Bullying and harassment is a constant cause of concern in schools. You feel helpless, as if there is nowhere to go. Teachers and other staff have always told you to ask for help, but you don’t feel comfortable telling them. Administrators at West are trying to ease the amount of negativity in the school by releasing an anonymous reporting app for students called P3 Campus.

Being safe at school is a priority for most people, and worrying about potential danger is not what administration wants students to focus on. Associate principal, Charlie Driscoll, one of the main advocates of P3 Campus, has an objective to help keep students safe.

“P3 Campus is a web-based tool that we can use to gather information anonymously about bullying, harassment, crime, kids with self-injurious thoughts, and has done a pretty good job so far,” Driscoll said.

Although P3 Campus was released throughout the entirety of West, it has been used less than a dozen times since its release during zero term earlier this year. With each of the times it was used, the problem was resolved efficiently, with little conflict each time. P3 Campus was released to teachers last year during spring break, but because of Covid, students weren’t informed about it until the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year.

“Covid sort of shelled the P3 Campus release. We did not roll it out hard, it was a soft roll out. It wasn’t intended to be soft, but because we don’t have a normal advisory, it was harder to roll out,” Driscoll said.

P3 Campus was released to the student body during two days of extended second blocks of what would be called advisory in previous years. Due to scheduling adjustments in regards to hybrid learning, advisory was cut out of this year’s schedule. Math teacher Ethan Johnson believed that advisory was a great way to help students, but there were also problems with it..

“Honestly for the most part [advisory] helps. There might be a student that is excelling in all of their classes, and so they have nowhere to go. It could also lead to the situation that we call the ‘chronic wanderers’ because they need the extra help, but they didn’t want to go so they just wandered the halls,” Johnson said.

With only one-third of the student body in school at a time because of hybrid scheduling, there has been significantly less conflict in the building this year. This is another reason why P3 Campus has hardly been used this year. Johnson also regarded that the amount of students in the building helped cut down with the conflict in the school. He, like most teachers in the building, believed that P3 Campus was just a safety measure in keeping students safe.

“We, as staff members, only see a certain amount of students every day. And because there is no advisory block this year, some students might not get that connection to a teacher or adult in the building and without that support, sometimes students fall through the cracks. But having P3 Campus available to all students, we can view it as a virtual teacher,” Johnson said.

From a student’s perspective, P3 Campus could be a useful tool if you were in need of help. But because of its soft release, a lot of students in the building know little to nothing about it. Junior Calvin Laake said that he knows nothing about P3 Campus, and he has never even heard of it. Other students like junior Evan Walker, knew a little about P3 Campus and understood why it was introduced.

“Bullying can be a very tough experience, and it happens at West a lot. I believe [P3 Campus] was introduced because this bullying happens, to make sure that students stay safe, and to keep student’s mental aura sane,” Walker said.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics and PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center, about 20 percent of students between the ages of 12-18 have reported being bullied. Most of the bullying was with rumors, insults, or threats of harm. Programs have been introduced by most schools to try to bring a halt to bullying, and they have decreased it by 25 percent. Administration introduced P3 Campus as an additional program at West to attempt to stop bullying.

There is potential for P3 Campus at West, if there was more awareness about it. Walker also explained that P3 Campus could be more effective if students were educated on how and when to use it.

“I think that administration should talk about [P3 Campus] more, being more involved and checking in on students more often,” Walker said.

P3 Campus has also been used as a tool at both North and Central high schools. North had similar results as West, on the other hand, Central displayed wide use of P3 Campus and saw tremendous results out of it. Central released P3 Campus to students towards the end of last school year, and that was the main reason why Driscoll believed they were seeing these results. If P3 Campus had wide use at West like it did at Central, Driscoll thought that conflict with students could be cut down to almost none.

Although P3 Campus is not widely known about at West, it could hold the key to the future of student’s safety in schools. The goal of administration is to get P3 Campus more widely used like it is at Central and to help keep students safe. Driscoll is not only willing to receive feedback from anyone but is requesting it when it comes to the discussion of rolling out P3 Campus and increasing its use throughout school.

“How can we roll out [P3 Campus] and make wide use of it around the school?” asked Driscoll.