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GoGuardian Beacon reviews student activity on school-issued devices and surfaces alerts when AI detects signals of self-harm, suicide risk, or threats of violence. Your safety team receives contextual, actionable alerts so counselors and administrators can intervene quickly and confidently.
GoGuardian Beacon is designed in consultation with leading mental health experts and is built to fit into your district’s existing suicide prevention policy.
Since March 2020, an estimated 18,623 students have been prevented from physical harm through GoGuardian Beacon. In surveys of Beacon users, 87% say their students and communities are safer as a result.

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Understand How GoGuardian Beacon Works

Beacon analyzes student activity across multiple digital contexts where risk signals commonly appear:
  • Search engine queries
  • Web browsing, including social media platforms
  • Gmail and Outlook
  • Popular AI chat sites
  • Other web apps on school-issued devices
When Beacon’s AI detects activity that matches patterns associated with self-harm, suicide, or violence, it generates an alert and notifies the designated staff members on your escalation list. The alert includes a time-stamped summary of the concerning activity along with relevant browsing history and screenshots so your team can evaluate the situation immediately. Supported platforms: ChromeOS, Windows, macOS

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Review Key Capabilities

AI-driven threat detection

Beacon’s AI is trained on real risk data to identify subtle patterns and context, dramatically reducing the volume of false-positive alerts and ensuring your team focuses on genuinely high-risk situations.

Contextual alert data

Each alert includes complete, time-stamped details of the concerning activity, relevant browsing history, and screenshots — giving responders the context they need to act quickly and confidently.

Customizable alert categories

Configure which risk categories generate alerts for your district. Enable or disable specific alert types to match your school’s safety priorities and staff capacity.

Configurable escalation workflows

Define escalation paths by alert severity, Organizational Unit, or time of day. Beacon routes each alert to the right staff member based on the rules you set.

Multi-person escalation lists

Assign multiple contacts to an escalation path so alerts reach the right people even when a primary contact is unavailable.

After-hours alert management

Configure how alerts are handled outside school hours, including who gets notified and how urgently, so high-risk situations are never missed.

Temporary pause for holidays and breaks

Pause alert notifications during scheduled school breaks without losing alert coverage, then automatically resume when school resumes.

Alert snoozing and analytics

Snooze individual alerts during active investigations to reduce noise. Review alert trends and patterns from the Beacon analytics dashboard to understand risk patterns across your district.

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Set Up Alert Workflows

  1. In the Beacon dashboard, navigate to Alert settings and review the available risk categories — such as self-harm, suicide, and violence. Enable the categories your district reviews and set a sensitivity level for each.
  2. Go to Escalation lists and add the staff members who should receive alerts. You can create multiple escalation lists for different schools, grade levels, or alert types.
  3. For each escalation list, define notification rules based on alert severity. For example, you can configure low-severity alerts to notify a school counselor by email, while high-severity alerts send an immediate text message to the counselor and principal.
  4. Navigate to Schedules and add your district’s school year calendar, including holidays and breaks. Beacon uses this schedule to apply your configured after-hours rules automatically during non-school periods.
After configuring your escalation workflows, test the setup by reviewing the alert routing rules in Escalation lists to confirm each alert type routes to the correct contacts.

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Respond to Alerts

When Beacon generates an alert, the designated staff members receive a notification via email or text message, depending on your escalation settings. The notification links to the full alert in the Beacon dashboard. Each alert contains:
  • Student identity — the student who triggered the alert
  • Alert category — the type of risk signal detected (for example, self-harm or violence)
  • Severity level — the AI-assessed severity of the activity
  • Time-stamped activity — a chronological record of the concerning activity
  • Screenshots — captures of the relevant activity to provide visual context
  • Browsing history — recent browsing context surrounding the alert
From the alert view, you can mark the alert as reviewed, add notes for your team, escalate to additional staff members, or snooze it if an investigation is already underway.
Beacon alerts are signals that require human judgment. A Beacon alert does not confirm that a student is in immediate danger. Always follow your district’s established response protocols and involve trained counseling or mental health staff when evaluating alerts.

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Configure Escalation Workflows

Beacon’s escalation system lets you define exactly who receives an alert and how, based on the specifics of each situation. You can configure escalation rules based on:
  • Alert severity — route critical alerts to senior staff while directing lower-severity alerts to frontline counselors
  • Organizational Unit — assign school-specific staff to receive alerts for their own students rather than routing all district alerts to a single team
  • Time of day — configure different contacts for alerts generated during school hours versus evenings and weekends
Each escalation list supports multiple contacts. If the primary contact does not acknowledge an alert within a defined period, Beacon can automatically escalate to a secondary contact. Escalation paths are fully auditable — Beacon logs which staff members were notified, when they acknowledged the alert, and what actions were taken.
GoGuardian Beacon was designed in consultation with leading mental health experts. The alert categories, severity framework, and recommended response workflows reflect current best practices in school-based suicide prevention and crisis intervention.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Beacon allows granular customization of escalation lists and notification rules based on the alert’s severity level, the Organizational Unit the student belongs to, and the time of day the alert is generated. This ensures alerts reach the right staff member through the right channel, every time.
Beacon’s AI analyzes student activity across search engines, web browsing (including social media), Gmail, Outlook, popular AI chat sites, and other web apps on school-issued devices. This broad coverage is designed to catch concerning behavior wherever it occurs on a student’s device, not just in a single app or platform.
Beacon’s AI is continuously trained on real risk data to distinguish between concerning activity and benign content that superficially resembles risk signals — for example, a student researching a historical event versus a student expressing intent to harm. By focusing staff time only on high-confidence alerts, Beacon helps counselors and administrators work efficiently without wading through irrelevant notifications.
Last modified on June 4, 2026