The Maryland Center for School Safety’s annual report found it got a lot more tips and reports to its anonymous tip line during the last school year than it did in the previous school year. But leaders in that small state agency said that’s not necessarily indicative of growing problems and safety issues in schools — but rather the success of its messaging and efforts to raise awareness of what the center does.
There were more than 900 tips and concerns about various safety issues submitted to the anonymous tip line — which can be accessed online, via phone or through the agency’s app — up more than 150 tips from the 2021-2022 school year.
“One of our priorities every year, since the reporting system began in 2018, is to increase awareness of the system,” said Kimberly Buckheit, the policy, communications and engagement manager with MCSS.
“So as you increase awareness, you create that likelihood of increasing the number of people who are then reporting things, which can’t necessarily be equated to … more incidents occurring.”
She said increasing that awareness can make a big difference when it comes to keeping threats away from schools.
“National trends research really tells us that there’s always leakage prior to any kind of event that has caused harm,” Buckheit said. “It’s just critical that individuals, parents, students, educators, community members, have a means by which to report any behaviors of concern that they encounter, whether that’s on social media, overhearing a conversation in a way that gets an immediate response, whether that’s 2 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the afternoon.”
She added that “almost always there is someone who knew something, or something that was posted, a change in behavior.”
The Maryland Center for School Safety is a small (16 people) cabinet level agency in Maryland that helps school systems coordinate all kinds of safety issues. It offers training and help with programs for school systems to utilize, reviews emergency plans, and helps secure grant money for various types of emergency preparedness, whether that’s violence, weather or even something such as a gas leak inside a school.
Offering more training to school personnel on what to look for in terms of student safety was one priority last year, and remains a goal for this current school year. But so does standardizing certain language to describe situations such as lockdowns, so everyone knows exactly what it means and what it implies.
Of the 927 tips that came into the anonymous reporting system, more than 100 were about bullying or cyberbullying concerns. Concerns about assaults, drugs, guns, building security, anger issues and child neglect also increased. Tips about planned attacks saw a significant reduction.
The report also noted more than 1,700 threats were made to schools or school system facilities. Of the more than 1,000 total emergency responses, 241 of them led to evacuations and there were 170 lockdowns around the state. Almost 700 of those emergency responses didn’t have any impact on school operations.
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