‍Safe School Initiative (SSI)

The Safe Schools Initiative offers a free, user friendly mobile app that connects students and teachers to School Resource Officers in order to stop threats before an active shooter event.

About SSI

The Safe Schools Initiative works to prevent school shootings by combining the power of technology with community initiative empowering students, teachers, and law enforcement to effectively crowdsource their own safety.

The Context

The Safe Schools Initiative has created a mobile-first technology to provide students across the United States the ability to help keep themselves and their schools safe. Aiming to combine the power of community and technology, The Safe Schools Initiative engaged Hatch Apps to create an app that provides a free, user-friendly mobile app to stop threats in a school setting before an active shooter event. The Safe Schools Initiative needed to develop a mobile app to make this tool accessible to members inside of schools and local law enforcement.

The App

The SSI created a free, user-friendly mobile app that directly connects the students and teachers to School Resource Officers.  The app also provides a direct connection to the National Suicide Hotline and to national anti-bullying resources in order to help anyone who is in need. The app is designed to crowd-source safety by leveraging social media, and will be integrated into existing law enforcement and school reporting systems.  

SSI’s app enables people to:

• Chat in-app with essential resource providers
• Verify student status
• Learn more about safety resources
• Submit specific safety reports
  

The Impact

Hatch Apps helped SSI develop a beta version of the app within 6 months. SSI is now in the process of incorporating their app and safety initiative into Central Florida and Baltimore City Schools. The beauty of the app is that it can be downloaded, shared and utilized in any school in America. If just a few students share it with their School Resource Officer, a network is born in that school and information can start to flow to law enforcement to help them prevent violence prevention versus having to react to violence. SSI’s goal is to help schools, specifically students, feel empowered and to connect them with the law enforcement that seeks to keep them safe.  

“The Hatch Apps team has been very helpful in understanding how to make my vision a reality.”

“Up front, I will say I am very, very pleased with all the interactions I’ve had with Hatch Apps. We were so happy to be able to go from a whiteboard to an actual app in our hands within months.”

“As an organization, Hatch Apps met the right price point, and was user friendly. These are both things they do very well.”

- Chris DeRuyter, Co-founder

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