School security doesn’t have to mean creating a rigid, high-alert environment where your students and staff don’t feel comfortable.
With new school safety technology, school administrators have various solutions for assessing school comfort, ones that allow them to detect any at-risk student behaviors and manage visitor access with minimally-invasive monitoring tools.
If you’re in the process of sourcing new technology to keep your school and students safe, here are a few things to ask for in your next RFP. These considerations can help ensure that you get a high-performing solution at the best vendor price for a more secure school environment.
Building a Positive School Climate
Schools should be safe places for learning, not communities of people who are constantly on high alert. Principals and admins need forward-thinking tools that can assess school comfort. They’ll want to make sure these tools help:
- Keep students, staff, and visitors safe.
- Avoid disrupting students’ and teachers’ daily routines.
- Encourage a positive school climate.
The US Department of Education gives schools guidelines for this kind of environment and learning culture: “A positive school climate reflects attention to fostering social and physical safety, providing support that enables students and staff to realize high behavioral and academic standards as well as encouraging and maintaining respectful, trusting, and caring relationships throughout the school community.”
There are a few ways that administrators can support a more positive school climate and even improve the wellbeing of people on their campus.
The Opportunity for Improvement
School admins can keep their community at ease and encourage a positive climate by carefully assessing school comfort with the right safety technology. If you’re looking for security solutions, you can focus on improvement in a few areas to guarantee that your RFP process results in the vendor solutions that your school actually needs.
1. Behavior Intervention
Managing any student’s behavior can be a challenge, and when teachers have full classrooms, that challenge only becomes more complex.
Students’ social and emotional learning is a crucial component of their education, and today’s educators are encouraged to support this kind of learning. According to research from the Institute of Education Sciences: “Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a key ingredient of high-quality education care, is important for both educators and children, and has been associated with children’s concurrent and later academic and social success.”
For at-risk students, it can be more difficult for teachers and staff to monitor progress without easy-to-use tools and actionable solutions for improvement. New school safety technology from ScholarChip provides those solutions by helping school staff monitor student behavior and encourage their progress. Teachers and admins also get access to behavior management reports for guidance, so they can make data-driven decisions when it comes to the student’s behavior.
2. Attendance and Accountability
Using solutions like Smart ID cards is a cost-effective and efficient way for administrators to manage student attendance in school buildings and classrooms. Implementing an ID system creates accountability among students, who are responsible for showing up to their classes and activities on time. This builds trust and rapport in classrooms and helps create the positive school environment that everyone wants.
Innovative platforms like ScholarChip give administrators applications that work on most mobile devices to help track and collect attendance data on the fly. Because ScholarChip integrates with other technologies, administrators can also use the platform with near-field communication devices when necessary.
3. Secure Outside Visitor Management
School officials also need ways to protect their students from intruders, and access control is a huge concern for today’s educators. But there’s a balance that many admins look for when it comes to school safety measures: creating a secure and protected school that’s also a welcoming environment.
The solution is an efficient and capable visitor management tool, according to Campus Security and Life Safety Magazine: “With the use of visitor management systems, your front office can run more efficiently by automating the tasks your staff used to do manually. Accurate reports, volunteer hour calculations and tardy counts are taken care of as soon as they are logged.”
Screening outside visitors with modern school safety tools like ScholarChip helps school administrators ensure that their students are safer, without creating a rigid atmosphere for anyone visiting campus. This safety technology allows admins to proactively check the identity of outside visitors, ensuring secure classrooms and a hospitable culture.
Create a Safe and Thriving School Environment
Finding solutions for a secure education environment comes with a few challenges, but the safety measures you take don’t have to make your school’s environment feel locked down. Letting technology like ScholarChip support your school safety program means accurately assessing school comfort and spending more time helping your students grow.
See how these school administrators built safety into their school’s culture using ScholarChip, or check out our other safety ideas for your students.
ScholarChip offers a solution called Alternative Behavior Educator (ABE). This innovative program enables school administrators and counselors to identify, monitor, and improve student behavior throughout a student’s career, while giving them powerful data-driven reports that quickly flag at-risk students, help monitor and chronicle progress, and help them identify school safety risks before incidents.<br>
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To learn how ScholarChip can help make Texas schools safer or get free recommendations, feel free to chat with one of our specialists today!
