MARSHALL COUNTY, Ala. — New this year, the Marshall County Schools system has several ways to report tips that can notify school officials and law enforcement in an instant.

Anyone with information regarding safety pertaining to the Marshall County Schools system or its students can email, call, or use an online tip forum. All of the information is on the Marshall County Schools homepage.

“It’s completely anonymous,” Superintendent Cindy Wigley said.

The system also implemented a software program that monitors student activity on its server. It looks for keywords and key phrases that might talk about self-harm, bullying or other kinds of threats.

“It allows our principals, our counselors, even our parents to monitor what our students are doing during the time that they’re logged on their internet accounts here at school and even at home, if they’re logged into it,” said Charlie Jimmerson, the district’s director of technology.

“Any words related to bullying, or school safety, or self-harm, it’ll pick up those words and it’ll notify a safety team immediately,” Wigley explained.

With both the tip line and the software, law enforcement can get involved at any moment.

“It will go directly to the Securly team, and depending on the situation they’ll either call us directly, the school officials, or they’ll call the sheriff’s department,” Wigley said.

The safety measures started this year in a system-wide safety overhaul.

“We’re just putting as many efforts as possible toward school safety,” Wigley said. “Anything that we can do to make our schools safer, and we just think this is really important technology-wise. This is another thing that we can do.”