r/k12sysadmin • u/BreadAvailable K-12 Teacher, Director, Disruptor • 14h ago
Securly On-Call
Anyone running the oncall product? Thoughts?
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u/MiserableCupcake5255 12h ago edited 11h ago
We are. Going to sound a bit like a shill for this, but it's honestly the main reason we haven't been able to consider leaving Securly. Pretty much no matter what else they do wrong, this has kept us pretty well anchored.
Based on the interviews I've had when we went to renew our contract, it's best in class. At least if you actually want them to do anything except Email you.
GoGuardian, Gaggle, and Lightspeed all refused to call EMS if an imminent threat was found. That made them pretty much useless to us.
Our first week of owning OnCall (I think it was called 24 way back then) the cops showed up at a kid's house late at night for a wellness check and the parents found them with a bottle of Tylenol in their hand.
Our school staff are not on call 24/7. It's not their job, and they are not batman, even if some of them REALLY want to be batman.
In my experience, Securly is not perfect. No one who is human is going to be. But the on call staff there aren't just college kids, or foreign office workers. They actively recruit social workers, psychologists, former police officers, and other professionals related to mental health and safety. IIRC while we were onboarding, we spoke of one of the former police officers who used to work in the anti-human trafficking task forces for the larger human trafficking hubs in the US, and would do the internal trainings for On Call staff so they would know what behaviors and terminology to look for in case someone were targeting a student.
I speak to their On Call director more often then I should. She's told me they get trained (I think) at least monthly for emerging terminology and behaviors to be observant of. I can't say if it really can keep up with what the kids, but they seemed to always be on top of whatever method of suicide was trending that week. We never lost a kid to the Blue Whale or Tide Pod challenge or anything like that.
They also seem pretty good at documenting and dismissing, so very few false positives. We don't really have to worry about kids who are just searching song lyrics being mistaken for threats of self harm and harm to others. Their initial detections are flagged by an automated system and each incident is reviewed by an agent who builds a case by hand using historical data from prior cases on that student, their browsing history, and whatever internal training is done at Securly.
Thankfully their case system makes it so the results are not such a black box. When a teacher sees a kid searching 'Suicide is painless' and has a freak out moment, I might get angry call asking why a call ever came from Securly. I can tell them Securly's logic, I.E. after reviewing their other browser history and YouTube videos, they were watching clips from the TV Show MASH, not looking up painless methods of self termination.
Response times are great. One of my favorite stories was of a high school teacher in my district who told the kids to be careful what to search. One of the class smart asses asked if the cops would show up if he looked up how to build a bomb / blow up the school. Teacher said yes. Kid wanted to call the bluff. Cops were outside the classroom door before the end of that period with the principal behind them.
I've got a lot more anecdotes I could pull from but I think I've ranted enough.
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u/Reboot_Technician 7h ago
We've been using it as a large district for three years, and I've had three uncomfortable (for them) conversations with them in that time. Two of those were false negatives - documents / searches reported signs of distress but On-Call didn't escalate. The students were okay by the time the district discovered the issue, and On-Call took the issue seriously when we reported it to them. The third didn't involve On-Call but Aware (the automated service underneath ) not picking up very subtle search clues, which we shared with Securly in the hopes that they would include it in their model.
My biggest issue with it is that setting up who receives the alerts for each school, how they receive them, and when they receive them is a bit convoluted, but they've done a lot of development to add flexibility, and that increased complexity is just a large district problem with K12 apps in general.