PA SAFE2SAY Something


The kid was wrong: Pa.’s Safe2SaySomething school safety line gets 40K+ tips in its first year

State Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Pennsylvania's Safe2SaySomething school safety tip line received more than 40,000 tips in its first year of operation.

By Matt Miller | mmiller@pennlive.com

When state Attorney General Josh Shapiro told his four kids about Safe2SaySomething, a student safety tip line his office was launching, one of them, a high-schooler, wasn’t too impressed.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Dad, that’s stupid. Nobody’s going to use that’,” Shapiro recalled.

Well, the kid was wrong.

As Safe2Say hits its first anniversary, it has fielded 40,382 contacts from students in every single school district in Pennsylvania, Shapiro said during a news conference Monday afternoon.

“I can tell you unequivocally that the investment has paid off,” he said, as the staff at Safe2Say’s temporary center in Lemoyne worked behind him. “We receive over 100 tips every day.”

He said there have been some surprises since the Legislature tasked him with setting up the 24/7 anonymous tip line in conjunction with Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit school safety group formed following a December 2012 massacre at an elementary school in Connecticut.

The expectation was that Safe2Say would mostly get tips about threats of school shootings and other classroom violence, Shapiro said.

Such tips have been received and acted upon, he said, but they are only a tiny part of the tips receive via the Safe@Say app, the 1-844-SAF2SAY phone line and the SAFE2SAYPA.com web site.

“Though we did successfully thwart some (school) attacks, those tips were not the majority of the tips we received. Not even close,” Shapiro said.

In most cases, he said, tipsters “were talking about their fellow students who seemed depressed. They were talking about students who were coming to school hungry. They were talking about kids who were victims of cyberbullying.”

Center staffers pass on the information to school district resource teams and, if necessary, the police, he said.

“We hear you,” Shapiro said, praising the kids who have used Safe2Say. “We take your tips seriously.”

Due to the types of tips that make up Safe2Say’s traffic, “I have called on the Legislature to put a mental health counselor in every school building in Pennsylvania,” the AG said.

Brittany Kline, the center’s director, cited examples of two instances where tips headed off possible school violence.

Brittany Kline is the director of the Safe2SaySomething crisis center.

In one case, a student reported hearing about school shooting threats on social media. A firearm was seized from the home of the student making the threats, Kline said.

In another case, a gun was confiscated from a student in a school after another pupil saw him carrying it, she said.

In general, she said, “We have a lot of students who reach out for friends. We also get a lot of students who reach out for themselves.”

The app has received the most traffic, about 39,000 tips, Kline said.

She has 10 analysts to handle all those calls. There are 11 staffers if you count Linus, the Golden Doodle who’s there for stress relief and who really seemed to enjoy the belly rub he got from Shapiro.

Those analysts are a busy crew, because all of the communication is two-way. Safe2Say isn’t cold and impersonal. “It’s more like a chat,” Kline said.