Providing a Holistic, Proactive Approach to School Safety

Presenters

Anathea ChartrandFollow

First Presenter's Institution

Sandy Hook Promise Foundation

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Anathea is a passionate life-long educator committed to working in service of ensuring all youth have fair access to a successful future. She is an experienced director of product development and management of educational and technology products. As the Associate Vice President of the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System at Sandy Hook Promise, she and her team work with educators across the country to successfully implement and the program, ensuring that it is operated with fidelity and efficacy and then sustained for the long term. Prior to working at Sandy Hook Promise, Anathea spent 10 years at Sylvan Learning, creating and managing the eductional programs taught at their Learing Centers. She has also worked as a classroom teacher and as an editor in the educational publishing field.

Document Type

Event

Primary Strand

School Safety

Relevance to Primary Strand

The Say Something Anonymous Reporting System (ARS) is designed to provide a holistic, proactive approach to youth violence prevention. The program provides a mobile app, telephone hotline, and web-based form for students or members of the school community to submit an anonymous tip if they or someone they know is at risk of hurting themselves or others. Tips are then routed to the SHP 24/7/365 National Crisis Center where our Crisis Counselors conduct two-way dialogue with "Tipsters," gather as much information, categorize the tip as "life safety" event or "non-life safety," and deliver the tip to a local multi-disciplinary team who work together to provide the appropriate intervention. We train distict, school, and law enforcement teams to use our technology program to process and respond to tips, manage the program at the local level and we train students to identify signs of at-risk behavior, to take it seriously, and to say something to a trusted adult or submit an anonymous tip.

By providing a way for students to submit a tip anonymously and them seeing tips intervened upon in a timely fashion, the Say Something-ARS program helps to evolve a culture of trust in schools where students feel safe to be upstanders and at-risk students feel supported. In addition to the training directly related to the program, we also provide training to adults on how to be a trusted adult as well as a Say Something: Suicide Prevention training for educators, students, and parents.

The Say Something-ARS system utilzes a technology called P3 Campus, which has been in existence for over 30 years, used by hundreds of school districts, states, and government entitites around the world. The system is awash in data that can be generated at the state, county, district, and school level. Data includes statistical reports that measure and report on success. These reports are critical to the success of organizations implementing an anonymous reporting solution within their communities. P3 provides several statistical reports that can be filtered by event type, date, individual school, school district/group, county, and tip status. Statistical information captured includes information regarding tip status, outcome, trends, and assessments. These reports allow administrators to measure and report on success, identify areas for improvement, and detect any anomalies.

The Say Something-ARS program is designed to foster collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team of stakeholders at the district, school, and law enforcement, providing a framework to work together to ensure a safe school and general community environment. As part of our implementation process, we train all educators and teams who will be receiving and acting upon tips to use the system and manage tips with fidelity. In addition to the philosophy of the program, the P3 system is built to allow for collaboration between our Crisis Center and local teams to ensure that all parts of the puzzle are accounted for, evidence is reported, and it requires local teams to "disposition" or close tips with information on outcomes to ensure accountability. As part of the implementation process, we provide presentations to parents and other members of the school community to ensure they are aware of the program, its background, goals. In addition to making the program available for students, we also provide a mechanism to empower students to be leaders of school safety by providing Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) Promise Clubs. Each school is required to register a club and then they receive monthly newsletters, activities, etc., and we also convene an annual Youth Summit and work with a Youth Advisory Board who provide insight and perspective as we build and evolve programs.

Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics

Climate and Culture

Brief Program Description

The Say Something Anonymous Reporting System teaches students how to identify signs and threats of someone at risk of hurting themselves or others, to take it seriously, and to be an upstander by saying something to a trusted adult or submit a tip via an anonymous reporting system.

Summary

In order to foster a community that is built on trust and youth empowerment, school safety programs must provide a holistic, upstream solution to youth violence prevention. This includes providing education and tools to students that empower and train adults and students how to recognize signs and threats, to take them seriously, and to say something. In turn, these programs must show those who are upstanders and who may be victims of violence or at risk of suicide that the adults in their school communities take them seriously and are committed to building trust and keeping their students safe.

Recognizing that many students want and need a secure and anonymous way to share their concerns, the use of an anonymous reporting system provides a framework to help bridge that gap. However, it is critical that an anonymous reporting system not just provide a means to submit a tip, but it must be available and accessible and include certain features and specific tools that provide a holistic approach to youth violence prevention. These include but are not limited to the following:

• Secure tip-reporting tech plaftorm that allows tipsters to submit tips via a mobile app, web-based tip form, or a telephone hotline.
• 24/7/365 Crisis Center services that allow tipsters to conduct two-way dialogue with a Crisis Counselor
• Student training that teaches students to idenfity signs and threats, take them seriously, and use the reporting system
• Multi-disciplinary adult user training that teaches adults how to use the tip management system, manage tips, and how to work together to keep students safe
• Lesson plans and activities to reinforce key themes of the program, which are aligned to Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning competencies.
• Ongoing account support to ensure operational fidelity and efficacy, including professional development opportunities
• Opportunities and activities to promote student leadership and empowerment
• Evidence-based

Before considering launching an anonymous reporting system in their school community, it is important that district leaders consider these features when determining which is the right fit.

Evidence

Sandy Hook Promise’s signature Know the Signs violence prevention programs are based on critical analysis of every major mass attack and school shooting These comprehensive studies reveal that key warning signs precede violence and that recognizing the signs is essential to violence prevention. Further academic research proves that teaching these signs and when and how to get help effectively saves lives. In addition, resarch has shown that Anonymous reporting systems (ARS) are associated with fewer school-based violent behaviors and have the strongest effect compared to any other type of prevention strategy. In August of 2022, the Journal of School Violence published “The Effectiveness of the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System in Preventing School Violence: A Cluster Randomized Control Trial in 19 Middle Schools,” proving that, when accompanied by training, providing safe, easy ways to get help works.

According to the 2021 article by Rachel Masi, Ph.D., "The 2021 U.S. Secret Service analysis of thwarted school shootings revealed that upstream prevention
strategies emphasizing social connections and fostering a supportive school climate are most effective in preventing gun violence."

According to Dr. Masi, the research shows that in order for school safety programs to be sustained over time, they must be accompanied by a specific framework. This framework must be inclusive, provide education to all stakeholders in an educational community, education on the warning signs of at-risk behavior, and include clear evidence of effective interventions.

Learning Objective 1

Understand the key features of an anonymous reporting system

Learning Objective 2

Understand the importance of the key features that must accompany an anonymous reporting system

Learning Objective 3

Understand the research supporting a holistic approach

Learning Objective 4

Understand how to sustain an anonymous reporting system over time

Recommended Citation

Chartrand, Anathea, "Providing a Holistic, Proactive Approach to School Safety" (2023). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 11.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2023/2023/11

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.