AG adopts Sandy Hook Promise reporting system for school safety threats

The attorney general is partnering with Sandy Hook Promise to provide an anonymous way for students and adults to report school safety concerns. 

The “Safe2Say Something” reporting system will use both a telephone hotline and a web app to receive tips from across Pennsylvania, said Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

Those tips go to his office, where dedicated analysts will review them, Shapiro said. The analysts will refer credible threats to school officials and local law enforcement. 

Pennsylvania is the first state to implement the “Safe2Say Something” program, said Sandy Hook Promise managing director Nicole Hockley. The program was based in part on an earlier reporting system set up in Colorado after the 1999 Columbine school shooting.

Hockley’s 6-year-old son Dylan was killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, along with 19 other children and 6 adults. Hockley and other parents formed Sandy Hook Promise in the months after the shooting.

The “Safe2Say Something” system allows children who might otherwise be afraid to come forward to tell authorities when someone could be a risk to others, Hockley said.

“They hear things that the adults…don’t always hear,” Hockley said. “Now they have a tool to help someone else before they make a tragic choice.”

The system is funded through Sandy Hook Promise as well as bipartisan school safety bill, Act 44, passed in June, Shapiro said. 

Republican State Senator Pat Browne co-sponsored the bill. Browne said the reporting system is just one aspect of bipartisan efforts to improve school safety, which come as a response to the Parkland, Florida school shooting in February that killed 17 people. 

In June legislators passed Act 44, which allocates $60 million for school security funding.