PENNSYLVANIA — Safe2Say, a youth violence prevention program run by the attorney general, is anonymous and mainly driven by students. Coming out of the pandemic, some superintendents are seeing the number of reports to the program double and even triple.
“We receive just a few a year, and now we are receiving a couple a month,” said Dr. Mark Holtzman.
Holtzman, the McKeesport Schools superintendent, believes the reason for the increase in reports to Safe2Say is clear.
“I think the children are under distress, to be honest. Just look at student behavior, it’s been ongoing, in a rise of just behaviors I think a lot had to do with the pandemic, not in school and in ways unsupervised,” Holtzman said.
The data agrees. The Attorney General’s Office said 72.9% of all Safe2Say reports are about mental health, suicide or bullying.
“We have plenty of resources to lead families. It really is their responsibility to follow up with those resources,” Holtzman said.
The attorney general believes the need is more community mental health support to help the students outside the school buildings.
“We are having a real crisis of needing people to meet people on the front line to help them, from teachers to nurses to mental health professionals, and cops to homecare workers. That’s something we have to grapple with more broadly,” said Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
To respond to this need, he’s encouraging the state legislature to fund at least one mental health counselor per school district to help the crisis in those buildings.
“Some schools have made the investment, like North Hills. Other schools don’t have the resources to do it, but what’s clear is the need is real, it is great,” Shapiro said.
Each of those Safe2Say reports goes to school administrators. From there, they will seek police help if it’s related to public safety, or request a wellness check on a student. Overall, it’s a team effort from multiple agencies.
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