Educators and school personnel want to keep students safe, yet threats to student safety and well-being can emerge within and outside the school environment.
Inside the school environment, students face threats such as bullying, violence, gun violence, and self-harm.
Outside, far too many students are navigating abuse, neglect, and violence in homes and communities. These outside factors can show up in classrooms as behavior issues, learning disengagement, and aggression, creating a cycle of violence in and out of the school.
Data Reveals Key Trends in Student Safety
Lightspeed Systems is a leader in K-12 safety and technology systems, including:
- Lightspeed StopIt’s anonymous reporting system allows individuals to report safety, misconduct, or compliance concerns to school officials via the app, website, or phone.
- Lightspeed Alert identifies potential threats where students engage online.
Lightspeed’s 2025 State of Student Safety Report, built from millions of digital signals across K–12 schools, highlights several key trends that educators must face daily:
- Escalations are rising and happening earlier. Threats, bullying, and self-harm concerns are surfacing at younger ages and more frequently.
- Self-harm and violence represent more than 80% of all incidents and are highest at the high school level.
- Violence (including gun violence), bullying, and self-harm are “more connected than ever.”
- These are not separate problem buckets; they often co-occur in the same students or same situations.
- Early warning signs are often visible, especially online, before a crisis peaks.
Safety Threats Inside School Environments
From the school perspective, Lightspeed’s data highlights a familiar but urgent landscape:
Lightspeed Systems monitored more than 454 million pieces of student digital content during the 2024–25 school year, resulting in approximately 1.7 million incidents, over 1.2 million human-reviewed events, 82,392 high-risk cases, 4,045 imminent threats, and escalated 4,827 emergencies.
Digital spaces are where risk often first appears.
Most school violence and self-harm are preceded by clear warning signs, often online or shared with peers.
One of the most significant warning signs is bullying.
Bullying Linked to Self-Harm and Violence
Lightspeed data reveals that bullying was the single largest incident category, with 19,398 bullying-related alerts or reports, often appearing alongside mental-health language or self-harm behavior.
Research shows that bullied students are 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide than peers who are not bullied and that students who are bullied in school are more likely to have access to a loaded gun than their peers, causing an increased risk for gun violence and self-harm. National data shows that nearly 75% of school shootings are linked to bullying or harassment, and almost all recent K-12 school shooters had also shown suicidal behavior.
Safety Threats Outside the School Environment
Students do not leave home life at the door.
Research is increasingly clear that exposure to family and community violence plays a direct role in bullying, aggression, and violence at school. Child maltreatment (abuse and neglect) and exposure to community violence have been linked to:
Academic Struggles and Behavior Issues in School
Studies have found that child maltreatment has been linked to lower cognitive functioning and academic achievement, low levels of school preparedness, and frequent occurrence of problem behavior in young children and adolescents, as well as non-academic problem behaviors (i.e., aggression, off-task behavior, and poor social skills) at higher proportions compared to their non-maltreated peers.
Increased Risk of Gun Violence
A recent study revealed that a person who experiences abuse, neglect, or family violence in their childhood is at higher risk for gun violence (perpetrated against themselves and others) later in life. “There is a well-established connection between child maltreatment and the risk of violent crime and suicidality,” the authors wrote. Evidence shows that the more types of abuse a child experiences, the higher the likelihood of threatening others with weapons.
Increased Risk of Bullying
A longitudinal study of 829 adolescents found that witnessing community violence at one time point increased self-serving cognitive distortions, which in turn predicted later bullying perpetration in school.
Exposure to family conflict, caregiver substance use, domestic violence, and child abuse is related to a greater likelihood of bullying others and also being bullied by peers.
What Educators Experience
Outside the walls of a school, some students experience caregiver abuse or neglect, domestic violence, or chronic instability (housing insecurity, food insecurity, caregiver substance use). Others live in neighborhoods where violence, threats, and police activity are common, making hypervigilance or defensive aggression feel like survival strategies.
When students bring chronic stress, fear, or trauma into school, staff often see:
- Aggression that looks like “defiance,” but is actually shaped by repeated exposure to violence or maltreatment in the home.
- Withdrawal, anxiety, or self-harm signals that are easily missed in busy classrooms.
- Cycles in which the same student is both a bully and a victim.
- Bullying and peer aggression that increase mental-health strain, absenteeism, and fear for both students and staff
- Learning and behavioral challenges resulting from violence exposure in homes and communities
Effective school safety strategies need to address both sides of that loop: what happens to students in and out of the classrooms.
Early Supporting + Smart Reporting: Effective Strategies for Strengthening Student Safety
Data from Lightspeed and broader research converge on two solutions that work together to prevent and address violence in and out of schools: early supporting and smart reporting.
- Early Supporting: Early, non-punitive help for students and families in need.
- Smart Reporting: Anonymous, accurate, and well-triaged school safety reporting that gets the right information to the right people quickly.
App Data Reveals Effectiveness Of Smart Reporting
Lightspeed’s platforms give a window into how students use reporting tools when those tools feel anonymous, safe, and responsive:
Lightspeed’s StopIt is an anonymous reporting app used by more than 5.5 million individuals in 7 countries, where it has helped schools address over 10,000 suicide, self-harm, or shooting-threat interventions.
Lightspeed product leaders reported that nearly 80% of students who submitted an anonymous report said they would not have reported without the anonymous tool.
Smart reporting is one of the most reliable ways to flag early signs of:
- Suicidal ideation and self-harm
- Bullying escalations and retaliation
- Threats of violence, on campus or off
How Early Supporting Helps Prevent School-based Safety Threats
Lightspeed’s data shows that many safety threats, from bullying to self-harm to aggression, begin long before the moment of crisis. Students often show distress in two places: online and in their daily interactions with staff. Early warning signs frequently track back to something else happening in the student’s life, such as family stress, unmet basic needs, or exposure to violence at home or in the community.
Lightspeed has found that early support can help address safety threats inside schools. Its prevention programs educate students and staff on personal, social, and emotional learning, including self-control, anger management, and resilience. Lightspeed’s HELPME app, for example, provides students and families support with easy, one-click access to crisis textlines and resources.
Lightspeed’s data ties early supporting to the prevention of violence on campus. However, research suggests that the concept of early supporting can extend to areas of child abuse and neglect prevention, as well.
Early Supporting at the Forefront of a Mandated Reporting Paradigm Shift
Educators who are mandated reporters are required to report when they suspect a child is at risk or experiencing maltreatment. Yet, if reporting is the only available response, students and families can end up in systems that are punitive or overly intrusive, especially when the underlying struggles are poverty, disability, trauma, or lack of access to services, rather than reportable abuse or neglect.
Policymakers are finding that a “report-only” culture leaves two critical gaps:
- It overlooks the root causes of maltreatment, violence, and safety threats
- It risks over-reporting families whose primary challenge is poverty, not maltreatment.
As a result, a paradigm shift in mandated reporting is occurring in states across the U.S., with a range of strategies that provide early support to families.
In California, a Mandated Reporting to Community Supporting (MRCS) Task Force was established to drive a shift from “fear-based over-reporting” toward “trust-based community supporting,” noting that over-reporting disproportionately harms Black, Native, and Latino families.
California lawmakers are working to address systemic and structural inequities, including overreporting of families experiencing poverty, by updating the definition of “general neglect” under California’s Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act (CANRA) to include situations where a child is at substantial risk of serious physical harm or illness, and to exclude a parent’s economic disadvantage.
In New York City, the child protection agency partners with the school district to provide information sessions tailored specifically for school staff with an emphasis on the range of ways to support families. Similar work is underway in partnership with hospitals, shelters, and other entities that are sources of mandated reports.
This shift to community supporting means identifying situations where a family’s lack of basic needs can be met by connecting them with available local resources.
Early support/ community support can help strengthen families, bolstering protective factors that can reduce the likelihood of child maltreatment. Supporting also provides a concrete course of action for educators and school staff who have concerns about a student’s well-being, and who want a pathway to provide support or help that does not require a call to a child protection hotline for reportable abuse or neglect.
Takeaway: Supporting protects against violence in and out of schools by encouraging educators to connect families to supportive resources when concerns are driven by stress, unmet needs, or financial hardship rather than clear safety threats.
Practical Steps to Implement Early Supporting + Smart Reporting
To operationalize “early supporting + smart reporting” culture in your school or district, consider:
- Normalize anonymous reporting for students and staff for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence in schools
- Promote anonymous safety and compliance reporting tools, such as Lightspeed StopIt, to students.
- Teach students what kinds of concerns to report, such as bullying, self-harm talk, threats, or unsafe home situations.
- Train school personnel and volunteers on early digital warning signs of bullying, violence, and self-harm.
- Train school personnel and volunteers to recognize signs of child abuse and neglect; ensure staff and volunteers meet their mandated reporter training requirements.
- Have an organization-specific plan for providing support services to students and families.
- Maintain a living directory of local resources for housing, food, mental health, and youth programs.
- Make it easy for front-line staff to refer families to local support
- Recognize that frequent exposure to threats, violence, and student trauma affects educators' well-being and sense of safety. Include staff support in your safety plan, such as training on managing secondary trauma.
The emerging picture from student safety data and emerging mandated reporting reform is clear:
Effective student safety strategies include identifying early signals, providing early support to students and families to prevent incidents, and reporting before harm escalates.
Supporting and reporting are strongest together, creating environments where:
- Students trust that speaking up will lead to help, not harm.
- Families facing hardship are connected to resources, not just surveillance.
- Staff are equipped to interpret what they see through both a safety lens and a support lens.
That is how early supporting and smart reporting can strengthen safety in schools for every student and adult who walks through the doors.
About Lightspeed Systems
Lightspeed Systems is a trusted leader in K-12 safety and technology solutions, dedicated to creating safer, more supportive learning environments for students. With tools like Lightspeed Alert and Lightspeed StopIt anonymous reporting systems, we empower schools to proactively identify and address safety risks, from self-harm and bullying to violence and substance abuse. Our mission is to provide schools with the technology, insights, and support they need to protect students and foster their well-being. With more than 25 years of serving education, Lightspeed serves over 23 million students across 31,000 schools in 43 countries, utilizing 15 million devices every day.
