoring can identify signs of self-harm, suicide, depression, violence, and bullying.
When a student demonstrates risk signals, student services staff are alerted so they can intervene quickly. Like an extra set of eyes and ears, student wellness monitoring helps student services teams triage and better support student safety and wellness concerns so they can prioritize students who need help now.
Continually Updated Student Wellness Levels
Wellness levels help schools take an even more proactive approach to student wellness. Using a proprietary, highly trained AI engine to analyze students’ online activities and trends, Securly Aware assigns each student a wellness level, starting at All Clear. As a student demonstrates increasing risk signals across their online activities, their wellness level will escalate in severity, moving to Concerning, then High Risk, then Critical.
The Aware dashboard (pictured above) provides a breakdown of the number of students in each level, giving administrators and student services teams a real-time "pulse check" of student safety and wellness in their district or school. They can easily drill down to the individual student level, as well as gain additional context to investigate and understand the risks involved.
Wellness levels also make it easy to identify students whose wellness levels have deteriorated. By providing early insight into potential risks, wellness levels help student services teams take proactive measures to support student safety and wellness before issues escalate.
Proactive Data Collection & Analysis
Schools and districts need access to timely and reliable data to proactively identify and support student needs. While they’ve traditionally looked to manual survey tools, the data these tools generate is historical and reflects only a snapshot in time.
Furthermore, when relying on manual survey methods, it can take weeks or months to analyze the data and derive insights. Once the data is finally actionable, it’s no longer an accurate representation of the current state.
Schools can eliminate the time and labor involved in manual surveying and start making data-driven decisions with AI-powered data collection and analysis. Securly Discern is a revolutionary AI that continually analyzes your students’ digital footprint to provide real-time insights to help better support student safety and wellness.
Conclusion
AI has the potential to revolutionize education in many ways. This includes helping K-12 schools create safer and more supportive environments for their students.
AI-driven tools like Securly Aware and Securly Discern give schools the much-needed ability to monitor, identify, and address student safety and wellness needs effectively and efficiently. With the help of these powerful, always-on AI-powered tools, schools are able to close the critical gap between growing student needs and dwindling school resources.
FAQs
Q: How can AI help schools support student safety and wellness?
A: AI can help schools monitor student online activities, identify risk signals, and provide real-time insights to support student safety and wellness.
Q: What is Securly Aware and how does it help schools?
A: Securly Aware is an AI-powered student wellness monitoring tool that helps schools identify signs of self-harm, suicide, depression, violence, and bullying, and alerts student services staff so they can intervene quickly.
Q: What is Securly Discern and how does it help schools?
A: Securly Discern is a revolutionary AI that continually analyzes students’ digital footprint to provide real-time insights to help better support student safety and wellness.
Q: How can schools get started with AI-powered student safety and wellness tools?
A: Schools can get started by registering for a personalized demo of Securly Aware and Securly Discern.
