News
June 3, 2021

Keep Your Students Safe With the Latest Updates in GoGuardian Beacon

GoGuardian Team
Lighthouse with title "GoGuardian Beacon"

As suicide rates continue to rise, identifying students in crisis remains a challenge. Many students are struggling silently, and those who are at the highest risk for suicidal behavior are least likely to seek help for themselves. More than half of individuals considering suicide give some warning of their intentions.¹

Schools across the country are using GoGuardian Beacon® to help identify students who are at risk of suicide, self-harm, or possible harm to others by seeing those online warnings and alerting those who can help. Beacon can alert the right responders to get students help and quickly activate a school’s response plan.

Announcing updates to GoGuardian Beacon

With the rise in student suicides being front of mind, the GoGuardian Beacon team is focused on continuously updating Beacon to further expand and improve our student safety solution for K-12 schools. Here are some of the updates we’ve recently released:

GoGuardian logo
The GoGuardian Beacon team is focused on continuously updating Beacon.

Improved machine-learning model

We hold ourselves to high standards of accuracy. As part of our continued investment in model accuracy, we’ve updated Beacon’s machine learning model to provide more accurate searches and minimize false positives in alerts.

A zoomed-in shot of the snooze alert button
Use Snooze Alert to communicate what you want to see.

Snooze Alerts

In addition to reducing false positives, Beacon’s newest feature allows users to manage alerts with the new flexible Snooze Alerts option. For a determined period of time, users can “snooze” a specific page, an entire site, or a search term that generates an alert. The Snooze Alert allows the administrator to communicate to Beacon what they want to see in order to show more relevant alerts.

The Threats and Violence Related Alerts table. Subjects include Guns & Bombs, Violent Acts, Bullying, and Historical Acts.l
New categories help you ensure students stay safer.

Threats and Violence categories

In addition to helping identify students at risk of suicide or self-harm, Beacon Core and Beacon 24/7 plans now include automated detections for four new Threats and Violence categories in searches: Bullying, Guns and Bombs, Violent Acts, and Historical Acts. With these new categories, Beacon is able to identify students who are at risk of harm to themselves or others.

More updates to GoGuardian Beacon in 2021

In addition to the latest features mentioned above, this year’s updates also include easy reporting, notes, and feedback:

Downloadable PDFs – Information is key. After an event, critical school staff, parents, and students may need access to the alert information. Beacon’s logical, easy-to-read PDF reports can be downloaded and shared with other stakeholders.

Notes on alert details – Each alert now contains a notes section so you can document your team’s response to an alert in detail and quickly communicate with other members on what actions have been taken.

Alert verification – Users can provide in-app feedback by verifying alerts. With this helpful feedback, schools can play a part in improving the accuracy of Beacon.

Coming soon to Beacon

We’re continuously improving Beacon and other products in our suite of tools to better serve your schools and students. Here’s what you can expect to come later this year in GoGuardian Beacon:

Advanced filtering views Users will be able to display alerts based on filters, such as actions taken or risk-level priority.

Device-agnostic capabilities – Soon Beacon will be able to run on any device, browser, or operating system.

Separate escalation list for Threats and Violence – Users will be able to add different contacts to escalation lists for Suicide and Self-Harm alerts, and for Threats and Violence alerts.

GoGuardian Beacon serves as one data point of a school's overall suicide prevention program. To learn more about how Beacon can support your district or school’s response plan, please contact us for a demo.

¹Berman, Jobes, and Silverman, “Adolescent Suicide: Assessment and Intervention, 2nd edition” 2006.

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