[April 17, 2012]

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Offers Schools Groundbreaking Solution to Combat Bullying and Other School-Related Incidents

Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today announced the introduction of its new concern reporting and resolution management solution specifically designed for schools. This platform offers students an avenue to safely and anonymously report their concerns, while empowering school administrators to respond effectively, efficiently and consistently to each report as it is made.

The reporting platform includes a comprehensive case management solution to help school districts and local government agencies manage each case consistently and fairly, including a sophisticated analytics and reporting engine.

"When children feel safe, it has an overwhelmingly positive effect on their learning environment," said Sean Burke, President, School Safety Advisory Council. "This tool is unique in that it gives students piece of mind in knowing their concerns will be kept confidential, while providing the school district with the ability to track each report. It creates a certain level of accountability, ensuring that cases of bullying and other related incidents will not fall through the cracks."

Incidents of student bullying have risen to troublesome levels in the last few years. Statistics show that one out of every four students is currently being bullied in school, and every seven minutes a child is bullied on a school playground. Furthermore, 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied. In light of this environment, HMH has made it easier to identify and end bullying.

"HMH is focused on empowering students to learn, which includes a responsibility to work toward building safer school environents for all students," said Linda Zecher, President and CEO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "This particular platform provides districts the ability to report, track, manage and analyze a variety of incidents including bullying, and we are excited to bring this solution to districts across the country."

Victims of school bullying will often not report their concerns for fear of retaliation or not knowing who to trust. HMH's solution allows students, educators and parents to anonymously report any incidents or fears through the school district's web site, by text message, or by contacting a call center.

Once reported, each case is documented and managed in one central repository to help administrators define and follow a common process for reviewing, investigating and resolving reported concerns in a consistent, compliant and transparent manner. Each step of the resolution management process is documented and alerts are set up to notify appropriate authorities if a case has gone delinquent at any step along the way.

Collecting and storing data in one central repository also enables flexible, real-time data analysis to track performance and identify trends and systematic issues within each school. This capability can be given to individual school authorities to analyze data associated with their school and to district level authorities to review district-wide reports, school level reports and reports from individual schools. This provides the ability to cross-analyze data to key performance indicators from multiple levels.

Please visit www.hmheducation.com/learningenvironment for more information.

About Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

With education products and services used by 57 million students throughout all 50 U.S. states and 120 countries, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a global education and learning company. One of the world's largest providers of materials for pre-K-12 learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is leading the way with innovative solutions and approaches to the challenges facing education today. Through curricula excellence coupled with technology innovations and professional services, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt collaborates with school districts, administrators, teachers, parents and students, providing interactive, results-driven learning solutions. Its Educational Consulting Services group works to increase student achievement in underperforming schools by developing, implementing and supporting education transformation through sustained district partnerships. With origins dating back to 1832, the Company also publishes an extensive line of reference works and award-winning literature for adults and young readers. For more information, visit www.hmhco.com.

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