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Little monitoring, wide variability permeates the teams responsible for stopping school shootings

Little monitoring, wide variability permeates the teams responsible for stopping school shootings

Some of the teams responsible for preventing the next shooting in school have developed systemic problems that put them at risk of unjustly labeling and viritating children. (Courtesy of the New Jersey governor’s office)

Max Schachter wanted to be close to his son Alex on his birthday on July 9, so he saw old videos of him.

“He put a smile on my face to see him so happy,” Schachter said.

Alex would have turned 21 that day, six years after he and 16 other children and staff of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, were killed by a former student in 2018. In the years before the shooting, that former former student had shown a behavior that caused dozens of calls to 911 and at least two tips to the FBI.

“Alex should still be here. It is not fair, ”said Schachter.

After two weeks of grieving for the death of Alex, Schachter, driven by anger and pain, began to advocate for school security. In part, he wanted to make sure that his other three children were never damaged in the same way. He joined the newly formed Public Security Commission of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to improve the safety of Florida students. And he launched a Non -profit with the name of Alexthat advocates for school security.

Max Schachter with his son Alex.Max Schachter with his son Alex.

Max Schachter with his son Alex. (Max Schachter)

When doing that work, he learned about threat evaluation teams, groups of public order forces and school officials trying to identify potentially dangerous or distressed children, intervene and avoid the next shooting in school. Florida is one of Around 18 states that require that schools have threat evaluation and intervention equipment; Estimate a national survey 85% of public schools Have a team assigned to the task.

The teams, whose mission and operational strategies are often based on the research of the FBI and the National Center for Evaluation of Threats of the Secret Service, or NTAC, have become more common as the number of school shootings increased. Despite their prevalence for almost 25 years, some of the teams have developed systemic problems that put them at risk of unjustly labeling and vilifying children.

The states vary widely in their requirements of threat evaluation equipment and there is no national archetype. Few school districts and states collect data on equipment, little is known about their operations and research on their effectiveness when frustrating mass shootings and other threats is limited. But a Analysis 2021 For the NTAC of 67 plots against K-12 schools he discovered that people “contemplating violence often exhibit observable behaviors, and when community members report these behaviors, the next tragedy can be avoided.”

“School shooters have a long process of thought. Not only are they broken. They have time related behavior. If we can identify them early, we can intervene, “said Karie Gibson, head of the FBI behavior analysis unit.

However, Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist who in 2001 developed one of the first setting sets for school threat evaluation teams, said there have been problems. In many cases, he said, threats have been considered not serious “but parents and teachers are so alarmed that it is difficult to calm their fears. The school community is in a fuss and school administrators feel pressured to expel the student” .

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And in other cases, a school does not make an evaluation of threats and assumes that a student is dangerous when someone else informs them as a threat, and can adopt a zero tolerance approach and eliminate them from school, said Cornell, the virgil s. Education professor at the University of Virginia.

A working group convened by the American psychological association He found little evidence that zero tolerance policies have improved school climate or school safety and said they can create negative mental health results for students. The working group cited examples of students who were expelled for incidents or rapes of school rules as lower as having a knife in their lunchbox to cut an apple.

Marisa Randazzo, a research psychologist and director of Evaluation of Threats at the University of Georgetown, said she has also seen “hyperreacciones”, especially among school communities who have experienced mass murder.

“It’s understandable. People who have been close to an event like this are on a higher alert than other people, “said Randazzo, who previously worked for the Secret Service and co -founded Sigma Threat Management Associates.

Threat evaluations are supposed to be a graduated process calibrated to the seriousness of a problem, since the majority of students’ threats are not credible and can be resolved through support interventions, According to the investigation of the Secret Service.

Stephanie Crawford-GOETZ, School Psychologist and Director of Mental Health for Student Support Services in the Douglas County School District in Colorado, where a There was a shooting In an Autonomous School in 2019, he said the threat assessment process of his district emphasizes a proactive and rehabilitating approach to manage potential threats, as the NTAC suggests.

Crawford-Goetz said that his district interviews students before summoning the team to assess whether a threat is a wrong expression of anger or frustration and if the student has a plan and means to carry out violence.

Students whose threats are considered transitory receive support, as help with coping skills, and can meet with a mental health provider.

If the threat is credible, a student can be temporarily eliminated from the classroom or school.

Randazzo said that the vast majority of children who make threats are suicidal or dejected: “The process is mainly designed to discover if someone is in crisis and how we can help. It is not designed to be punitive. “

Crawford-GOETZ has parents about the threat evaluation team of their district at the beginning of the school year. Some districts report to keep their teams a secret of the parents, which is not how they were designed to operate, said Lina Alathari, head of the NTAC. His team encourages schools to educate the entire community about the threat evaluation process.

Some defense groups argue that threat evaluation teams have perpetuated inequalities. There has also been a general concern that children with disabilities can be easily swept into an evaluation of threats.

In a 2022 report, the National Disability Rights Network, a non -profit organization based in Washington, DC, said some threat evaluation teams have become “”Judge, jury and executioner“, Goes beyond assessing the risk of serious and imminent damage to determine guilt and punishment.

Expanding their scope allows threat evaluation equipment to overcome civil rights protections, says the report.

Cornell played the conclusion of the disability rights group. “This has not been corroborated by scientific studies and is speculative,” he said.

Some states, such as Florida, demand that threat evaluation teams determine whether the disability of a student played a role in their behavior and recommends that they include special education teachers and other professionals in their evaluation.

In Texas, which has ordered threat evaluation teams, a third of students undergoing threat assessments in the Dallas Independent School District receive special education services.

However, the district It does not have A special education personnel representative in his threat evaluation team, according to a March 2023 report by Texas Applaseed, a non -profit public interest center.

Many school districts are developing their own models in the absence of national standards for threat assessments.

Florida renewed its threat assessment system in January 2024 to improve response times, provide a constant data collection and build more controls and balances and supervision, said Pinellas County Sheriff, Bob Gualtieri, who is also president of The Public Security Commission of Marjory Stonemas Douglas.

The new model requires that the equipment works quickly and presenting uniform, uniform, electronic summary reports of threat evaluation findings. These results follow students during their school years.

The adjustments intend to eliminate the risk of not knowing about the worrying behavior of a student if the schools change, as happened with the parks shooter and a student who shot and killed classmates in a high school near Winder Georgia, in September, said Gualtierii.

“As parents, you never stop worrying about your children,” Schachter said.

Virginia requires that all public schools and institutions of higher education, including universities, have threat evaluation equipment. In Florida, where one of Schachter’s daughters attends the university, threat evaluation teams are mandatory in all public schools, including autonomous schools.

“There is more work to do,” said Schachter.

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Cheryl Platzman Weinstock reports has the support of a subsidy of the National Institute of the Foundation for Medical Care Management.

This article First appeared in Kff Health News and is published here under a Creative Commons license. Kff Health News It is a national editorial room that produces an in -depth journalism on health issues and is one of KFF’s central operating programs: an independent source of health, survey and journalism policies. Get more information about Kff. Subscribe to the free morning session of KFF Health News.

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