DAVIDSON COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — If you see something, say something. Thousands of life-saving tips came into North Carolina schools this year through an anonymous reporting system.

It’s called Say Something and lets students report a wide range of issues from bullying to weapons at school to mental health issues.

Across the state, more than 22,000 tips have been reported by a phone call, online or the most popular option: through their app. FOX8 reached out to all the school districts in our viewing area and only received data from four of them.

Since the start of this school year, Alamance County received 16 tips that were considered life-saving. Asheboro City Schools received 20 tips. Surry County Schools received a total of 199 tips.

Davidson County Schools received 218 tips with nearly a quarter of those being drug-related.

“Most of those are about vapes. Kids reporting other students have a vape or that they saw them vaping in a car before school, after school…that is the top item we are seeing,” said Chris Johnson, the Davidson County Schools executive director of operations.

DCS officials say seeing hundreds of tips come in this year means kids care about one another.

“This is a tool that without it, there are things we wouldn’t know about,” Johnston said.

They received dozens of tips about bullying and harassment, ranging from tips about cyberbullying to sexual harassment to verbal abuse.

“When we see those numbers, I think that the bullying intervention training we are doing right now is very appropriate and timely…train our principals to train their staff about what bullying is and take the necessary steps to make interventions for those,” Johnston said.

Another area of focus is mental health. DCS has also heard tips about self-harm, depression, anxiety and eating disorders.

“Those tips open the door for conversations…if we have kids that are reporting that themselves are hurting or that others are hurting, it simply opens the door so that adults can have that conversation of what is causing you to feel the way you feel,” Johnson said.

The district also received seven tips about a planned school attack, something Elkin City Schools can relate to after the Say Something app helped to stop a student’s plan for violence earlier this year.

They canceled school for the day and made an arrest due to the anonymous tips.

At the state level, a spokeswoman from the Department of Public Instruction says through this data, they can provide districts with additional support based on their needs. Even as the year wraps up and students head home for the summer, the Say Something reporting system is still available to report tips.

The national crisis center handles these tips 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

“We always want our kids to reach out to a trusting adult to get help or get help for someone else,” Johnston said.

We were not able to get data from Guilford County Schools because they cited a general statute saying information received by an anonymous tip line is not public record.

Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools did not provide us with their information for the same reason, but they did say in most cases this year when weapons were recovered on campus, it was in part or solely because of an anonymous tip.