As students get ready to return to the classroom next week, a new program to allow for anonymous reporting of suspicious and potentially dangerous threats to school safety is officially live in North Dakota.
Kirsten Baesler is North Dakota's Superintendent of Public Instruction. She says the program is called Project Stand Up, and it allows anyone to anonymously text to report suspicious activity to the proper authorities. She said it operated as a pilot program in Stark County recently, and it has already resulted in a drug arrest. Baesler says keeping the reporting anonymous takes away one barrier someone may perceive when it comes to "seeing something, and saying something."
"What we've seen with every incident across this nation involving our schools, there was someone in that community or that school that may have suspected something, and there may have been more than one person that saw something individually. If we can get all that information collected together into one source we can start to connect the dots and hopefully prevent any tragedy from ever happening in any of our schools or any of our communities in the state of North Dakota. So, the anonymity is very important because if they see something, sometimes they don't know who to tell or if it's important enough to tell, but when you are able to put all those pieces together sometimes it really does lead to a bigger picture of a need for intervention before something tragic happens."
Baesler says Project Stand Up originated in South Dakota, and it has resulted in over 500 arrests there. She says it is available to every student and every community member across the state. She says people can text their tips to 82257, and they will automatically be sent to the proper channels.