Improving school safety: How the cloud is helping K12 students in the wake of violent incidents in schools

Research shows that students who feel safe are more likely to be engaged at school and be more successful in all aspects of life – not just academics. But students are dealing with the reality of increased violence in schools – finding it more difficult to feel safe.

Administrator concerns in the wake of school violence have made school safety a top priority in K12. One collaboration is delivering a safer learning environment for students through a scalable, highly secure, and innovative cloud services solution: Kokomo 24/7® Safety Cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We found that students who felt safer were more attentive and efficient in the classroom. These students also reported fewer symptoms of depression, such as feeling unhappy and having difficulty enjoying themselves. Making sure that students are engaged and attentive in the classroom can contribute to long-term success above and beyond intellectual capacities,” said researcher Caroline Fitzpatrick, who is also a professor of psychology at Sainte-Anne’s University.

Combating this “new normal” with technology

School safety has become a priority for teachers and administrators, where the ability to track incidences of bullying and violence in a centralized system has become paramount.

Kokomo 24/7® teamed up with AWS to provide tools for school administrators and safety resource officers to create safer K12 learning environments. This approach to school safety uses years of school safety data across thousands of incidents to provide a predictive score for the probability of unsafe school incidents.

The TruScore™ incident scoring system in Kokomo24/7’s Safety Cloud™ turns the tables on the reactive approach administrators have used over the years to manage unsafe incidents. TruScore™ delivers to educators and safety resources pre-packaged intelligence about student safety so they can potentially intervene before incidents occur.

The software is built by Kokomo24/7 Solutions and delivered using AWS services, including: serverless architecture, AWS Lambda in .NET and Python, Amazon SageMaker and AWS Cloud9 for artificial intelligence, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for file repository, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) for messaging and notification, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for database, and Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Route53, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for networking.

Most Student Information Systems (SIS) today are data repositories to report (and sometimes document) incidents after they have happened. Kokomo24/7 Safety Cloud puts data to work proactively so faculty can intervene in real time, before an incident happens. Additionally, the workflows and logic built in the school safety platform can track, record, and store compliance documents and other sensitive incident information needed for archiving and forensics.

Running on AWS, Kokomo24/7 Safety Cloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product licensed with school systems in mind, in an easy-to-install, cloud-based subscription model. Whether a small school district with a dozen schools or a large district (as with the flagship deployment at the second largest school district in the United States, Los Angeles, California), Kokomo24/7 can scale to school system size and tailor to a school’s current needs and adjust in the years to come.

Kokomo is an AWS EdStart member. Learn more about the Kokomo24/7 Safety Cloud and cloud computing for education and AWS for K12 education.