Dr. Martin Ringstaff is Cleveland City Schools superintendent.CLEVELAND, Tenn. – Cleveland City Schools has added a digital weapon to its anti-bullying arsenal.
The Cleveland school board voted 7-0 on Thursday to adopt the STOPit program, a bullying reporting system that allows students to immediately and anonymously contact school administrators. The vote followed a presentation by Tennessee Risk Management Trust officials.
The annual STOPit subscription costs 69 cents per student, or around $1,900 for the approximately 2,800 students enrolled in Cleveland’s middle and high schools. School officials plan to roll the program out to grades 6-12.
“It’s essentially an application that kids can load on to their phone and it gives them a beneficial, very rapid way to report incidents of bullying or whatever it may be,” said Chris Stipes, a TMRT safety representative. “It is two-way communication that is anonymous but the biggest deterrent is that everyone knows that there is an opportunity to report.”
The reporting app allows users to specify types of incidents such as violence or drugs, Stipes said. It can even be used to report online bullying and includes options to call a toll-free crisis line.