4 School Safety Issues And How To Combat Them

When it comes to managing a boarding school, your student's safety is one of your most important responsibilities. To fulfil your duty of care, it's important to ensure that you have considered and addressed potential risks in your day-to-day routine.Here are 4 common school safety concerns that Boardingware can help you keep on top of.

Students' Mental Health

Looking after the mental health of your students is an important part of running a boarding school. As a home away from home, the boarding environment needs to be a supportive place where students feel safe and can have their emotional needs looked after.A study by researchers at the UKM Medical Center in Malaysia found the prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression were slightly higher in the boarding school students they surveyed when compared with previous studies that had focused on students in regular schools.

With Boardingware, supporting your students through the sometimes stressful environment of boarding school becomes much easier.Each student has an individual profile on where you can store records of their behaviour. If a student has been showing signs of stress, is constantly turning up late, or showing some other kind of behavioural indicators, you can easily make a quick record of it in their profile. This helps to ensure that you are always up-to-date with what's been happening. Furthermore, because Boardingware runs in the cloud, all your house staff will also be able to see the same information.The watchlist is another great way to stay on top of students that are currently experiencing tough times. The watchlist helps you to quickly share and communicate student information with the rest of your house staff so they will be ready to provide effective care to the students that need it most.In addition, disciplinary information can also be stored in Boardingware profiles. If a student has been bullying others, teachers and boarding staff can see this, and take steps to manage any interactions between the relevant students accordingly.

Emergency Situations

It's a situation no-one running a boarding school wants to ever imagine, but in an emergency, it's crucial to have effective protocols in place to mitigate risk and keep students safe.Crisis response features in Boardingware allow you to automate communications and accelerate response in an emergency. When an emergency roll is initiated, custom alerts are automatically sent to staff, students and parents, informing them of the situation and providing instructions to guide the evacuation process.And because Boardingware keeps track of your students movements, all the information about their current whereabouts is right there for you to see from right inside the roll check, as well as contact information for each and every student. This extra level of detail gives response teams the ability to focus valuable resources on students that need it first.

Extreme Weather Events

Depending on where in the world your boarding school is, extreme weather events may be incredibly common or extremely rare. Either way, when they happen you want to be adequately prepared and have protocols in place for making sure all your students are safe and accounted for. Flooding, hurricanes, thunderstorms or heavy snow can all be dangerous when they come in their most extreme forms.

In sudden extreme weather events, it's crucial to ensure that off-campus students return safely.Similar to crisis and emergency situations, the information you keep in Boardingware can prove to be invaluable when managing a shut down in the event of extreme weather.From Boardingware, you can quickly see who is currently on-and-off campus, and in the case of an extreme weather event, you can quickly identify who is scheduled to return, inform them of the weather situation and coordinate special travel plans to ensure they return safely.

Breach of Personal Data

Boarding schools hold a lot of sensitive personal information about their students, as well as their parents, and any unauthorised access to this information may prove to be detrimental to the welfare of your students. Administrators need to be incredibly careful with their data handling practices and must ensure they uphold high standards for data security.Thankfully, Boardingware is an incredibly secure platform. All of the data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Our servers are held in enterprise-grade hosting facilities that employ robust physical security controls and include non-stop monitoring and surveillance.Boardingware is also compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Assurance Portability And Accountability Act (HIPAA) and is a signatory of the Student Privacy Pledge.Earlier this month, we also announced that Boardingware is officially certified for ISO 27001 and ISO 27018. These certifications are internationally recognised and are widely considered as the gold standard for data security. We believe that data security should be a primary concern for any system that is used to handle sensitive student information, and we are proud to prove our commitment to our customers with these certifications.For more information on how Boardingware can help your school manage its safety issues, watch our 20-min demo video or book a time to talk with of our friendly consultants.