Florida’s school safety dashboard helps parents and teachers address root causes of bullying, fighting and other misbehavior
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May 08, 2024
F. Chris Curran, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Florida -
The Conversation
Florida updated its school safety dashboard in April 2024, and it is now one of the most comprehensive in the nation. F. Chris Curran is an education policy professor at the University of Florida who partnered with Safe Schools for Alex, a nonprofit created by Max Schachter following the murder of his son Alex in the Parkland massacre in 2018, to release the new version of the dashboard. The Conversation asked him how parents and schools can benefit from the dashboard and what other states might learn from it as well.
What can this dashboard show parents about how safe a school is for their child?
Parents can use the Safe Schools for Alex dashboard to compare safety metrics in their child’s school with district and state averages as well as with other similar schools. The dashboard includes all public K-12 schools in Florida and over 50 indicators of school safety – ranging from fights and weapons to school bus crashes. Parents can also see information on school responses and resources, such as whether school staff are trained in suicide prevention and the ratio of counselors to students.
Access to this data lets parents and parent-teacher associations know what questions to ask of their teachers and school leaders to help them contribute to school improvement plans. It can also help parents better support their own children at home by talking about and addressing issues they see in the dashboard. For example, parents might talk to their kids about bullying or hazing, using the statistics in the dashboard.
With numerous measures of school safety at their fingertips, parents can look for the indicators that meet the needs of their individual child. For example, a parent with a child dealing with anxiety or depression might compare the mental health resources available at different schools.
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