While Denver Public Schools (DPS) had been monitoring student email use for years, a Gaggle audit helped the district realize that struggling students were falling through the cracks. DPS discovered that students had stopped using email to communicate with one another and had instead started using Drive, which wasn’t monitored. “It wasn’t like the communication stopped; they just transitioned over to a different platform,” said Kellie Riley, DPS Student Safety Specialist. “That was a real eye-opener for us.”
In 2016, the district of 93,000 students across 222 schools expanded its monitoring to include student drives. This shift allowed Denver Public Schools to create a comprehensive safety system, helping them protect more students and save more lives. “In the last three years, we’ve tripled the number of possible student situations,” said Melissa Craven, Director of Emergency Management for DPS’ Department of Safety.
Last year, Gaggle reviewed about one million pieces of documentation for DPS. Many of those alerts went to Riley, who reviewed each one to determine whether further action was warranted. In one instance, the student safety platform alerted her of a student considering suicide. This early warning allowed the district to intervene before anything happened—a scenario that’s already repeated itself 70 times in 2019 alone.
Craven believes the Gaggle student safety platform is second to none. “I’ve received phone calls at 2:00 Saturday morning because a Gaggle safety analyst came across something that couldn't wait or couldn't be emailed,” she said. “I’m certainly grateful that they have no hesitation in picking up the phone to call me—especially when it comes to our students’ safety, which is priority number one for all of us.”
Read the case study to learn more about how Denver Public Schools expanded their student safety efforts.