Talk About It: Connecting Kids and Educators Anonymously to Build Safer Schools

Good morning all,

My district is looking at this subscription service – Talk About It by AnComm. Anyone familiar with it?

The basic idea is that a group of teachers, school counselors, administrators, etc. form a team of people available to students anonymously via AnComm’s secure, proprietary, completely anonymous messaging system … students then log onto it whenever they need to talk, presumably about something so important and potentially difficult that anonymity is required … and in the process, students get the guidance they need. The AnComm FAQ (.PDF) explains it all. Here’s their brochure.

I like this concept.I like the idea of students being free to converse with teachers about issues in their lives. Some of these kids feel they have nowhere to turn in response to social or personal issues in school or at home. (Gotta give props to those school counselors out there who deal with this stuff every day – I could never do that job – I’d probably jump off a building due to all the stress.)

That said, I wonder how well this service would be utilized, what kind of volume in terms of message traffic gets generated typically, how interactions are guided from online-only to face-to-face (so that real progress on the issues can be made), and what students think about such a program.

A neighboring school is using it, I’ve yet to hear from them about their opinion. What do YOU think? Is this something your district would benefit from? In this age of shrinking school budgets when every expenditure is being scrutinized, would this be seen as a good value? (Not sure of the costs but I heard for our school it was several thousand $ per year.) I’d imagine that if it prevented even a single serious incident, it would more than pay for itself, but that’s just me. Looking forward to the conversation, and I’m hoping this is something we can make happen in our district.

-kj-