Here are five-fold approaches to student safety that will make sure schools are doing enough to protect their students from security issues. It has laid down briefs on structural safety, fire safety, how to deal with ragging and violence in schools, how to protect students from sexual abuse, and how to ensure safety of students in school buses, among others.
Here are the five factors which must be kept in mind to ensure student safety and school security:
Physical safety:
- It is very necessary to keep the school environment including the school buildings, premises, libraries, laboratories, playgrounds, computer rooms, swimming pool, toilets, drinking water facilities, school buses, transport area and the surroundings safe and secure.
- The buildings must be built to ensure "life safety", and be most tough to hazards.
- School administration, staff, teachers as well as students need to be more aware and prepared to respond to any catastrophe, natural or man-made.
Psychosocial safety:
- Just as the physical safety of students in schools is significant to ensure complete student safety, so too is their psychosocial safety.
- Students who are victims of violence show continuous symptoms of dissociative reactions, depression, feelings of helplessness, lack of emotional intelligence, and also aggression.
School Transportation and safety:
- In 2014, CBSE made it compulsory for all school buses to install GPS systems to ensure safe transportation of all the students to and from schools.
- However, the actual need of the hour is to provide the school administration with an easy-to-use system to ensure safety of all the students and fleet management in real-time, and provide parents with constant updates of their children's whereabouts and everything.
Background verification of staff:
- When it comes to hiring administrators, teachers and other school staff, there definitely are many great reasons to conduct pre-employment background checks for student safety.
- This will help schools in screening people who come in contact with students within the school premises, including administrators, teachers, cleaning staff, sports coaches and volunteers.
Visitor management system:
- Inclusive tags for visitors and handwritten late slips and permission slips for students will not really serve the purpose of recording and analyzing information
- A digital visitor management system with visitor sign-in information and photo ID badges will rapidly increase the level of security in schools.
- A school can easily collect and gather information from contractors, parents, volunteers, and staff visits during the sign-in/sign-out process. The system can even automatically mark student attendance and send the reports directly to the parents, using a simple mix of GPRS and SMS/email notifications.
- Biometric security systems in schools automatically track student's attendance records based on their swipe time.
It must always be the responsibility of the schools to ensure that the students:
a) always come to school feeling safe, and welcomed
b) to have a trusting relationship with at least one adult in school
c) to understand academic and behavioural expectations clearly
d) to have access to mental health services
Schools effective safety policies, such as anti-bullying, are as significant as high-quality education, and should be fully integrated into school planning and strategy.