Cyberbullying
Stopit App Enrolls 2 Million Students in Time for 'Stop a Bully' Week
Stopit, an anti-cyberbullying app and risk mitigation platform, has enrolled more than 2 million students this school year, thanks to strategic alliances with Great American Insurance Group, Bay Area School Insurance Cooperative and several other insurance entities worldwide.
The company also announced “Stop a Bully Week,” which started Sept. 20 and continues through Sept. 26. The week intends to empower school communities to recognize positive, upstanding behaviors among students and discourage bullying. During the week, students 13 and older, administrators and teachers can visit stopitsolutions.com to share acts of kindness they have witnessed during the first few weeks of the school year. Stopit will select one winner based on outstanding behavior and provide his or her school with the STOPit platform free for life, along with an autographed poster of retired baseball player Derek Jeter, an investor in the company.
According to a news release, more than one in four children are cyberbullied in their lifetime. Inappropriate behavior both online and offline is reportedly costing school districts millions of dollars annually. The consequences of bullying can also cause young people to engage in self-harm or worse.
Stopit helps empower students to speak up about problem situations before they escalate — anything from bullying to inappropriate student-teacher relationships to concern for a peer, the release said. By providing Stopit, insurance companies can empower school administrators with smart technology to help them stay ahead of risk.
“I started this company because of the growing cyberbullying epidemic with students on social media, but as we began to rollout in schools across the country, I realized that the problem is also a broken reporting infrastructure — traditional methods are so riddled with friction they have the disastrous effect of deterring kids from speaking up,” said Todd Schobel, founder and CEO of Stopit, in a prepared statement. “By bringing Stopit to protect over 2 million additional students in 2016 and counting, we’ll continue to make a difference in schools everywhere and disrupt an industry that’s in desperate need of a tech innovation.”
The Stopit platform is available to schools, universities, businesses and governments in the United States and around the world. The Stopit mobile app is a simple and fast tool, the release said, which can enable individuals to protect themselves and stand up for others online, on social media, in the classroom and in the office.
The Stopit company also makes Documentit, an incident management system, which allows administrators and management to get in front of issues to mitigate risk and adhere to the evolving compliance landscape.
About the Author
Richard Chang is associate editor of THE Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].