Customer spotlight: Bay District Schools

We sat down with Vernon Barth, School Safety Director, at Bay District Schools to understand how they’re approaching online safety in the district and the role of Bark’s monitoring technology in that strategy.

How does monitoring fit into your overall safety strategy?

It provides a proactive, digital layer of security that identifies, alerts, and prevents threats, self-harm, and cyberbullying in near-real time. It acts as “virtual eyes and ears” on school-issued devices and networks to protect student mental and physical health.

You’ve switched solutions to Bark. What were some of the challenges you had previously, and what has changed?

Our previous solution was generating a high volume of false positive alerts. This created significant alert fatigue among school teams, leading to desensitization and delayed response times that risked student safety. By transitioning to a system that combines advanced filtering with human review, our staff now has greater confidence in the validity of notifications. This 24/7 monitoring capability aligns with our leadership’s commitment to immediate safety interventions and ensures critical, time-sensitive incidents can be escalated to Law Enforcement at any hour.

What would you say to another executive looking for a solution?

I would say definitely take a look at this solution. The Bark team offers a chance to pilot their product to see if it is a fit in your school district. This opportunity to “test drive” the platform allowed us to compare solutions side by side and see the differences in what it offered. That and along with the affordability of Bark make the choice easy for us. They have lots of training resources that allowed our staff members to learn the platform which made the transition to Bark go so well.