Threats to Colorado schools and viral misinformation circulating on social media in September fueled a 162% increase in Safe2Tell reports from the prior month, according to the state attorney general.
Students filed a record-breaking 4,729 reports about safety concerns to Safe2Tell in September, beating the previous mark set in February by 47%, according to a news release from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
Safe2Tell allows students and other community members to anonymously report issues to school officials and law enforcement.
The surge of school threats also drove an unprecedented increase from one year to the next, with Safe2Tell reports in Colorado jumping 74% from September 2023 to September 2024, state officials said.
“We typically see an uptick in reporting after a tragedy like the one in Georgia, as students become more vigilant,” Safe2Tell Director Stacey Jenkins said, referring to the mass shooting at Apalachee High School last month.
The most common September issues reported this year — with hundreds of submissions in each category — were concerns of suicide, bullying, school safety involving staff, threats, and planned school attacks, state officials said in the news release.
There was also a record number of duplicate reports that originated from a small number of social media posts threatening schools, officials said.
“These posts were often shared, altered and misinterpreted, leading people to believe that the threats applied to different schools across the state and country,” state officials said in the news release. “As a result, the same concerns were reported multiple times, even though they referred to the same original posts.”
One Safe2Tell tip in September led to the arrest of a Colorado student who posted on social media about explosives in their classroom and threatened other students not to go to school, according to the news release. Local law enforcement arrested the student who made the post and reported their account to the social media platform.
Only 2.1% of all tips submitted to the Safe2Tell program this year were deemed false reports — reports that contained untrue information and were submitted with the intent to harm, injure or bully another person — state officials said.
“This past month highlights exactly why the Safe2Tell program is so critical — to prevent the worst-case scenarios from happening to Colorado students,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in the news release. “We encourage students to speak up, knowing they are making a difference in keeping their peers and schools safe.”
Students can make a report by calling 877-542-7233, texting S2TCO to 738477 or through the Safe2Tell phone app.
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