Safe and Sound Schools and Bark Team Up

Safe and Sound Schools and Bark Team Up to Provide Schools With More Comprehensive School Safety Resources

Research-backed educational resources combined with smart monitoring technology help parents and schools improve safety efforts

Newtown, CT – Jan. 16, 2019 – Safe and Sound Schools, a national school safety non-profit founded by Sandy Hook parents, today announced a new collaboration with Bark, the digital monitoring service for parents and schools. As part of the agreement, Bark will strengthen its offerings for parents and schools with Safe and Sound Schools’ research-backed resources, tools, and programs.

Bark offers monitoring services to help pick up signs of cyberbullying, sexting, suicidal ideation, school shootings, and more, among youth. The free Bark for Schools program monitors school-issued Office 365 and G Suite accounts. Bark also offers a fee-based service for parents for discrete monitoring and alerts of potential threats. By working with Safe and Sound Schools, Bark will enhance its monitoring services with additional resources to help schools and parents prevent, respond to, and recover from safety incidents.

“Teaming up with Safe and Sound Schools is an incredible opportunity to give schools the tools they need to better protect their students, both at home and at school,” said Brian Bason, Bark CEO. “Given the growing number of school shootings and other threats of violence, there’s no better partner to help keep kids as safe as possible.”

The relationship between online activities and in-school behavior intensifies the importance of monitoring services and their role in detecting potential issues in today’s schools and ensuring a safe school climate.

“The more information we have, the better prepared we can be,” said Michele Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools. “When schools and parents can tap into the power of a tool like Bark, they can step in earlier, helping to break the chain of causality in potentially violent situations. Combined with our resources and programs, communities can help mitigate safety risks, better respond to threats, and overall, have a proactive approach to improve school safety.”

As part of its ongoing commitment to school safety and Safe and Sound Schools, Bark continues to offer Bark for Schools for free. In addition, Bark is offering a lifetime 20 percent discount to members of the Safe and Sound Schools network for personal/family accounts.

For more information, visit Bark’s Web site.

About Safe and Sound Schools

Michele Gay and Alissa Parker founded Safe and Sound Schools in 2013, following the tragic deaths of their children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Safe and Sound Schools works with school communities and mental health, law enforcement, and safety professionals to create and ensure the safest possible learning environment for all youth. The non-profit organization delivers crisis-prevention, response, and recovery programs, tools, and resources, backed by national experts, to educate all members of the school community, from students and parents to teachers and administrators, to law enforcement and local leaders. Winner of the 2015 SBANE New England Innovation Award for nonprofits, Safe and Sound Schools continues to answer the growing needs of school communities with custom programs, assessments, and training, reaching schools in every state in the country. For more information, visit safeandsoundschools.org.

#####