The number of threats to Philadelphia schools reported via a state-run anonymous tip line has more than doubled in the past two years, according to data from the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General.
The office launched the Safe2Say Something tip line in 2018 to comply with a statewide mandate that all schools establish a phone, texting, or app system for kids to report bullying, suicide, drug use, and other issues.
The number of tips about “Threats Against Schools” increased 82% across Pennsylvania and 164% in Philadelphia from the 2023-24 to the 2024-25 school years. That’s a larger jump than any other category during that period.
And that might be a good thing, according to experts, because it means students are using the tool as soon as they become aware of a potential threat. Both the state attorney general’s office and the School District of Philadelphia say staff have been spreading the word about the program, and school communities are becoming more familiar with it.
“It’s kind of what we expected, and kind of what we want to see,” said Dr. Jack Rozel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
There’s been a rise in tips about threats to schools across the nation, according to Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization that developed the model that PA’s program is based on.
Prior studies on school shootings have found that there’s often “leakage” that happens ahead of time — for example, a student telling a friend they have a plan to bring a gun to school.
“We’re just starting to talk about this now, in the broader field of threat management,” said Rozel, who co-directs the threat assessment team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “We need to sort of build out this network of credible receivers and tip lines like Safe2Say.”
In Pennsylvania, all tips go through the state attorney general’s crisis center. Their team conducts an anonymous dialogue with tipsters to weed out illegitimate tips, and categorize each tip as life-threatening or not. Analysts deliver the information to the impacted school and, when needed, local law enforcement. Schools then conduct their own investigations and report back to the state.
There’s a risk that students abuse the system, said multiple experts, due to internet trends such as swatting and the potential to submit tips as a form of retaliation during an interpersonal conflict.
Statewide, 3% of all submissions last year and 4% the year before were prank tips or abuses of the system, according to the annual Safe2Say Something report produced by the office.
After the state identifies some tips as immediately false, the school district investigates whether the remaining tips pose a viable danger to the school. The Philadelphia district said the number of verified “serious threat incidents” went down 16% between the 2022-2023 school year and the 2024-2025 school year.
For verified threats, the school district notifies the Threat Assessment Team, which includes the principal, a counselor, a safety officer, a school safety investigator, and the police department when necessary. Others including school nurses and special education staff may also be called in, according to the district.
Tips about violent threats do tend to spike after a nationally publicized school shooting, experts said. This happened in September 2024 when a student at Apalachee High School in Georgia killed two schoolmates and two teachers and injured nine others.
And a similar spike occurred after the 2022 Oxford High School shooting in Michigan.
Children are hyper-aware of these events, even though mass shootings made up just 1% of all gun violence in the U.S. in 2024, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
“Here we are in 2026, every kid in a K-12 school setting was born post- Columbine, was raised on active shooter drills,” Rozel said, referring to the 1999 school shooting in Colorado. “It’s Generation Lockdown.”
Without further study it’s impossible to know all of the drivers behind the spikes, said Elyse Thulin, a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.
“Is it just that students are using the tip lines more, or is it that these behaviors are actually changing?” she said. “There’s almost no research on anonymous reporting systems. We’re still trying to dig into it.”
In Philadelphia, “Threats Against Schools” was the second-most common tip at the end of last school year, and the ninth-most-common the year prior. Bullying has consistently been the most frequently submitted tip since 2018, with the exception of 2020 when suicide surpassed it for that year only.
Tip lines play a vital role in preventing multiple kinds of gun violence, Thulin said. Her team looked at four years of data from an anonymous tip line in North Carolina schools, and found that 10% of tips involved firearm threats.
Of those, 40% of tips were about a potential school shooting. The rest alerted schools to a weapon on or near campus, a bullying situation or argument, or a suicide attempt involving a gun.
A total of 151 guns have been confiscated throughout Pennsylvania as a result of the tip line since 2018, according to the attorney general’s office.
Programs like Safe2Say Something are “shifting the narrative from inevitable to preventable,” said Sandy Hook Promise spokesperson Aimee Thunberg.
“There are proven things we can put in place, and we can intervene earlier,” she said. “So they feel comfortable telling someone when they see something. Because they’re the eyes and ears of their school.”
In a 2025 report, the Pennsylvania Budget and Finance Committee said it was unable to review “the timeliness and specificity by which school entities resolved tips” due to confidentiality laws.
The report recommended periodic performance audits to ensure compliance, more advanced training for call-takers, and a requirement that school entities report back to the Attorney General’s Office within 48 hours for a life-threatening Safe2Say report and within 30 days for all other tips.
Last year a bipartisan group of legislators passed a bill that makes those changes.
This story is part of a collaboration between Chalkbeat Philadelphia and The New York Times’s Headway Initiative, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) via the Local Media Foundation.
Sammy Caiola covers solutions to gun violence in and around Philadelphia schools. Have ideas for her? Get in touch at scaiola@chalkbeat.org.
