Steps to stopping school violence before it starts

School shootings always seemed to happen someplace else — until they don’t, as was the case just over a year ago at Freeman.

Hitting really close to home suddenly made school safety a much higher priority on the radar of all area schools, and Medical Lake was no exception.

Every district school received physical upgrades of secure doors and video systems that allow staff to monitor who is coming and going.

Medical Lake High School will also soon have an 8-foot security fence in the back of the campus to tie together exposed outbuildings and annexes. It should be installed this month, Superintendent Tim Ames indicated.

But fencing off potential violence, so-to-speak, is also a critical aspect of school safety and Medical Lake has taken the lead locally by becoming engaged in the work of Safer Schools Together (SST).

The company is based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It was founded in 2008 by current president, Theresa Campbell, with the idea in mind to promote a climate and culture of safety in schools through violence prevention. Campbell has been in the school safety arena her entire career.

Members of the Medical Lake School Board, and a variety of administrators, discovered the company at a convention earlier this year. The presentation by Nick Chernoff, a threat analyst for Safer Schools, convinced them to bring the message to town at their annual staff orientation day in August.

Chernoff, a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces, and still part of their reserves, conducted a riveting 90-minute presentation that covered everything from how a smart phone tracks your every move to diving into social media to try to detect a problem before it gets out of hand.

“We train professionals, mainly in law enforcement and school districts, to essentially ensure they have the tools to make effective determination of level of risk when they assess threats,” Chernoff said.

That means training people to make sure they are seeing all the things they need to see in terms of risk. SST also helps connect the data dots to help mitigate violence.

“Data is important, and we know data doesn’t lie,” Chernoff said. “The last thing we want to do when dealing with threat assessments, or dealing with threatened behavior, is make that assessment based on emotion.”

What kind of information leads Chernoff and others in the company down that path?

For one, schools can make a determination that a student’s behavior has maybe shifted towards a more concerning behavior, Chernoff said.

The conversation might have been about sports and family and all of a sudden, that person is feeling upset and is suicidal. “Obviously there’s a shift in their behavior,” Chernoff said.

At that point schools will initiate a threat assessment to determine an overall level of risk.

“When we talk about data, it’s about the facts of having a conversation with teachers and determine when the shift of behavior started,” Chernoff said.

Or it can be behaviors seen outside of school, at home or in the community, for instance.

“Hey, have you noticed a shift in your friend’s behavior?” is one question that is asked. Other sources can be mental health professionals or the police when and if the conversations turn to the subject of weapons.

Online activity can lead to answers, too.

“Maybe he or she has been talking about sports and now is talking about being suicidal,” Chernoff said.

Getting the data that can help with the intervention is what the goal is in a Safer Schools Together program.

Students sometimes will also come to counselors and alert them of shifts in a fellow student’s behavior, noting their friend has been acting “not like himself or, not like herself.” That’s what observers want to know in order to intervene at the right time, Chernoff said.

And one of the best preventives are teachers.

“We always tell the teacher they have the best connections with these kids,” Chernoff said. “They see them through the year and maybe through the years they are in the school.”

They can help with shifting behavior and help start the process of how to address it, he said.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].