Lightspeed Alert™ Adds Spanish Language Capabilities

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey, 15 percent of the nation’s K-12 students speak Spanish at home. That’s nationwide. The percentage swells in states with high Latinx populations—31 percent in California and 29 percent in Texas. The needs of native Spanish-speaking students and families are the driving factor in Lightspeed Alert’s addition of Spanish language capabilities.  

The addition of Spanish language alerting capabilities enables districts to better identify students in crisis, empowering early intervention and more effective support. Lightspeed Alert’s models are trained in the native Spanish language rather than relying on translations. As a result, it more quickly and accurately understands a situation’s context, the nature of the online text, and its full meaning, recognizing at-risk students and empowering school districts to proactively intervene and deliver support where needed.  

What is Lightspeed Alert?

Lightspeed Alert is an at-risk student identification solution that monitors and analyzes online activity for signs of self-harm, violence, and bullying. By recognizing warning signs in online activities, Lightspeed Alert identifies students who need help and might otherwise go unseen and unheard. Through its notifications to school district officials, Lightspeed Alert empowers schools with proactive student safety measures and allows a focus on early intervention.  

Lightspeed Alert’s new Spanish capabilities are just one of its newest features. Recently, the product also added new Drugs and Weapons categories to its feature set. In providing the most comprehensive student health and well-being protection in the marketplace, Lightspeed Alert’s powerful machine-learning algorithms classify flagged interactions as either a Low, Medium, or High concern. School district administrators establish which level alerts they would like to monitor, including Self-Harm, Violence, Bullying, Explicit, and now, Drugs, and Weapons.

Human Review Team of Student Safety Specialists

A key differentiator for Lightspeed Alert is Lightspeed Systems’ dedicated Human Review team, a closely-knit group of highly trained Student Safety Specialists who provide 24x7x365 support to school districts. It’s an incredibly powerful feature for student protection, especially outside of normal school hours and over the weekend. Rick Salter, a Student Safety Specialist, shares one example of the importance of the Human Review team in the short video below. 

Summary

Lightspeed Alert enables school districts to take proactive approaches to student safety by empowering staff to direct their limited resources on early interventions. It is an accountability that Lightspeed Systems takes very seriously. 

Expanding Lightspeed Alerts’ protective features to now include Spanish language capabilities and new Drugs and Weapons categories provides the granular data that allows student support staff to more easily prioritize and proactively respond. Learn more about Lightspeed Alert by scheduling a quick demo today!