Nicole Mendoza is a swing shift supervisor at Nevada’s new 24-hour anonymous school safety and anti-bullying hotline, “Safe Voice” — a program that she says is literally saving lives.

The hotline and its companion website and app, P3, have received just over 2,500 tips since inception in the beginning of the calendar year. Mendoza said she rarely gets calls from students reporting, say, a bully pulling their hair. The reports are often grave.

“I had someone tell me personally that she didn’t feel that anyone cared for her. Her parents, her stepparents, her grandparents, her friends — she felt she didn’t have anyone in the world and she called me because she had already ingested pills and just wanted someone to be there while she was passing away,” she said.

Mendoza testified Wednesday at the Interim Finance Committee that she’s counted 58 success stories since the program began — and by success stories, she means lives that were saved. In those instances, children were taken to a hospital or mental institution to receive help after a tip came to the hotline.

At the meeting, lawmakers authorized $609,346 from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement to pay for trained call center operators. The funding will mean that the program will have its own dedicated staff and Department of Public Safety dispatchers will no longer have to cover for the hotline to ensure it’s operating on nights and weekends.

DPS officials who testified Wednesday said the volume of inquiries they’ve received since launching the program has far exceeded the projections they made based on results for a similar program in Colorado; they attribute some of that to the more regional nature of Colorado’s program versus Nevada’s statewide initiative. But they also plan a major marketing campaign to inform the public of the service and expect even more inquiries after that.

Mendoza said it takes a team of staffers to respond when tips roll in.

“When they come in, these tips are completely anonymous,” she said. “So it might just say ‘my friend says she’s going to commit suicide tonight by hanging herself.’ When you receive that, you instantly jump because you know a child is in danger.”

While one staff member is on the phone or messaging with the anonymous tipster to try to build rapport and draw out actionable information, such as their distressed friend’s name, address and phone number, another staffer is working with law enforcement or school officials to arrange for a welfare check on the student.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into that and also with law enforcement,” she said. “We build a lot of relationships within the state of Nevada to really be able to foster those welfare checks on those children.”

State Superintendent Steve Canavero said the Nevada Department of Education is working on regulations that seek to strike a balance between preserving the anonymity of the tipster and ensuring authorities can gather enough information from reports to take action.

The Safe Voice program is the outgrowth of a bill sponsored by the late Sen. Debbie Smith and approved by the Legislature in 2015. It was part of a broader push that session to fight bullying that also included stricter investigation requirements for school administrators who receive bullying reports and funding for school-based social workers to help improve campus climate.

Supporters of Safe Voice say it’s needed because a high number of young people report depression or suicidal ideation. In the 2017 Nevada High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 34.6 percent of respondents said anonymously that they had felt sad or hopeless for two weeks or more in the past year to the extent that it affected their normal activities.

Nearly 17 percent of respondents said they seriously considered a suicide attempt in the preceding year, and 14 percent said they had progressed to planning that attempt.

The state landed federal funds last year that helped set up the hotline and reporting app starting in January. Researchers supported by the National Institute of Justice, a subsidiary of the Department of Justice that’s been putting tens of millions of dollars into school safety-related research since 2014, will be analyzing data about the hotline’s usage and response techniques to determine whether such reporting channels can be considered “evidence-based” and franchised elsewhere.

She said she’s also received about 30 kudos from tipsters who reach out after their crisis, telling her they don’t know what they would have done without the program.

“It’s instrumental what we do and to me it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, we need to be there,” Mendoza said. “It’s crucial and fundamental. I truly believe that if we aren’t there — it’s just inconceivable how many lives will be lost.”