Creating safe schools where students show respect and empathy can have lasting rewards. A comprehensive schoolwide bullying prevention program such as the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program can help you achieve a safe school environment. It involves students, parents, teachers, staff, and even the community, helping everyone who participates to feel ownership in the program's positive results and concrete, long-lasting benefits. 
Safe Schools for Students Who are Bullied
Students deserve to feel safe in school without the repeated degradation and humiliation that comes from being bullied. Schoolwide prevention of bullying can help these students:
- Build self esteem
- Avoid depression and suicidal thoughts
- Minimize chronic health problems, such as stomachaches and headaches
- Learn how to determine roles students play in bullying situations
- Perform better on schoolwork
- Increase attendance
- Enjoy a safer more respectful environment
- Develop trust for teachers and staff who are in control and care
- Gain a brighter future
Safe Schools for Students Who Bully Others
Students who bully are at a greater risk of continuing on a path of antisocial behavior, including crime, substance abuse, and more. Schoolwide prevention of bullying provides interventions for everyone involved, including students who bully. By holding students who bully others accountable for their behavior, they may also learn to turn away from other negative behaviors like rule breaking, shoplifting, and vandalism.
Safe Schools for Bystanders
Those students who don't directly bully others or experience bullying themselves may still feel its affects. And, over time, the mere presence of bullying can change the attitudes and norms in a harsher, less empathetic direction. Schoolwide prevention of bullying will help students who witness bullying by giving them:
- Power to change situations
- Tools to avoid engaging in bullying
- Skills to improve peer relationships through positive bystander behavior
- Trust for teachers and staff
- Safe schools to attend
Safe Schools for Parents
Schoolwide prevention of bullying includes all parents. Parents can play an important role in creating safe schools by using practical tools to help children who are bullied or who have bullied others. Find out more.
Safe Schools for Teachers and Staff
Since teachers have the most day-to-day contact with students, they play a large role in schoolwide prevention of bullying. Students need to know that teachers and other staff have control over the environment and that they care and are prepared to intervene effectively when bullying behavior happens. Learn more.
Safe Schools for the Community
Bullying isn't confined to the school grounds. It can continue in the community and escalate to law-breaking violence. And because many communities have learned that devastating school shootings get carried out by students who felt bullied, excluded, or threatened by peers, helping to create safe schools will:
- Give students a safe place where they feel like they belong
- Prevent violence and other crimes
- Increase property values and overall community pride
