School Safety
By JENNIFER CARTER, Staff Writer
Skagit County Herald, January 8, 2007Following the fatal shooting of a student at a Tacoma high school last week, Skagit County educators are seeking to reassure parents and students with information about local efforts to prevent school violence.
In fact, Skagit County has the state’s first county-wide system for identifying and responding to threats of violence at school.
The program, launched last year, brings together school officials, law enforcement and mental health experts to evaluate threats and work with students to minimize the risk of violence.
Research shows that such a multi-disciplinary team approach to identifying, assessing and managing students who may present a risk is the best way to prevent actual violence, said Martin Speckmaier, a school safety consultant and retired police officer.
“School violence is not a school problem. It’s a community problem.” said Speckmaier, who has been involved with training members of the Skagit County assessment teams.
Bringing the resources and judgment of law enforcement, mental health professionals and school administrators together gives everyone a more complete picture of a student’s life and situation, said Dave Shackleton, a Mount Vernon Police school resource officer at Mount Vernon High School.
“Everybody comes to the table with what they know,” said Shackleton, a member of the school’s safety assessment team. “The goal is, how do we safely keep everybody in school.”

Since last school year, each school building in the county has had a trained safety assessment team to evaluate threats and determine how to manage students who make them.
The teams include representatives from all seven school districts, all nine law enforcement agencies as well as county mental health professionals.
This school year saw the creation of the first county-wide safety assessment team in the state. The group of experts is available to all Skagit County schools.
The program is funded through a three-year federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant to Northwest Educational Service District (ESD) 189, which provides support services for 35 school districts in northwest Washington. The multidisciplinary approach is also what experts recommend for preventing school violence, Speckmaier said.
In the wake of school shootings in the late 1990s, experts from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service teamed up to study so-called “targeted” violence in schools, in which students plan and prepare for violent attacks at school.

The study group’s primary conclusion was that schools need a unified team approach to assessing threats so the burden doesn’t fall entirely on school administrators, who may not have access to all the information about a student’s personal and home life and mental health, Speckmaier said.

Identifying threats

A key component of the program is a county-wide School Safety Help Line, launched last school year. The line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It’s another way that better communication can help reduce the risk of violence, said Dave Ahrenholz, a prevention center coordinator for the ESD, which headed up the creation of the county-wide system last year.
Other students often see the warning signs before school violence occurs, he said.
“The other kids will know things, but they won’t tell anybody,” Ahrenholz said.
“They don’t want to get anyone in trouble or, if it’s a bullying situation, they’re afraid.”
But to prevent violence, Ahrenholz said, schools need students and parents with concerns about potential threats to report their worries. Flyers and refrigerator magnets with the number have been distributed to all students in Skagit County schools, according to the ESD.
Representatives from Volunteers of America Care Crisis Response Services answer the line and respond based on their assessment of the seriousness of the threat.
If a caller reports criminal activity, the help line representative calls 911. Mental health counselors are available for callers with mental health problems. Each call generates a report that goes to the ESD, the school district and the school.
As with the county-wide assessment teams, it’s also the only county-wide school safety help line in the state, Speckmaier said.
The county-wide system also means that when a student who makes a threat at one school shows up at another school, there’s a system in place to notify staff to be on the lookout for potential risks.
“That’s how this process was intended to work,” Speckmaier said.

School Safety Help Line 1-800-585-3109

Ensuring safety in the schools

By Lynn Thompson
Times Snohomish County bureau
In the wake of the shooting death of a Tacoma high-school student last week, local educators and law-enforcement officials say violence in schools can't be eliminated. But schools can be made safer, they say, if school staff respond as a team to assess potential threats and provide support to at-risk youth.

"The most important thing a school can do is create a climate of trust and open communication. It's surprising how often that's overlooked," said Martin Speckmaier, a private-security consultant and a 22-year veteran of the Edmonds Police Department who patrolled Edmonds-Woodway High School as a school-resource officer for seven years.

Speckmaier noted that incidents involving guns at school are rare, in part because bringing a firearm to school results in a mandatory one-year suspension under state law. Most Snohomish County districts had none or one gun seized at schools in 2005-06, according to statistics from the Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction (OSPI).

But knives and other weapons were seized at a rate of about two a day in county schools, often in the largest districts. Everett had 74 incidents involving knives or other weapons, while Marysville and Northshore each had 60.

The Edmonds School District bucked the trend with only 14 incidents involving weapons last school year.

But Speckmaier cautioned against putting labels of "dangerous" on schools with higher incidents of weapons. A school may be more vigilant or alert to possible weapons, which may explain why they turn up more often, he said. And he said weapons go unreported at every school.

But Speckmaier also noted an alarming trend in teenage-death statistics. While car accidents still kill the most teenagers each year, homicide is now the No. 2 cause of death among older teens, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And he said the number of juvenile homicides with multiple victims also is increasing.

That's where school-threat response teams and safety planning come in.

After the Columbine shooting in 1999 that left 14 students and a teacher dead, the federal government developed a threat-assessment model that is now being implemented by Snohomish County schools. Under the model, schools create a team to identify, assess and manage students or situations that pose a threat of violence.

In Washington, OSPI has sponsored statewide training on the approach, which calls for school personnel, including administrators, counselors, psychologists, police and security officers to meet together and evaluate a threat. In some communities, mental-health and juvenile-justice professionals also are brought in to help evaluate and provide assistance to at-risk youth.

"The focus is on helping kids succeed. Most aren't hard-core psychopaths. They're kids stumbling who need support," said Craig Apperson, supervisor of safety and security for OSPI.

Edmonds School District adopted the threat-assessment model three years ago, said Jan Beglau, manager of student support and outreach for the district. Anytime a student threatens to act violently, the school team meets to devise a response plan and get ongoing monitoring and support for the student.

It might mean checking a student's backpack every day, or assigning an adult mentor, Beglau said. Parents also are brought into the confidential discussions, she said.

"The process is designed to identify underlying issues, to get at the root of what's causing the threats and give the kids a support system." But she cautioned that the motives for violence are often complex and hard to predict.

"If we knew why kids turned to violence, we wouldn't have any shootings," she said.

In Marysville, Assistant Superintendent Gail Miller said several of the gun incidents in the district last year involved nonlethal weapons including paint-ball rifles and air-pellet rifles spotted by school-security officers in cars parked in the student-parking lot.

Even though there was an innocent explanation, Miller said the incidents were treated seriously and threat-assessment teams evaluated the circumstances of the students involved.

She said the threat-assessment process allows school officials to distinguish the accidental or unintended event from the truly dangerous and to determine whether a student needs outside help or intervention.

Next year, Marysville Pilchuck High School, one of the state's largest at 2,700 students, will be broken into smaller learning communities, in part so students are better known by the adults in the school, she said.

Larry Francois, superintendent of Lakewood School District, said the most important thing a school staff can do is keep lines of communication open with students.

"Kids will know about things before an adult. We work on making kids feel comfortable and safe letting an adult know if there's a problem."

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company