Central Indiana Stop School Violence Initiative

Central Indiana Educational Service Center (CIESC), in partnership with seventeen Indiana school districts, submits this proposal to lead the Transforming Indiana for the Protection of Students (TIPS) project. TIPS is a statewide initiative designed to provide technology solutions and training to enhance school safety. TIPS will improve school safety for more than 76,000 K-12 students in central Indiana. On average, 40% of the children attending TIPS schools are economically disadvantaged. These school are facing disproportionaly high rates of disciplinary issues, student arrests at school, harassment, and bullying. Sadly, violence is a reality on K-12 campuses throughout the State of Indiana. Once seen as safe learning environments, both urban and rural school campuses have seen an alarming number of violent acts. In fact, Indiana reported 1,321 students arrested and 5,257 bullying incidents in the 2018-2019 school year. These statistics are the driving force behind the recent Indiana School Safety Recommendation Report, requested by the Governor of Indiana, to examine existing school protections and explore new ways to keep schools safe.

The goal of the TIPS project is to increase school safety by addressing Indiana’s specific concerns related to preventing and reducing school violence. The objectives are to improve school safety by implementing training (social-emotional learning/SEL) to prevent violence among students; technological solutions including anonymous reporting technology that can be implemented as a mobile phone-based app, a hotline, or a website to enable students, teachers, faculty, and community members to anonymously identify potential threats of school violence, and students in need; incident moitoring; and a panic escalation feature embedded directly in the app.

Based on the recommendations from the state report, with STOP School Violence grant funding, CIESC will serve as a “one-stop-shop” for these school safety innovations for schools throughout Indiana. The project will provide Indiana’s highest-need schools with an anonymous reporting system, 24/7/365 incident monitoring and emergency incident management services, SEL resources and training. Coordination with the 17 partnering districts will be facilitated by district coordinators.

CIESC and the 17 partner districts request $996,998 to provide life-saving technology solution to transform school safety in Indiana schools.