Bullying is 24/7 – With STOPit IMS, Your Monitoring Can Be, Too

STOPit’s New Add-On Service Improves School Safety

Parents know, kids certainly know — and so do school administrators: bullying and harassment often occur long after the bell rings at the end of the school day.

“Over the last year, we have seen an increasing number of informative reports being sent in over the weekend and late at night,” said Neil Hooper, chief revenue officer for STOPit, the leading provider of comprehensive technology solutions to mitigate and deter bullying, harassment and other harmful or inappropriate conduct. “We now see 11.6 percent of reports submitted between Friday evening through school starting Monday morning.”

Other reporting tools require school districts to designate one particular individual to receive incident reports and determine appropriate next steps. This means that this one point person must monitor the platform 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — a truly daunting task.

STOPit, a simple, fast and powerful solution for reporting inappropriate behaviors, has solved this dilemma by giving customers multiple options for managing reports outside of school hours:

1. Customized Alerts – Allow multiple administrators to receive alerts of new STOPit reports via email and/or text
2. After Hours – Set a custom auto-reply message to inform students that reports will be addressed the next school day
3. STOPit IMS – A monitoring service that reviews & assigns all incoming reports

With STOPit’s new Incident Monitoring Service (IMS), customers can address reports of bullying and harassment — 24/7 — and provide round-the-clock incident reporting coverage for their schools. Many STOPit customers are choosing IMS to save their administrators additional time and make sure urgent reports are acted on immediately. School issues remain as school issues and after hour emergencies are covered by your emergency backup team.

How does STOPit work?

STOPit gives students a way to report bullying and other inappropriate behaviors anonymously and in real-time, using an app downloaded to their smartphones. With just a few clicks, students can send a message along with a photo, screenshot or video as additional evidence.

STOPit gives administrators powerful investigative tools as well — such as real-time alerts, built-in reports and the ability to communicate directly with incident submitters — all to help them get in front of issues and mitigate risk.

“With STOPit, we have a program in place for students to report issues they see so that we can help,” said Cheryl Dyer, superintendent of Wall Township Public Schools. “From bullying issues through school safety, we want to know, so we can continue to provide a safe and civil environment that is necessary for students to learn and achieve high academic standards.”

Your safety and security back-up team

STOPit’s team of trained IMS operators are standing by 24-hours-a-day, 365 days a year to review inbound messages. Operators are specially trained to know when to route reports to local law enforcement and when to direct reports to a school’s designated anti-bullying coordinator.

In the event of an urgent issue, technicians will notify appropriate emergency contacts or emergency services and provide a full report on the information submitted through STOPit — enabling authorities to conduct a full investigation. “With STOPit IMS, we know that if law enforcement needs to be involved, the STOPit team will help make it happen, round the clock,” said Dyer.

Operators, who are fluent in multiple languages, are staffed in three shifts. In addition to Spanish and English, more languages are available upon request.

“We can count on personalized customer service every time to make this a success,” said Kyle Phernetton, director of public relations for the Vanderburgh County (IN) Prosecutor’s Office.

STOPit benefits everyone

STOPit helps organizations improve their ability to respond to actual and potential inappropriate behaviors and also helps to deter incidents in a community. STOPit addresses issues such as:

• Safety
• Cyberbullying
• Violence
• Harassment
• Substance abuse
• Self-harm
• Policy violations

The deterrent effect is, in fact, one of the biggest benefits of STOPit, according to school officials. As valuable as it is to be able to report an incident as it’s happening, the ability to prevent harm or prevent the most serious consequences of of a harmful action or planned action — anytime — is an extremely powerful advantage of leveraging a tool like STOPit.

Capt. Neil May, USN (Ret), a senior naval science instructor, said that he knew of three students who had benefited from early intervention counseling for suicidal ideation as a result of STOPit and were now, “getting the help they need.”

“If we can save one kid’s life, it’s worth it,” said Captain May. “I’m nearly positive we’ve already done that in just a few months.”

For pricing and more information on how STOPit IMS can benefit your school community, contact us via email at sales@stopitsolutions.com or by calling 855-999-0932.