Safe to Say Something

Dear Karns City Area School District Families:

This letter is to inform you that starting on January 14, 2019, the Karns City School District will be participating in the Safe 2 Say Something Program (S2SS). This program is a mandated anonymous reporting system that was established as part of the Pennsylvania Safe Schools - Act 44 in July 2018. This program will be used by every Pennsylvania School and will be managed by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General.

Safe 2 Say Something - Program Overview

Safe 2 Say Something is a life-saving and changing school safety program that teaches students, educators, and administrators how:

1. to recognize the signs and signals of individuals who may be at risk of hurting themselves or others
2. to anonymously report this information through the S2SS app, website, or 24/7 Crisis Center Hotline

The following provides an overview of how the program works and will be implemented in schools:

Safe 2 Say Something works through 5 easy steps:

1. A tip is submitted via the mobile app, website, or by calling the toll-free Crisis Center
   -the phone number for the Crisis Center and other information will be released on 1/14/19
   -this information will also be on the Karns City School District website on 1/14/19
2. The tip is triaged by the Attorney General's Crisis Center to gather enough information to act on it -tips are categorized into life-safety or non-life safety tips
3. The tip is delivered to the impacted school and, as needed, local law enforcement via 911 Center
4. The school and local law enforcement assess and intervene with the life-safety tips. The school will assess and intervene with the non-life safety tips
5. After the tips are evaluated and a course of action is completed, the school will then close out the tip and report actions taken as a record for their school

The S2SS program allows the official users (Crisis Center analysts, school entities and 911 County Dispatch) real-time 2-way dialog with a tipster and the viewing and sharing of attachments (such as screen shots and videos) that a tipster has submitted.

Students, educators and administrators will have the opportunity to be trained post January 14, 2019, to recognize the signs and signals of individuals who may be at risk of hurting themselves or others along with how to use the S2SS anonymous reporting system to submit tips of the signs and signals they observe. Training takes about 1 hour and will be made available via an interactive training video. All students at the High School will be provided this training. Students in the 5 ^th & 6^th Grade at the Elementary Schools will also be provided this training. The training will be completed in January 2019.

Additional information will be available on the Karns City Area School District website on 1/14/19.

Sincerely,

Eric D. Ritzert
Superintendent
Karns City Area School District