One of the most important ways to prevent HIB within schools is to educate the community about these types of incidences, consequences, etc. Although educating the community of updated HIB information is just one responsibility of the student safety team, it is one of the most important tasks that the SST can do to prevent severe incidences in schools.

Especially at the elementary level, it is important to dig deeper into what is going on with a student if they are constantly complaining about these physical problems. The teacher may just send the student to the nurse to take care of their illness, but the illness may actually be caused by an act of bullying, intimidation, or violence. Therefore, teachers should be aware of the students that constantly complaining of physical problems.

I know that this training is about HIB as well as suicide prevention. If we know that bullying has the potential to drive students to suicide then to work on stoping bullying is a step towards working to stop suicide related to bullying. If you combine this with the fact that on the playground only 4% of bullying sees adult intervention then it becomes clear that not enough is happening. Not only should we be educating educators and students on how not to bully but we need to be able to stop the bullying that is occuring.