Comprehensive database of safety incidents in America’s schools provides easy website access to data insights that help families and community leaders make informed decisions and drive change.
Challenge
Safe Schools for Alex is a non-profit founded by Max Schachter after his son was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The organization’s mission is to provide the most current school safety best practices and resources to students, parents, school districts, and law enforcement so that all children can learn in a safe environment. Democratizing access to school safety data – which historically has been hard to access and analyze – is central to this mission. Safe Schools for Alex sought help from Cleartelligence to:
- Make safety data easy to access and understand: School safety data is often buried in multiple, illegible tabular data files, requiring specific knowledge or skill sets to analyze effectively.
- Address underreporting: Underreporting of school safety incidents remains a significant problem throughout the US.
- Inspire advocacy: Create clear and concise standardized school safety data metrics that parents and schools can use to make schools safer.
Solution
The team consulted with school safety experts from the University of Florida to understand where the data lived and in what formats. They also researched what students, parents, school administrators, and law enforcement wanted to learn from the data so they could deliver accurate and valuable insights to serve their needs. The result is a large-scale embedded analytics solution that uses Snowflake, DBT, Tableau, and an evolving set of web development and AI technologies to untangle, summarize, and visualize the disparate data sets.
From the Safe Schools for Alex website, constituents now can get answers to their most pressing questions, including:
- What is my school’s safety rating?
- Is my school better, worse, or different than other schools?
- Are safety incidents rising or decreasing?
- How is a state, school district, or specific school trending over time?
- How can I act on this data to drive policy changes?
Key Features & Capabilities
Dashboard with 50 safety indicators
Ranging from reported violence and weapons incidents to bullying, mental health support, and disciplinary actions—which, behind the scenes, are actually multiple dashboards working in tandem to provide a unified experience without sacrificing performance.
Narrative context
Helps users interpret the data and engage key stakeholders—parents, educators, policymakers, and students—more effectively.
Data storytelling
Combines data with real-world stories to make safety insights more accessible and actionable, helping schools not just track issues but understand and improve them.
Clickable map interface
Interactive and accessible data viewing.
Automated Spanish translation
Automatic translation of the website and Tableau dashboards.
Dynamic comparisons
Mobile Tableau designs embedded in desktop view to create a dynamic “comparisons” page in half the development time of a fully web-based solution.
AI-generated summaries
AI-ready data will deliver new Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) summaries in early 2026.
Future data sharing via custom APIs
Data sharing will be available through custom APIs in future releases to support research efforts, philanthropic initiatives, and eventual monetization.
Results
- Comprehensive data available to millions of students, parents, school administrators, and law enforcement in Florida, with initial data available for all 50 states and Washington, D.C
- Thousands of page views and increasing dashboard usage are driving significant new donations
- Users can easily compare their school’s safety report with other schools to drive awareness, informed decision-making, and activism
- New Florida legislative policies enacted regarding school safety (Florida Senate Bill 1470: School Safety), with other states following (Utah most recently) based on Safe Schools for Alex’s data-backed speaker series
Ready to lead with data?
Our team is here to help you turn your complex data environment into a finely tuned engine for impact and growth.
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