Raptor Shares NASRO Survey Results

March 13, 2023
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Raptor Technologies recently gathered insight into the school safety and student wellness challenges districts across the nation face through our NASRO school safety survey in January. This blog shares key insights into what that survey found.

Survey respondents and their districts

Over 80% of our 397 respondents hold the title SRO, SPO, or supervisor to SROs, and they come from 31 different states; 64% indicated they are on or sometimes on the decision-making team when the district considers purchasing hardware or software for safety-related improvements. Of these, most respondents indicated their role on the team is that of a consultant or influencer in the process.

The top three safety-related decisions respondents can influence include physical security/hardening, safety drills and procedures, and emergency response, and the top two safety improvements they’d most like to see include physical security and training.

Although the vast majority of respondents indicated their district has a solid emergency response plan and that they have the support of school administrators and board members to address safety concerns, there are a number of obstacles to safety and security their schools face. In the next section, we are going to look at the data related to these obstacles.

Safety and Security Needs and Obstacles

Tools and Processes
Fewer than 25% of respondents felt as though they were equipped with the tools and support necessary to address safety concerns in their district. Of these, the three tools and processes most frequently identified as lacking relate to door hardening and emergency communication.

Obstacles and improvements
The greatest obstacles schools face revolves around students’ mental health needs as well as concerns surrounding access to funding for security upgrades and budget allocations for SROs. When it comes to safety improvements, strengthening schools’ physical security and training opportunities top our respondents’ lists.

Overcome obstacles with Emergency Management and Raptor Alert

Raptor’s Emergency Management software includes Raptor Alert, which empowers schools to expedite the call for help and, if necessary, initiate an emergency response, such as a lockdown or evacuation. The person initiating the alert can connect to 911 directly via the mobile application, voice call, or, where available, text-to-911. The initiator can provide additional context and answer questions so 911 operators can better inform first responders.

Additional Raptor Emergency Management communication features include:

Group messaging enables users to direct resources in emergencies more efficiently. The chat feature includes both whole group and administrator channels.

Compatibility with all standard Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) and emergency calling infrastructure. Raptor Alert is also RapidSOS Ready, which accelerates the transfer of critical emergency alert data to 911 and first responders.
The ability to account for students, staff, and visitors during an emergency—and the ability to communicate the status and location of all individuals in your buildings.
The Reunification module provides ways to communicate when students and parents are able to be reunified, and the software automatically sends alerts to the student’s other guardians upon successful reunification to help streamline the process by reducing any additional people waiting in holding areas.

SROs and Mental health

Most respondents indicated their schools not only have dedicated counselors who are trained to support students’ mental health needs, but also that they have received training to help spot and address those needs as well.

It’s important to note that over 78% of respondents indicated the mental health needs of their student population have increased since returning post-Covid, and over 50% (combining “No” and “Needs Improvement”) indicated their ability to assist with the mental health-related needs of their students needs improvement.

StudentSafe can help with mental wellbeing

The impact SROs have on their school communities expands beyond that of authority figure—they impact students’ wellbeing, too.

Early intervention is the most important and effective way to support a student who may be experiencing challenges they are not equipped to manage. Being able to recognize a student in the initial stages of distress empowers schools to reduce that child’s exposure and give them the support they need to cope and heal.

Raptor’s patented StudentSafe technology brings together the systems that help schools recognize, document, support and manage the wellbeing of individual students. The intuitive and robust platform includes safeguarding and behavioral threat assessment (BTA) methodologies which are proven to help schools recognize a student in need of early intervention and support for their wellbeing.

“StudentSafe is a tremendous asset. I’ve been doing threat assessment for about seven years. For me, three key benefits of Raptor StudentSafe is that the organization of the app itself completely walks you through the process, it gives you the ability to collect all that data and analyze it easily, and the ability to collaborate with each other is built in really well.

If you want a great organizational tool to keep all your threat assessment information, StudentSafe is pretty complete.” David Wrzesinski, Director of Safe Schools at Robinson ISD

Managing BTA workflows

Using behavioral threat assessments is a critical component to school safety, enabling schools to evaluate threats and help guide students off the pathway to violence.

Raptor’s StudentSafe software includes the ability to document and manage low-level concerns, create student chronologies, run BTA workflows, manage BTA cases, gain immediate insight through alerts and robust dashboards, determine trends and gaps with full-scale reporting and more.

Also available at additional cost, BTA model-specific training on the development and implementation of your chosen process with added emphasis on recognizing and recording low-level concerns across various types of threats to students.

Learn more about Raptor

Raptor Technologies provides software and services that tie together the critical aspects of safety throughout your campus, from prevention through recovery, in a cohesive, easy-to-use software suite. We partner with you to fulfill our mission: To protect every child, every school, every day.

Learn more.