Understanding Raptor StudentSafe

Welcome to School Safety Today, a podcast brought to you by Raptor Technologies. I'm your host, Doctor. Amy Grosso. Today's episode focuses on the Raptor product, StudentSafe. To help us understand why this product is important, I'm so excited to introduce you to not one, but two guests today. First, we have Chris Knoll, who's the Chief Product Officer here at Raptor. And then we have Will Durgin, Director of Student Well-being. Welcome, Chris and Will. Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Chris, I wanna start with you of a broader overview of even how StudentSafe came about. You know, Raptor, we got our feet wet with visitor management, and that's what we were really known for, and then volunteer management, emergency management. So how did Raptor come to realize that they wanted a product like StudentSafe? Well, as is usual, our customers were a step ahead of us. They were advocating for us to help them with behavioral threat assessment. But there were some caveats that as we sort of got deeper into the conversation kept coming up. Our customers recognize that behavioral threat assessment is a complex process. It involves a whole team of people. So it is something that software can really help with. But we got a lot of feedback that, hey, if all it does is behavioral threat assessment, that's not something that people do every day. And that's going to be really hard to get people to use a product that they only trip across every now and then. So we started having conversations about other types of behavioral concerns that pop up, whether they're bullying or Title IX or any of the things that schools in many cases are mandated to build processes around. And that's what led us to StudentSafe. I love and I know that's been my experience at being Raptor of really listening to the customer voice, of really asking schools, what are you coming across? What can we help you with? And I know that's even how Will ended up here at Raptor. So Will used to be at a district. He's been a campus administrator, a district administrator, and then came on really to help with bringing StudentSafe to life. And so I Will, I'm wondering from your perspective, as you stepped into this role at Raptor, what how did you see a gap that StudentSafe was filling? So it was two primary pieces of it. One was once you got to the assessment itself, what we were trying to do is build a robust case management tool that when you got to a behavioral threat assessment and eventually other assessments, it was conducive to a multidisciplinary team. Like Chris mentioned, these are complex processes that involve law enforcement, administrators, counselors, multiple teachers. And in the systems that I was familiar with, it just wasn't conducive to multiple people jumping in and working collaboratively together. And that's really what we're trying to harness is the collaboration, right? The many are stronger than the few. So from that component, we wanted to build a very robust case management system that allowed you to assign folks. Those assignments had alerting that would notify you because we know how busy teachers and administrators and guidance counselors are. They're not just sitting at their computer waiting for the next threat to come across. We wanna be able to try to make it so they can continue their day to day operations and then jump in when needed. So that was part one. And part two, again, to piggyback off of Chris again, is the assessment is the tip of the iceberg, right? It's a little bit that you see sticking out of the water, but there is so much that goes on before that threat, the connective tissue, the origin stories. How can we be as proactive as possible? It's a buzzword that we all like to say, but how can we actually do it? How can we put it into action? And the thought of being able to catalog and record concerning behaviors and what's concerning to me might be different level of concern to you, it'd be different than Chris. But again, this allows districts the full power to customize those behaviors, what they want their staff to look out for to help prepare us to not have to do a threat assessments, to not do bullying investigations. But if push comes to shove, we've got the tooling to be able to do so. So identifying concerning behaviors and case management. Know, Kristen, I'm wondering if you can talk about like even the importance of bringing someone like Will into that development process. That doesn't always happen with school safety software companies, right? Like that they bring someone that has that expertise in product development, but you brought in an educator. Yeah, I think it's been a very successful approach to building a product management team is I think one thing that is true across the entire team is people either come from an education background like Will and are practitioners or have been in the industry a long time and may not have worked in education, but have worked with educators for so long that they've developed those relationships and knowledge of what schools really need and have had the missteps of what schools sounds good, but schools may not need. So they can avoid those going forward. When I even know, because I got to actually be part of it when I was still at a district that not only did you bring Will in and do all this stuff, but y'all did a lot of research on, like, focus groups and got opinions from people on the ground of what they were needing, which takes a longer time to get a product to market. But I'm wondering, Chris, if you can talk about why that was so essential as you were getting ready to launch StudentSafe. Yeah, there were a lot of insights that came out of doing that extra legwork that I don't think we would have been intuitive to us otherwise. I think the one that I mentioned at the beginning of just this tool has got to do more than behavioral threat assessments or it's going to be underutilized. I mean, that was really pivotal to the strategy we took and how we built the software and how we've continued to evolve it with custom case types and different permissions for different users. I think that was another thing that in retrospect is kind of obvious, but really came out of those focus groups is just how sensitive this data is. I mean, we're talking about some of the most private sensitive subjects about the most vulnerable people in our society. And we need to make sure that the software only shows that data to people who have a real need to know and can help that child and not just anybody who's got a log in. And we had a good start with the CPaMS acquisition, but we've continued to grow that. And that was another important insight. I'm wondering, you brought up CPAMS, which I was wondering if we were going go there some. So can you even talk about like CPAMS and how then that became what StudentSafe is and how the UK uses it? So Will's probably forgotten more about safeguarding than I know. But safeguarding is a national regulatory framework and audit framework in the UK, where the UK has imposed an affirmative duty for schools and their staff to monitor students and their well-being. Anything related to the students' well-being becomes a recordable concern, and they need to take appropriate action. Behavioral threat assessments you can think of as kind of the most extreme case, a threat of violence. But safeguarding is much broader than that. And truthfully, the US, we're much broader than that too. We just have very specific state regulations in those other areas. But when we saw students say for the first time, we were like, oh, this is it. Because it is that broader basket of behavioral concerns that our interviews and focus groups had really emphasized of, again, as important as behavioral threat assessment is, and it's got to meet those needs. It's also gotta meet a lot of other needs too. It it it weaves sorry. I was just saying it weaves so well into what we were trying to do because, like Chris mentioned, you you you're doing a threat assessment. Right? So that's originally what they're looking at. And as you do that investigation, it wasn't just a spur of the moment. I woke up today and said, you know what? I'm gonna commit an act of targeted violence. Like, that's not how this works. There's a progressive of progression of behavior. So when you look at any of these, whether they were, you know, committed or whether they were thwarted, nonetheless, there is that pathway to violence. And when I was seeing this, you know, I'm thinking to myself, those first couple stages are just so low level, right? They're witnessed and observed by multiple people across campuses, not always by an administrator. And that's something that in the US, we always kind of take for granted is the fact that, you know, it's so administrator heavy, but this kind of puts the onus on the whole staff and really kind of helps create that culture of a safety culture at our in our campus to where we are all members. And again, if we can try to get things before they before the the lid blows off, that's the most efficient way of doing things. Well, and I know when I first saw students say and it wasn't the threat assessment part, it wasn't that later on suicide screening would come and all these other things. For me, it was like you, both of you talked about that what safeguarding is in the UK, bringing it here of these early concerns, that why are we waiting until it is a crisis point? Because yes, threat assessment is proactive, but I still think by the time you're there, kids in crisis. Right? And that being able to help that early on, for me, I was like, this is what we need in school safety. Everything else we do is so reactive in addressing. And so it was so exciting for a company like Raptor to be so on the front line of wanting to be part of preventing violence, not just how do we react to it. Yeah, something I like about that proactivity too is, it's not just about protecting, the rest of the school from a violent actor. I mean, that violent actor is typically a child at the school. And how many times have we seen precursors to that behavior? And what a long pathway that usually is. I mean, that's usually years of trauma in the making. And it's a tragedy. I mean, let's help that child early on when the problems are minor for the child and for the community and prevent this escalation from ever happening. From just a staffing standpoint, it's much easier to handle those concerns when they are new and before they've really taken root. Because as we know, again, there's fewer staff for more kids. So we need to create an environment that's as efficient as possible. And there really is no better model of efficiency than again, identifying early concerning behavior, identifying it, providing the right interventions so we're not worrying about down the line that full escalation. That's where you can really start to kind of put your efforts in the right place. Well, and I know Chris brought up the whole custom forms and stuff. And, Will, I wonder if you can dive into that a little bit of, like, what that means and what we're seeing schools use them for and even into the future of how you see this can be so beneficial. It's been a couple of years since we've released it, but I still get goosebumps every time I hear custom forms and cases. It really, to me, in my opinion, is the most powerful component of this. Like Chris mentioned before, this becomes more useful for the more things you can use it for. Who are we at Raptor to tell you exactly what to use it for? Who knows better than that school administrator, than that district administrator, or that community? Does your process look a little bit different in Washington than it does in Florida? Is North Carolina a little bit different than Tennessee? We all have these unique differences. Sometimes it's just terminology. Know, the and the, right? We can go ahead and the, you know, the custom forms and cases allows people to do whatever is done on their campus, replicate it in StudentSafe. You are all using paper and pencil forms, Google forms, sometimes even less formal than that. Whatever you have, if it has a title, right? Bullying, Title IX, McKinney Vento, does it have a collection of forms? Does it have a status, it's open, it's closed? Does it have a severity, high, low, substantiated, unsubstantiated, red or green? Again, you are in control. You are the master of your domain in that sense, and that you can really make the system bend to the will of what your district is doing. And to me, that was the most empowering piece. We'll be on a call every week and somebody's like, Hey, I've got a new, you know, I'm using this for restraints. You know, I've got my ESC, special education population. We have a form that we fill out every time we need to do a restraint. I have to report that to the state. We have a paper form that we put in a file. Hope we don't spill a coffee on it or, you know, that office goes in flames cause there's no record of it anywhere else. So they went ahead and took that form, replicated it in StudentSafe. Now at a moment's notice, if you ask anybody on that campus, how many restraints have you had? Three seconds. They can tell you the name, the students, and all these different components. And that's just aside from the general ones that we know are heavily utilized, Title IX and bullying. But so really just it empowers staff. I know when I was at the district, would have, my day would start by opening up seventeen tabs, because I had seventeen different processes and reporting portals. And the whole concept between, you know, behind custom cases and forms was, wouldn't it be great if I could condense those all into one place that shows that intersectionality? Because so many of these events overlap with each other. But it's hard to see that overlap if I'm looking at that tab and this tab and that. But if you give it to me on one dashboard, I don't need to be the smartest man in the room to say, that looks off. Let me ask some probing questions here. You know, and you brought up a great word that I love reporting and then a dashboard because data. You know, I know I'm a nerd and that that gets me very excited. But, Chris, I'm wondering if you can talk about even the this journey that StudentSafe has been on within the reporting capabilities and what's now inside. Yeah. It's been very exciting. So, going back to early days, one of the things about StudentSafe that was surprisingly mature was the reporting capability. And sometimes, yeah, it was so mature that it became a little bit hard to use, but incredibly powerful, in terms of keyword searches, demographic searches, different types, categories of behavior searches, and being able to ask those questions about I'm interested in fourth grade girls and this particular type of behavior and being able to pull that up and see maybe a trend that you weren't aware of, or see which schools in the district may have the most severe issues. But where insight has really helped us with that kind of second issue that I just brought up, which is if I want to look at this across not only a school environment, but a district environment, or even a state environment, Insight gives you that dashboard and that abstraction to be able to see those patterns and then even be able to drill down and say, well, I just wanna focus on this population or this area of the state and see how the data may change. Really powerful. And then, of course, you can save those filters too. So if you wanna go show somebody or you wanna turn this into kind of a standard monthly view that you take a look at, all that's possible now. So and I think that's really where we're going as a society, hence why we're talking about AI so much and those types of applications is how do we get more intelligence out of the data we're collecting. And I think, again, that's kind of a foundational advantage of StudentSafe is if you're doing this in Google Docs or paper forms, it's really hard to extract much insight out of that. I can attest as doing some of this at a district. You know, I would be for five hours trying to run reports myself. And I love Excel, but it still took a lot of time. Now I know Will will you will be mad at me if I don't let you talk about reporting and insight. So I'm gonna have to let you go on this one, Sam. You you know me well, Amy. Thank you. Again, I always joke that the, you know, doing the work, the most important part, the second most is being able to report on the work that you did. Right? And you'd be able to report on it intelligently, be able to report on it that it can help guide decisions because that's, you know, if you're just looking at it for fun, which I know can be enjoyable, though, I mean, the whole point of data is so I can get some actionable piece of advice to to make tomorrow a safer day than today. In between the robust reporting, the custom reports within the actual application itself, which, again, you know, is it a reoccurring report? Is this something that you know that your boss is gonna ask you for on the third Friday of every month? So you're gonna have that report scheduled to run and hit you on Thursday night so you can just be a little ahead and show them your eagerness. But being able to visualize that and really taking what's dense, complex information, again, you know, what you're looking at is sometimes hard to consume when you're looking at dozens, hundreds of cases at a time. But to put into a visual that just says, why is this section of that pie bigger than that? Let's drill into it a little bit more. I don't need to have a degree in data sciences to be able to hold down control and click gender. That that really, you know, getted everything up. I wonder, well, if I look at this, you know, the week before spring break, what happens then? Control. So again, it's meant to be a low barrier for folks who, again, aren't technologists by trade, your educators, your administrators. We wanted an easy way for you to be able to take complex information and simplify it to a point where you can show your staff, say, hey, this is why we're doing what we're doing, or This is why we need to change what we're doing, guys. Listen, I know we're not big fans of change, but this is problematic, and we feel that based on this data, if we do X, and this is, we could see a giant drop in this, wouldn't you guys like to deal with fewer incidents, X, Y, and Z, and it really helps you tell the story. It's often forgotten. Sometimes there's a slightly adversarial teacher versus administrator aspect. But if you can explain what you're doing, what cause, and why this is a benefit for everybody, you're really helping out the entire segment. What I often say too, it allows districts to then make data driven decision making in student well-being. Someone that oversaw social workers and trying to make sure I showed their worth so that when cuts happened at a school, it wasn't gonna be them because, I mean, emotionally, knowledge based, I know that they're they do great work, but do I always have the numbers to show that? And I think for our purposes right. And we do that all the time with academics. Schools, academic data is everywhere for them. You know, they they can see a dashboard instantly and see all that. And I feel like student safe is the first time schools actually are gonna be able to have data in the way they have academic data, but for student well-being, which I think opens the doors for so many conversations and decisions that are based on not just what I think or I feel, but actually what's happening to students. And the great thing is the more that you use StudentSafe, to our point about custom forms and cases before, when you build those into StudentSafe, right, by the magic of technology, it makes its way into insight. So these things that aren't even suicide risks and BTAs, things that you're creating yourself, you can then go ahead and extrapolate data. You can download that raw data if you have some other, you know, data analytics software that you wanna compare some other subsets of data. Insight allows you to be able to grab those files to, you know, to intermingle with other systems. So it really gives you, again, the power of data in a way that is not drowning. Well, I wonder if you both can talk because once again, we're talking about a ton of data and, like, it's really robust. We're saying how important it is, but I wanna go back to something you talked about earlier, Chris, was the the privacy of student data and how that's so important. And so, Chris, maybe we'll start with you, and then we'll just talking about how that how Raptor prioritizes that student's, data and that their privacy for it, not just as a company, but even how the schools are able to determine who sees that. Yeah. So maybe I'll start with the reported context that we were just on. One of the decisions that we made is, StudentSafe has developed an incredibly rich set of permissions. So you can really lock down who can see what categories of behavior. Then there are multiple dimensions to how you can configure that. As we started to look at things like Insight and the dashboarding technology, there's we wanted to make sure that we weren't creating a vulnerability there where, now we're putting data in another system that either has to replicate all those same complex rules, or we're potentially exposing very sensitive data to, in many cases, an audience that doesn't need the details. I mean, they're making district resourcing decisions and state reporting decisions. They're not administering care to a single individual. So we anonymize the data before we send it to that layer. And I think that's really important and comforting because now you can expose a broader group of decision makers to the data they need to make resourcing decisions without worrying about which particular incidents and the details associated with them people may stumble across in the process. And going to something Will mentioned, that also gives you the capability to export this data to another system and mingle it with other data sets without now worrying about, I've taken the super sensitive data, and now I've moved it into a place that never anticipated having it. Yeah, and I would just to piggyback off of that, Amy, when it comes to the sensitivity of the student data, sometimes that changes, right? What might be sensitive today might not be tomorrow, and then the next day I really need your assistance. So being able to plan for those what ifs, right? It's nice to think that everything is gonna happen. Garden variety is gonna be this every time. Spoiler alert, it's not, right? There's always a nuance. There's a difference. I remember when I got trained originally by the district, we had a FBI agent. No two threats are created equal was something that always just kind of was burned into my head. So being able to allow the nuances where I don't want my baseball coach to see all of my threat assessments or to be involved in all of these concerns. But if his star player, Chris Knoll, comes through with an incident, I might want to inform him this one time of this incident while it's open. Not everything that's happened previously, but this one point in time. Maybe I want to expose him to everything that happened previously. Being able to allow those kind of one offs where I need to allow folks to have access, maybe access for a limited amount of time because it's appropriate for this case. And it really allows so much flexibility but still that sense of security that I'm not giving you everything that I don't want you to have. You can really lock down this but not that, here but not there, while it's open but not after it's been closed. Again, I need you as part of an active participant not to look at this for the next three years. So again, whatever that scenario is, whatever makes sense for you, that student, that staff at that situation, you know, pretty confident there's a way StudentSafe is able to resolve, who can see it and when they can see it. One, I love that that's a district decision. Right? That's not a Raptor decision that comes in during implementation and onboarding that you get to determine those permissions. You know, I always like to use the example, like, if I'm using StudentSafe, I'm gonna want every school employee to have access to put something in it, right, that they can at least put in something if they see a change in a student, like a bus driver. It's my favorite to always use. But they don't need to see anything else. They just need to know they put the information in. But then someone like I was the director of behavioral health services at a district, I'm gonna get to see a lot of what's going on in there because that's my role and my responsibility. And in between is so many different layers of permission, which I think that flexibility for schools to realize that district a is gonna do it different than district b, than district c. Our big districts, it's gonna look much different than that rural school district or that private school. And I think just that flexibility is so important for our schools. What's nice is flexible, but there's continuity between each of the schools. It's not like we have one school working a little bit differently than the other. So from a liability standpoint, the fact that once we set them to your point at the district level, we're able to go ahead and make sure that there is a certain amount of permission equity across the board. So we have one area not getting jammed up when somebody else should not have. You know, and I'm wondering for both of you, we're almost out of time. I feel like I could talk to both of you about StudentSafe like all day long. But I'm wondering because I can imagine we have some people listening saying this sounds great, but it's hard to sell this to higher ups at a district when it's not as shiny or flashy as a lot of things within school safety. It's hard to explain to parents how this is a safety preventative measure. What either of you, both of you, what insight would you give to them of how do we promote this? How within a district to say, this is really important, even though it's so upstream that we might not never we'll never know what could have been if we didn't use it. Yeah. In some ways, it is kind of the age old insurance problem, of you need it when you need it, but you may not ever see the benefit in any given time period. I actually don't think that's one hundred percent relevant to this case. We just talked about all the data that can be produced along the way. And most of the things we're producing data about are regulatory requirements at state level. So you have to do these things. If you do them offline, it's really hard to show the work that's happening and the issues that are impacting your community. I think that's really the advantage of StudentSafe and using software to solve these problems is you have to do it. Now you've got a track record. And something we haven't touched on is it's all auditable. Even views of a record are audited in StudentSafe. And so you think about, unfortunately, some of these incidents can become litigious and being able to prove that you had a process, that you followed it, that you completed the intervention tasks, that the right people were involved. Know, software helps you do that. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I always there's so much in the news always about bullying cases and the amount of money school districts end up having to pay because of this. But if they're able to show we followed our process, we followed the protocols with fidelity, it really does help you if it ever came to that. Well, those processes are becoming more ingrained. Right? More and more legislations are mandating them to Chris's point. When I joined Raptor to to, you know, what it is now, it's a different nationwide landscape as far as the amount of states that require it. Like you and I, Amy, have spoken about no less than four dozen times with the recent RAND and US Secret Service report. Right? Threat assessments are ubiquitous across the country. That, you know, National Center for Educational Statistics just two years ago had an eighty five percent. A few years before that was hovering in the sixties. So you're seeing a pretty precipitous, you know, uptick in folks who are needing to do behavioral threat assessments. In of itself, there's other cases, like we've spoken about before, suicide prevention, bullying. But I think it kind of gets a little bit of the onus out there that you have to do this. And if you're going to do it, do it efficiently. Do it in a way that is beneficial to not just one administrator, but the whole school community. And most importantly, not to sound cliche, but the kids, right? Like Chris mentioned on the onset, it's not just the surrounding kids. It's that kid who's, you know, having an issue that we want to try to get them on the best path possible to be a productive member of society. This really helps you get in front of that. An educator is not about, you know, prevention and proaction. I don't, I don't know what to say. I agree. Clearly I agree. And that, you know, I always say each concern put in, each assessment done is helping a student and who can argue with doing something that helps our students be more successful and keeps them safe. So I wanna thank you both so much for taking time today to get to talk about StudentSafe and help our listeners understand not just the product itself, but the why Raptor did this and why the company believes in it. I mean, it's why I'm at Raptor. I was so blown away with a school safety company taking such a proactive measure to ensure our kids are safe every day. To our listeners, thank you for joining us for another episode of School Safety Today. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast on your preferred podcast platform so you don't miss out on future engaging and insightful discussions. Stay safe and see you next time.