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Randolph County Schools board hears proposal for anonymous tip line to report safety concerns
Summary
The Randolph County Board of Education heard a presentation on an anonymous tip line platform intended to let students, staff and community members report safety concerns; no purchase vote was taken and cost was not specified.
Allen Robertson, the district's safety coordinator, told the Randolph County Board of Education on March 27 that the district is considering an anonymous tip line to let students, staff and community members report safety concerns.
Robertson said the platform would allow people to send tips anonymously to designated district staff and to exchange messages with investigators without revealing the tipster's identity. "They will send us a media package that we can put posters up in school, we can put, notifications on Facebook, Instagram, on our web pages," Robertson said. He described the system as a "force multiplier for the principals" that could let staff "solve that problem before it ever becomes a crisis."
The presentation described configurable routing so a tip submitted for a specific school would go to that school's principal and other designated responders, and said the platform can be set to stop delivering alerts after hours. Robertson said the vendor's messages include explicit instructions that tips submitted during unmonitored hours should instead be reported to 911, a feature he cited as reducing liability for the district.
Board members asked procedural questions about routing and monitoring. Robertson said the district can choose whether alerts go only to principals or to principals, counselors and school resource officers, and that reports will ask the sender to identify which school the tip concerns. He compared the system to the district's existing BARK monitoring, which flags language related to self-harm or weapons and forwards incidents to principals and counselors.
No motion or vote to purchase the tip-line system was made at the meeting. The superintendent asked board members to speak with people in their districts and said a vendor representative would be available at a future meeting if the board wishes to proceed.
The discussion was presented as a request for direction and information; the board did not direct staff to execute a purchase nor set a budget during the March 27 meeting.
