Research shows that 37% of bullied students say the incident happened in a hallway or stairwell. But when Charlotte County Public Schools put students on panels and asked students where they felt most unsafe, one response hit harder: “I don’t feel safe using the bathroom.”
That feedback helped reshape how the Florida district approached hallway bullying prevention, vaping, and everything else that happened in the unstructured minutes of the day.
In our recent webinar, Rebecca Marazon, NCSP, Coordinator of Psychological and Mental Health Services for Charlotte County Public Schools, a district of 17,000 students across 21 schools, joined Adam Efird, Director of Professional Development at Navigate360, to discuss the referral data showed, what students said, and how Navigate360 Hall Pass gives staff real-time visibility into student movement.
The least supervised place in the building
“The hallway is the most under supervised area of the school,” Efird shared. When supervision drops, opportunity rises. That’s exactly why bullying behaviors cluster there.
Efird noted the catch in every school bullying statistic ever cited: those numbers only reflect what’s reported.
Federal survey data indicates fewer than half of students report bullying to an adult at school, so incidents of bullying in the hallway are likely undercounted. The same blinds spots have a second cost that shows up nowhere in a referral report: time.
Five minutes a day doesn’t sound like much but multiply it by 180 school days and you have lost 900 minutes.
Case study: How Charlotte County, Florida found its hot spots
After COVID, Charlotte County’s discipline referrals rose year over year, and vaping was among the fastest-growing categories. The district formed a vaping task force, which Marazon co-leads, and set a goal of cutting vaping referrals by 2%.
To find out what to target, the team spent about three years analyzing referral data for two things: Which behaviors happened most, and where they happened. They also spoke with students directly to understand what was going on.
“We don’t want to just look at the data. We also want to see what the students are feeling and seeing,” said Marazon.
From those conversations, students identified bathrooms as the first area of concern, then hallways, stairwells, and any area on school grounds with less supervision than the rest. They also challenged the district’s assumptions about how young kids were when they started vaping. They learned elementary students were curious and brought vapes into school to show friends.
Each grade level needed a different intervention.
While referral data alone never surfaced that—asking whether students feel safe did.
Consequences and education together
“You have to have a consequences piece, but you also have the education piece, so they know how to make those right decisions,” Marazon said.
The district built discipline matrices for every level, including elementary, and paired them with a K-12 plan drawn from Navigate360 Behavior Intervention content plus in-person sessions from community agencies.
Those lessons run inside in-school suspension rooms, too. Behavioral expectations and discipline matrices are posted in hallways and online for families, which keep district and community expectations aligned and work to prevent bullying and substance use before a referral.
The results
After year one, vaping referrals dropped significantly; tobacco referrals fell 27%, serious infractions declined, and out-of-school suspensions came down. Year two brought an additional 22% drop in overall behavior referrals and another 9% decrease in the most serious category—far passing the district’s goal of 2%.
Marazon is watching THC climb now. “
We’re not all rainbows and butterflies here. We’ve got our own things, and it’s a moving target.”
Hallway bullying prevention that runs on data
Charlotte County uses digital hall passes in grades 6 through 12. Marazon calls it a game changer.
Consistency came first. One teacher handed out a stick to carry to the bathroom, another wrote out a pass. Now every classroom works the same way and students know the expectations. Teachers also stopped carrying rules in their heads.
Blocking rules live in the system, so if two students should not be in the hallway together this week, the platform won’t issue both passes.
Administrators can cap how many students are out at once, cap passes per student per day, set limits per bathroom, schedule recurring passes, and set quiet times during testing. They can see who issued each pass, which sometimes points to a staff conversation instead of a student one.
Meetup detection surfaces the pairs. One report shows two students logging nine hours together across 19 hall passes. Districts using the system report 55% less hallway traffic and 75% fewer tardies across grade bands.
Reducing bullying in these places has less to do with adding hallway monitors than with knowing, minute to minute, who’s in the hall right now.
There is a well-being layer here, too. A student burning through passes may be trying to escape something, and bullying carries an increased risk of anxiety and lower academic achievement. That sign pairs with warning signs StopBullying.gov asks adults to watch for, including unexplained injuries and difficulty sleeping.
Where to start
Marazon’s advice: find your people. Pull from schools, district staff, local mental health agencies, and community partners, then meet often enough to change the plan. And use the data, even when it looks bad. “There’s no bad data when you’re truly looking at it.”
Hear more from Rebecca on how her team drastically exceeded their behavior intervention goals in less than two years.
