Marion students will have new hotline option to text tips soon

The Marion County Children’s Alliance will launch a new anonymous texting hotline in August that will target middle and high school students with the hope they will report illegal activity and suicide threats among their peers.

Called Text-A-Tip, the hotline is marketed to young people with the tagline: “See something? Say something!” The Text-A-Tip hotline, which was launched in Chicago four years ago in the wake of a series of teen suicides, is now being used by many agencies in all 50 states.

Marion County Children’s Alliance officials appeared before the school board recently to get its blessing to launch the new system, which gets about 120,000 text tips annually across the country.

The School District already provides a talk-based hotline (866-Speak-Up), which is used by a handful of students annually. The children’s alliance hopes the text-based system will attract more teens to report crises before they become tragedies. The hotline was already in the works before the April 20 shooting at Forest High School that left one student injured.

Alliance representatives gave a 30-minute presentation to the board last week. The board supported the new hotline, agreeing that students should have as many tools as possible to help them to say something when it matters most.

The local Text-A-Tip number is 352-877-2838. It will officially launch when the 2018-19 school year begins on Aug. 13, officials said.

The alliance will pay for the messaging system equipment and the $30,000 startup cost. There is no cost to the school district.

The Marion County Children’s Alliance was created in 2001. The agency hosts five work groups: Family Violence Prevention, Safe Kids, Childhood Nutrition, Fatherhood and Community Council Against Substance Abuse.

At the school board work session, the alliance asked the board for permission to advertise the hotline on middle and high school campuses. The presentation revealed that Text-A-Tip has made a difference nationally since its 2014 inception.

“To date, in other communities, it has intervened in two potential school incidents, prevented youth suicides, and is being implemented at multiple new locations each month,” according to the alliance’s PowerPoint presentation.