school safety

Averted Targeted School Violence Report Released Today

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The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) released its 2021 report on Averted Targeted School Violence today.

I urge you to download and read this report now as it has strong implications for the return to in-person learning for many students.

The report summarizes the findings of a detailed study of 67 averted school attacks. A comparison of home life factors, behaviors and stressors of “plotters” of averted attacks with those who completed attacks, reveals many similarities and a few critical differences.

The primary difference that leapt out at me today is that the highest proportion of plotters planned their attacks for the month of April.

With the April return to school for many students, it’s imperative that we train our staff members on concerning behaviors, reporting procedures and intervention strategies so we can assist students experiencing increased stress during this time.

According to the Secret Service report, stressors experienced by the plotters were:

  • Family
  • Social
  • Academic
  • Criminal/judicial
  • Change in schools
  • General/personal
  • Physical health
  • Unknown

Home life factors experienced by the students who plotted attacks were:

  • Parents divorced/separated
  • Family financial difficulty
  • Parents or sibling arrested/incarcerated
  • Family substance abuse
  • Family discord, incl. domestic violence
  • Family mental health 
  • Abuse/neglect 
  • Non-parental custody/care

In many cases of averted attacks, others have witnessed objectively concerning behaviors – threats, bringing weapons to school, physical violence, suicidal statements.

Also detected in these students were a constellation of lower-level behaviors – changes in behavior, interest in violent topics, a concerning mental status.

I think we can all agree that students have experienced unprecedented stressors over the past year. It is likely that we can’t begin to comprehend the level of stress some of our students have been living with.

Now, more than ever, we need to be vigilant and spend time checking in with our students.

We need to provide resources and we need to report concerns to our student services staff and/or administration. We must have a process in place for identifying those in need of intervention and a method for following up and providing help. We need a trained multidisciplinary threat assessment team. We need to train our students to say something to an adult when they have concerns about their peers. And, we need to act on those concerns.

I have provided only the briefest of details from the Averted Targeted School Violence report in this article. Please download it and spend some time familiarizing yourself with it. Share it with all staff members in your school and make sure everyone knows what to watch for and what to do when they see it. Only then can we feel adequately prepared for our students’ reentry to in-person learning.

My job is to make sure you have the resources you need to make your school a safer place to learn. I want you to be able to make your school safer without spending a lot. I’ve made many resources available to you at no cost, and just a few tools at minimal cost. To see the school safety resources, click here.

For a quick, low-cost way to train your entire staff online, click here. This training includes an expanded section on the warning signs of violence.

If you’d like help determining how to train your staff, feel free to contact me here.

School Safety on Sale

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School Safety on Sale

These are trying and unpredictable times, and many of us are trying to find ways to calm our own fears, while keeping our students engaged in learning during their time away from school.

If you are interested in keeping your mind active by learning some new things, I invite you to brush up on school safety basics by taking Youth Risk Prevention Specialists’ FREE online course, Increase Your School Safety in 5 Easy Steps.

If you’d like to explore further, I am discounting the Everyday School Safety online course to just $15 for the next few weeks. That’s a savings of nearly 70% off the regular price! The Everyday School Safety course is 90-minutes long, has downloadable resources, and is the exact same training delivered to schools across the country.

I’m offering this special pricing because I believe that all parents and school staff members have a desire to do everything they can to keep students safe; they just don’t have the time to learn as much about school safety as they might like. If your school is closed and you have some extra time, I invite you to take advantage of these learning opportunities.

Be well.

STOP School Violence Grant Available Now

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STOP School Violence Grants

It’s a new year, and it might just be time for some new school safety strategies. I trust that you had a restful holiday break and are ready to hit the ground running for the second half of the school year.

As you may have heard, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice has opened the STOP School Violence Grant Program to new applications. The STOP School Violence Grant Program is designed to fund improvements to school safety and security. Its objective is to increase safety by implementing training and school threat assessments and/or intervention teams to identify school violence risks among students; technological solutions such as anonymous reporting technology that can be implemented as a mobile phone-based app, a hotline, or a website in the applicant’s geographic area to enable students, teachers, faculty, and community members to anonymously identify threats of school violence; or other school safety strategies that assist in preventing violence. The grant application deadline is March 3, 2020.

If you’re interested in funding threat assessment team training and development or all-staff training in school safety, and would like help with your grant language or a price quote for training with Youth Risk Prevention Specialists, please feel free to contact me by phone or email. I’m happy to help!

I wish you the best of luck!

Could this happen to your school?

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Jury awards school shooting victim

A jury in California recently awarded 3.8 million dollars to a school shooting victim. The school district was ordered to pay 54% of that 3.8 million, a jury finding the school 54% negligent.

Could this happen to your school?

The prosecutor argued that the school did not do enough to protect the student from harm. The school was found to have ignored “red flags” which included threats and a very disturbing violent drawing. Six school employees were also found negligent.

In this particular case, the perpetrator’s family also brought suit against the school district, alleging that they did not follow state laws regarding bullying and sexual harassment.

How can we avoid being caught in this type of situation?

I believe it’s imperative to have safety protocols and processes in place, provide safety training for all staff, and adhere to your school’s protocols for both intervening in bullying and harassment and for assessing indicators of violent thoughts and threatening behavior.

Only then, will we be able to show that we have done our due diligence to protect our students from harm. Of course, we cannot always anticipate the actions someone will take, especially when those actions do not follow our own sense of values or logic. But, we must be prepared to take action when there is even the slightest hint of violence or violent ideology.

To further assess your liability quotient when it comes to school safety, check out these critical points. If you find that your staff is in need of training, or your school needs help developing safety protocols, take a look at this.

I wish you a safe and productive school year!

Key Points for Schools – 2019 Secret Service Report

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School Safety Update

The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center released its review of 2018 Mass Attacks in Public Places in July. While the full report can be viewed here, key points relevant to schools include:

  • Three attacks (11%) were carried out at high schools.
  • The findings emphasize that we can identify warning signs prior to an act of violence. While not every act of violence will be prevented, the report indicates that targeted violence may be preventable if appropriate systems are in place to identify concerning behaviors, gather information to assess the risk of violence, and utilize community resources to mitigate the risk.
  • More than half (63%) of the attacks ended within 5 minutes from when the incident was initiated.
  • Two-thirds of the attackers (67%) experienced mental health symptoms prior to their attacks. The most common symptoms observed were related to depression and psychotic symptoms, such as paranoia, hallucinations, or delusions. Suicidal thoughts were also observed. Nearly half of the attackers (44%) had been diagnosed with, or treated for, a mental illness prior to their attacks.
  • The violence in this study resulted from a range of motives, with some attackers having multiple motives. In half of the incidents ( 52%), grievances appeared to be the main motivating factor. Beyond grievances, some motives were related to the attackers’ mental health symptoms (19%), while others were connected to ideological beliefs (7%). While only two of the attacks were primarily motivated by an ideology, nearly one-third of the attackers (30%) appeared to have subscribed to a belief system that has previously been associated with violence.
  • Two-fifths of the attackers (41%) exhibited a fixation, defined as an intense or obsessive preoccupation with a person, activity, or belief to the point that it negatively impacted aspects of their lives. The behaviors that demonstrated these fixations included, but were not limited to, posting written material or videos online, stalking or harassing others, and filing lawsuits or complaints to police.
  • Most (85%) attackers had at least one significant stressor occur in their lives in the five years preceding the attack.
  • Nearly all of the attackers (93%) engaged in prior threatening or concerning communications. One-third had threatened someone (37%), including threats against the target in six cases (22%). All but four attackers (85%) made some type of communication that did not constitute a direct threat, but should have elicited concern.
  • Most of the attackers (78%) in this report exhibited behaviors that caused concern in others. Those who were concerned had various degrees of association with the attackers, from those who were close to them, to strangers in the community who may have never met the attacker before. For the majority of the attackers (70%), the concern others felt was so severe that they feared specifically for the safety of the individual, themselves, or others.
  • Because these acts are usually planned over a period of time, and the attackers often elicit concern from the people around them, there exists an opportunity to stop these incidents before they occur. Threat assessment is one of the most effective practices for prevention.

As you can see, this report echoes the previous year’s report and a great deal of research and literature on prevention efforts such as threat assessment. If you don’t already have a threat assessment protocol in place in your school district, perhaps the time is now.

Critical Aspects of Back-to-School Safety

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safer school

Summer has flown by, as usual, and school is starting in most parts of the country. Those of us in the West are already in session, and you lucky folks in the Midwest and East have until after Labor Day to savor the last days of summer.

In addition to lesson plans, creating a welcoming classroom, and getting to know our new students, many of us have school safety on our minds. We are charged with one of the most important tasks – keeping children safe while they are with us. This is bound to cause some anxiety as the school year gets underway.

School safety can be broken down into five separate areas, which helps us to put it in perspective.

Prevention – the capabilities necessary to avoid, deter, or stop an imminent crime or threatened or actual mass casualty incident. Prevention is the action schools take to prevent a threatened or actual incident from occurring.

Protection – the capabilities to secure schools against acts of violence and manmade or natural disasters. Protection focuses on ongoing actions that protect students, teachers, staff, visitors, networks, and property from a threat or hazard.

Mitigation – the capabilities necessary to eliminate or reduce the loss of life and property damage by lessening the impact of an event or emergency; reducing the likelihood that threats and hazards will happen.

Response – the capabilities necessary to stabilize an emergency once it has already happened or is certain to happen in an unpreventable way; establish a safe and secure environment; save lives and property; and facilitate the transition to recovery.

Recovery – the capabilities necessary to assist schools affected by an event or emergency in restoring the learning environment and healing from the event. This includes a plan for business continuity.

As you begin the school year, consider doing the following over the next two months:

  • Implement a school climate or safety survey for students, staff and parents, to pinpoint areas that need attention. If you are looking for a survey to use, check out this school climate survey compendium.
  • Foster a sense of belonging in your school community. Celebrate differences and offer a diverse menu of activities, mentoring and connectedness programs, so everyone has a place to call home.
  • Train your staff to identify the signs of those who are struggling so they can support and refer those needing help.
  • Review your crisis response plan. Ideally, this should be done every year, and no less frequently than every 3 years. We learn more every day in this field – you’ll want to be sure your plan reflects current recommendations.
  • Add a new type of drill. If you haven’t done a reverse evacuation or a lockdown drill in awhile, schedule one today. Then, review the results with your staff so everyone can make adjustments if needed.

I’d love to know more about your specific safety challenges and needs. Let me know by typing your safety challenges into this form. I look forward to hearing from you.

Have a great school year!

Key Points from 2018 FBI Report on Pre-Attack Behaviors

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FBI 2018 Report Pre-Attack Behaviors

In 2014, the FBI published a report titled A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013. The report focused on the circumstances of 160 active shooter events that had occurred from 2000-2013. In July, 2018, the FBI released the second phase of the study entitled A Study of the Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States between 2000 and 2013.

This report details behaviors and warning signs that occurred before an attack, providing readers with increased awareness of what to look for in our own settings. In the aftermath of an active shooter incident, we often listen as the media dissects the risk factors and warning signs that may have been missed. It might begin to sound as if there is a consistent profile of the active shooter.

I want to stress one thing: experts and authorities are still very clear on the fact that there is no profile of an active shooter.

While it is true that certain behaviors and characteristics appear in multiple individuals that have perpetrated this type of violence, each situation must be assessed on its own. An assessment is valid for a moment in time. Risk will either be increased or decreased as circumstances and individuals change. It is this fact that gives us hope. When we identify threatening situations and individuals early, we can intervene and reduce, or even eliminate, the likelihood of violence.

What the study tells us

The key findings of this phase II study that I believe are most pertinent to those of us who work in schools are:

  • The 63 active shooters in the study did not appear to be uniform in any way such that they could be readily identified prior to attacking based on demographics alone.
  • Active shooters take time to plan and prepare for the attacks, with 77% of subjects spending a week or longer planning their attack and 46% spending a week or longer procuring the means for the attack.
  • The FBI could only verify that 25% of active shooters in the study had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness. Of those diagnosed, only 3 had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. The FBI further states that, “declarations that all active shooters must simply be mentally ill are misleading and unhelpful.”
  • Active shooters were typically experiencing multiple stressors, an average of 3.6, in the year before they attacked.
  • On average, each active shooter displayed 4 to 5 concerning behaviors over time that were observable to others around the shooter. The most frequently occurring concerning behaviors were related to mental health, problematic interpersonal interactions and leakage of violent intent. In 56% of cases, the first incidence of such behavior occurred more than 2 years before the attack.
  • For active shooters under age 18, school peers and teachers were more likely to observe concerning behaviors than family members. In 12 student shooters studied, 92% of cases involved a schoolmate noticing concerning behavior before the attack.
  • When concerning behavior was observed, the most common responses were:
    • communicate directly with shooter 83%
    • do nothing 54%
    • report to a non-law enforcement authority 51%
    • discuss with a friend or family member 49%
    • report to law enforcement 41%.
  • In cases where the shooter’s primary grievance could be identified, 33% were related to an adverse interpersonal action (or perceived action) against the shooter and 16% were related to an employment action (or perceived action) against the shooter.

If you’d like to read more of the report, you can get it here.

Next steps for schools

If you don’t have a threat assessment team in place, I urge you to make it a priority this school year. Threat assessment is a research-based prevention and school safety strategy that will help you identify and intervene with not only potentially violent students, but students who are struggling on many levels. Those students need our help. We can’t help them if we don’t know who they are.

I’ve trained schools across the country to implement this practice. Is your school next? Contact me here to find out how I can help.

Be extra vigilant this week

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There are at least two reasons to be extra vigilant this week when it comes to school safety.

First, we know that anniversary dates of past school violent attacks are particularly significant to those planning a similar act of violence. Friday, April 20 marks the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

Second, Friday, April 20 is also designated as National School Walkout Day to protest school violence. This means that many of our schools will not be following their normal routines and students will be out of the building, on school grounds or otherwise out of class and hard to keep track of. It’s also a fact that transition times, those moments in our school day when students are moving from one place to another, are a high risk time for a multitude of incidents.

I urge you to create awareness among your school’s staff and encourage extra caution and vigilance for the remainder of the week.

School Safety for Less

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School Safety for Less

 

Are you thinking of making improvements to your school’s safety?

I want to let you in on a way to improve your school safety for less.

For the next few months, my loyal readers and followers can engage any of my services at prices that haven’t changed since 2012. That’s right – until the end of the fiscal year (June 30), I will honor my old prices for any booking or project that comes to completion by October 31. This gives you nearly 3 months to book, and over 6 months to host a training, purchase an online course for your staff, obtain a threat assessment consultation, or update your school safety plan.

As a lifelong educator dedicated to making schools better places for students to learn, and for staff members to thrive, I have always made sure that my services fit with schools’ tight budgets. Since founding Youth Risk Prevention Specialists 6 years ago, I have sought to provide outstanding school safety services at an affordable price and I have never raised prices. We all know that inflation is one of life’s certainties, and in order to continue doing this important work, I must make a few changes.

As violence threat assessment finally begins to get the recognition it deserves. I expect a surge in schools seeking this type of training. I have been doing this work for many years, and have obtained the education and experience necessary to provide the most current, research-based training and assistance to schools setting up threat assessment teams. There are many large safety companies that focus on a particular product or safety niche and I am concerned that they will develop “pop-up” threat assessment training services to complement their products or services. Even without adequate training or expertise in this area, they will likely get a lot of takers. Why? Because they have thousands of dollars to invest in advertising. A very small business like Youth Risk Prevention Specialists does not.

What I do provide is experience, knowledge, over-the-top service and customization to make sure you get exactly what you need to improve your school’s safety. I’ve worked nationwide with schools, organizations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on projects that increased the safety of schools, workplaces and faith-based entities. I’m an active member of the Association of Threat Assessment Association (ATAP) and have been on the front lines of implementing violence threat assessment as a preventive practice in schools.

If you’d like to learn more about what Youth Risk Prevention Specialists can do to help make your school safer, simply click here for service descriptions and training outlines, or here to contact me with your specific needs. I’m happy to provide more information or answer any questions you may have.

 

 

Managing Someone Who Poses a Threat

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how to manage someone who poses a threat
We’ve talked a lot about violence threat assessment in the past. Today, I want to talk about threat management. How, exactly, should we proceed when managing someone who poses a threat to our school’s safety?

There is no strategy that will work in every situation, or every time. We must address the specifics of each situation and the needs of everyone involved to ensure the safest outcome.

I can tell you that there are some things we always want to attend to when managing a threat.

  1. First, we need to ensure the safety of everyone involved. This means investigating the threat, notifying targets and implementing strategies to keep everyone in our buildings safe.
  2. We want to be aware of any existing connections and violence inhibitors that we can leverage to help a person of concern find alternatives to violence. This may take the form of contacting and partnering with family members, school staff or mental health providers who have a positive relationship with the subject.
  3. We want to understand the person’s perception of a situation or possible grievance, and help him or her to see that we will work to solve it to the best of our ability.
  4. We want to treat the subject with dignity, which may preserve the last bit of what is holding him or her together.
  5. If we must force a student out of school in the form of a suspension or expulsion, we need to do so with kindness and compassion, and keep the lines of communication open so we are not severing the relationship.
  6. We want to be mindful of the subject’s social media presence and communication with others, and monitor him/her for any hint of a violent mindset. This may continue for an extended period of time .
  7. If we are concerned about a student who is currently attending school, we may have to institute labor-intensive procedures such as daily check-ins or backpack checks, and even constant supervision, if necessary.
  8. It’s imperative that we continue to communicate with those in our school about any words, behavior or incidents indicative of movement toward violence in a person of concern. When we don’t do this, it’s much easier for each incident to appear isolated, and to lose sight of the true picture of the threat posed by an individual of concern. We must keep connecting the dots for each situation of concern.

To learn more about how I work with schools set up their own threat assessment teams, click here.