Their kids died at Sandy Hook. Their tip line prevents school shootings.

Boston Globe

31-03-2025

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Trinity Shockley was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and threatening to commit terrorism. It was the 18th credible school shooting threat interrupted by a tip to the Say Something phone line or app since 2018, and the second so far this year. Shockley's lawyer did not return a request for comment.
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The push to stop murders in classrooms by families who've experienced them continues to yield success stories even as the federal government is dismantling some tools aimed at preventing school shootings. The United States saw a sharp rise in such events starting in 2018, a Washington Post database shows, when the number of school shootings soared to 30 after annually averaging about half that. The grim figure increased to more than 40 in 2021 and 2022. But the number has dropped to 33 and 34 in the past two years, as Sandy Hook Promise pushes to spread word of the program through annual trainings and encourages students to report warning signs that could preface something worse.
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Police and school officials around the country say they are happy to have the help. In Prince William County, Virginia, police receive tips 'almost daily, sometimes multiple times a day,' said Lt. Kimberly M. Mercer of the police youth services bureau. In December, when a Prince William student allegedly shared detailed plans about carrying out a school shooting, the Sandy Hook tip line was notified. Prince William police responded that night, Mercer said, followed by involvement with the school's threat assessment team and an increased police presence at the school.
'Situations like these happen more often than people realize,' Mercer said, 'and having a structured response process, starting with students speaking up, Sandy Hook Promise filtering critical tips, and law enforcement stepping in when needed, is essential for preventing violence before it happens.'
In Largo, Florida, police in January responded after the Say Something line received more than 40 tips when a teen allegedly threatened to shoot up his high school in a social media post, and the teen was arrested.
'Countless lives were saved, thanks to your quick thinking and for taking it seriously,' Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Mark Barden, whose son Daniel Barden was slain in 2012, said in a video thanking the students at Largo High School and the first responders who intervened.
In addition to the 18 school shootings stopped since 2018, tips to the Say Something line have prevented more than 700 teen suicides nationwide, using in-school training sessions to teach students how to recognize a threat and report it, the group says. Nicole Hockley, also a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise and parent of Newtown victim Dylan Hockley, told of a recent case in which a tipster called to report a suicidal friend and spoke to a crisis counselor for several hours. Eventually, Hockley said the student told the counselor, ''I'm not calling you about my friend, it's me and I just overdosed,' so we were able to get to school to get to that child.'
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Sandy Hook Promise opened a 24-hour crisis center in Miami to handle phone and online tips, established relationships with law enforcement agencies and school districts around the country, and helped coordinate the training of more than 31 million participants, Hockley said. Last year, the program trained 5.7 million students, estimated to be about 10 percent of the K-12 universe, and they hope to double that to 11 million per year.
'We're just everywhere that we can possibly be,' Hockley said, 'so that people realize that this isn't a hopeless issue, that there are actions that everyone can take. And if you're not an activist, that's okay. But everyone can learn warning signs and everyone can have conversations with each other.'
The Post has compiled a database of school shootings since the Columbine, Colorado, shootings in 1999, when two teens killed 13 students and one teacher. Since then, there have been 428 school shootings involving gunfire at a primary or secondary school during school hours. In those shootings, 216 children, educators and other people have been killed, and another 487 have been injured.
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Hockley said Sandy Hook Promise uses 'a very strict set of data criteria for us to be able to say this was a validated, credible, planned school shooting attack that was stopped as a result of our program.'
'I come from a marketing background,' Hockley said. 'I didn't know anything about gun violence prevention or school safety when my son was killed at Sandy Hook. But I wanted to make a difference.' She said, 'So many people were focusing on the policy end of gun violence. We decided that we would do more than that.'
The group's anonymous reporting system, which also has a phone app, has received 328,803 tips since 2018, said Aimee Thunberg, head of communications for Sandy Hook Promise. The tips range beyond school shootings, Hockley said, to include substance abuse, bullying and self-harm.
'We've had the entire spectrum of violence against young people and self-harm that come into our crisis center,' Hockley said, 'as a result of training that we did for kids in terms of how to recognize signs of someone who needs help and tell a trusted adult or to use our anonymous reporting system.'
Chase Ferrell, the auxiliary services and safety officer for Johnston County, North Carolina, public schools, said the district of about 37,500 students receives up to 250 referrals a year from the reporting system. He said the call takers at the crisis center in Miami are trained to handle teenagers in crisis, while his staff works quickly with police and school officials.
'It's one of the most proactive tools out there, in my opinion. It allows us to curb incidents before they become crisis situations,' Ferrell said. 'There have been a couple of occasions where we have made a save, if you will, and that was a student that was in the throes of wanting to do self-harm. And we were able to stop it. And if it weren't for that tip line, we may be without a student.'
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Ferrell said his school district requires training of all students from grades six through 12 in recognizing, and reporting, situations where a student appears ready to harm others or themselves. 'The first two or three weeks after that training, we get some bogus tips and some things that drive us crazy,' Ferrell said. 'But after that, you really get pertinent information that can be very, very helpful.'
Hockley said Sandy Hook Promise chose education and awareness programs 'because we know that kind of violence prevention has a long historical base of evidence to prove that it works.' One way the group spreads the word is through public service announcements, including a new one featuring a child holding a beloved teddy bear, juxtaposed with the many teddy bears left at the mourning sites of school shootings.
'We had over 60,000 teddy bears that came into Newtown after the tragedy,' Hockley said. 'We don't want teddy bears to be a memorial. We want them to be companions to people. We want to let kids be kids and not have fear of going to school, or fear that they could end up in a school shooting.'