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21% of all active shooter incidents compared to other firearm incidents occur within an
educational setting.
In the lifetime of seeing what's programming, I think now it's it's full of these verified
transport shootings have been prevented.
I'm Sarah Ferris, true crime podcast producer.
And I'm Catherine Chouite, former head of the FBI's active shooter program.
And you're listening to Stop the Killing.
Hi everybody, this is Catherine Chouite again with Stop the Killing Podcast.
Thanks for joining us today.
Sarah Ferris is not with us today, but she's promising me she's going to be back very
soon.
I hope so because she's much more entertaining.
So bear with me today, I have the most incredible people.
An opportunity came about on the advisory group with the National Center for School Safety
based at the University of Michigan is where they do the work and there are other researchers
and practitioners there.
Sarah tell me what the name of this firearms injury prevention for a firearm injury
prevention.
That's so close.
National Institute for Fire and Dread Prevention will put all of those names in the show
notes.
People are that we're going to talk to you today, Brianna Scott, at least Tuline and Sarah
still well are from these organizations based in like I mentioned the University of Michigan.
And what we wanted to bring to you today is a little bit of the data that goes behind.
The research that goes behind instead of just stories of an individual.
What are we learning?
Because I think that's the hard part for all of us is how are we learning to make our communities
in our schools and our world safer and especially from firearms or related violence.
And this is a great opportunity today to talk about the practitioners who are working
behind the scenes to look at what's out there, gather the data if a state law is passed.
Is it effective?
If it should a state pass a law, should a community pass a prevention effort like putting
magnetometers in their schools.
We all say, oh, they should just.
So these are the people who look at the they should just and see whether or not what
we're talking about is practical and is effective.
How about if I start with Brianna, can you tell us who you are and what you're working
on and then Elise and then Sarah?
Nora, thank you.
I'm Dr. Banna Scott.
I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Fire Em Andrew Prevention,
the National Center for School Safety and the Michigan School Safety Initiative at
the University of Michigan.
My research focuses on comprehensive school safety and positive youth development in schools.
I'm really interested in school safety programming, building the evidence base for prevention
strategies to prevent youth violence.
I'm working on a few projects right now evaluating some school safety programming and
partnership with the San Diego Promise Foundation, the Youth Empowerment Solutions Program,
which I can talk a bit more about later as well, as well as some systematic reviews, building
the evidence base for some of our school safety strategies, including trauma informed school
safety programming and some other things as well.
Thank you for having me.
It's thrilled.
I'm thrilled that you're here.
It sounds like you're doing a lot of stuff that's brainiac stuff, so that's why we need
these brainiacs and doing the university stuff.
Elise?
Hi there, Elise.
Tuline.
I just wanted to make it clear that I do know how to pronounce Elise's last name.
Who I have met before.
That's the sad part.
I've had the honor of being on the podcast so far, so I'd be the best.
She's a veteran.
I don't know if I call myself a lab, but I certainly have appreciation for being here.
I'm Elise Tuline.
I am a research assistant professor at the Institute for Fire and Injury Prevention.
I also hold appointments in health behavioral health education at school of public health,
and then at the Institute for Social Research.
Social Research.
Thank you.
That's not just me.
It's not just me.
It's not.
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It's not.
It's not.
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It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
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It's not.
It's not.
I've been able to show in my research that it has a distinct and unique effect on youth, even when you would count for in person experiences.
So again, showing that the, I think what we know intuitively that the digital world has real meaning for our adolescents, and it can cause direct harms.
And then how to mitigate that is part of my work.
schools that are preventing violence and are being leveraged to try to increase kind of
the pro-social help seeking within our student populations. And that's really exciting work
because that is allowing us to kind of address upstream concerns and try to prevent escalation
of things like a firearm event at a school that could be an interpersonal firearm event or a
mass shooting, also self-directed harms of suicide, as well as a myriad of other kind of upstream
factors, bullying, aggression, withdrawal, substance use, etc. So I'm really excited.
That sounds very technical. So I'm just going to say right now on behalf of the entire audience,
I'm glad you're going to we have the time to break this down because that's a lot of words
that's a lot of technical words that talk about the value of the research that you're doing and how
you can break it down into tiny little pieces and inform us. So that's fascinating. I love it.
Yeah, hi. I'm Sarah Stowell and we met on the last episode if you listened and I hold a PhD
in Educational Psychology. So when I approach my work, I'm a former educator, so I think about
really breaking down the silos to make sure that everything is really actionable and tangible in
the ways that we can make schools as safe as possible. So what I started by talking about in the
last episode was that schools are already really safe places, but there are things that we can do
to make them even safer. And I have the pleasure of working and collaborating a lot with Elise and
Bri. And so we do a lot of research really thinking about how to make schools safe and really
comprehensive ways of thinking about the social side of things, the social media side of things,
these upstream prevention, extracurriculars, like really everything that we can be doing in a
rough, round way to ensure that we're moving in a prevention aspect by really thinking through
the entire way of this comprehensive model of school safety, really addressing school safety in
all the ways possible. One of the studies that I talked about, I started by sort of grounding
into facts, thinking about generally how schools are safe, but some of the trends that we've noticed
including increased weapon carriage, and I talked about a systematic review that we've conducted
looking at interventions they have been implemented to prevent students from bringing weapons into
school and demonstrated that there were only two that we found that have been produced over the
last 25 years, one of which was actually conducted by our colleague on the call Elise. So this is one
of the things that we found that it's actually effective in a prevention space. The purpose of
this episode is to really kind of give listeners some ideas and takeaways for what works in schools,
so you can think about what don't we have in our schools, what don't we have in our communities,
what should we be implementing. So I don't know, Elise, if you want to talk a little bit about that
study that you did, what you found and what schools can consider implementing if they aren't already.
And Elise, could you address if you have this information too? I think one of the things that I
think surprised me is the increasing risk of having kids bringing weapons to school for their
own safety, especially at very young ages. And somebody else may have the data on that, because I
see Brana Sheik in her head too. I think that's kind of as we start a school year, I know that we're
recording this to broadcast later, but that is a question that I get from news anchors a lot when
they call me and they're surprised too about, well, this kid just had a he had a gun in his back
pack. That's that's common. That's much more common now than it used to be. So I know that might
be off topic, Elise, so why don't you launch into what Sarah was asking you, but maybe we could park
in a lot that if you don't have that. I think it's all interrelated, honestly. And I think this
big question isn't about only how we do we stop mass shootings. Of course. Take a step back and
think about how do we just make sure that our students are feeling safe? How do we ensure that they're
feeling respected? How do we ensure that they're there to be able to do what they're there to do,
right? Which is to learn like that's the other piece of this is education is really our schools
are meant to educate our youth. They're having this additional task of keeping them safe within those
spaces, which is critical, but it's the secondary goal is the primary goal of education. So I think
we have to really think through the fact that this is a dynamic and kind of complex system.
There isn't just a okay do this and everything will be fine. There's a series of kind of
interwoven strategies that have to be applied in order to maximally benefit our students.
Some of the work that I do is on anonymous reporting systems or confidential reporting systems.
We call them the broad and broad we're using as technology facilitate reporting systems so that
we can talk about both types of systems. And in one study we looked at statewide tips within
the state of North Carolina and tried to identify the amount of tips that were about firearms
and then identify, you know, if tips that were coming in were preventing harm. And what we found
is that, you know, about 10% of tips are about firearms. A lot of them are about school potential
school shootings, but that in the lifetime of the Sandy Hooks programming, I think now it's it's
almost 18, you know, kind of verified plan school shootings have been prevented. That's not just
in the state of North Carolina, that's nationally, but we did find evidence that these systems can help
prevent those types of harms. They also prevent other harms though. They have prevented, you know,
over I think at this point, a thousand confirmed planned suicides or suicide attempts,
as well as identifying thousands of cases of potential concerning behaviors. So that ranges from
things like bullying to cyber bullying to, you know, one off forms of aggression. That includes
things like someone being really withdrawn, someone feeling really stressed out, someone feeling
really down. That also includes things like a planned fight or behavior on a bus. That's not great.
And all that type of information is really important for our schools to have. And in the case of
an urgent or imminent threat, our law enforcement to have so that they can act accordingly. And again,
intervene early so that we can prevent escalation. And that's the goal of these systems.
Is your research showing that, you know, what they did in North Carolina and other places?
Are you seeing that there are anonymous reporting systems, technology solutions,
important in the prevention arena? How important are they?
Yeah, we are finding that they're important. They are generating information. The state of
Michigan collects information about the, from schools perspectives about whether or not the
information was brand new. Unfortunately, that information is not collected in North Carolina. But in
the state of Michigan, 70 to 80% of tips are identified as being novel information to the schools.
They didn't know about it before the tip. So these systems are bringing in new information.
What I also want to say is that just because you have an anonymous reporting system in your state
doesn't mean that your youth are going to use it, right? Like their implementation really matters.
And I think that Sarah and Bri can really see to this in terms of the training that needs to happen
of our students. The training implementation needs to happen for our teachers and our staff to
understand the systems, how they work, when to advocate for a student to use them. And then kind of
the necessary, but I'm calling it almost a connective tissue between the different types of
responders. So you need really strong and robust relationships between, for example, your statewide
anonymous reporting system and each school. You need to have contact information for someone at
that school, you know, where if there's a problem, you can immediately call them and they're going
to pick up that requires iterative collection of contact information and relationships with schools.
You also need to have relationships with law enforcement and memorandums of understanding,
for example, in place so that there's training about the sharing of information. This is kind of
around this idea of interoperability. Can systems transfer information seamlessly between one another
in order to be actionable and do the individuals receiving that information know how to interpret it,
review it, respond to it, collect additional data, etc. Oh, that's so practical. I mean,
I love that because a lot of times people think data is just that and you know what I'm hearing is
very practical, especially I think it's worth repeating. You said in Michigan, your research showed
that the data showed 70 to 80% of the information that was provided was unique information. It was
new and I think that's a struggle. I see with people who don't want to get involved, right? You
say, my neighbor is this way, but I don't want to get involved. My kid's friend is doing this,
but I don't want to get involved. My classmate is doing this, but I don't want to get involved.
But I always say we have, I mean, I guess I take it from the law enforcement end, we have
plenty of instances where it was one phone call that prevented a tragedy, one phone call,
and that's what the 70 to 80% says to me. It jumps out and says, you are likely the only one who's
going to call that information in. So you've got to call it in. Yes, it does speak to the fact that
this is novel information to the schools. And I will say we didn't do that research that's based
on annual reports produced by the Michigan system. So I want to give them credit because
there are states who do release annual reports with their counts and information because that helps
to increase data availability for researchers like myself to then go through and look at things like,
we're doing a longitudinal analysis, for example, across states. Without that data, we wouldn't be
able to do that. What I will say is that we're wrapping up an analysis right now looking at data
coming out of Florida, the Miami-Dade school system where an anonymous reporting system was
implemented with training. What I'm finding is that students are actually reporting or
disclosing concerns. At least this is for mental health related concerns. This isn't specific
to school shootings, but they were relaying those concerns actually to usually a couple of
different sources. And what was interesting about that was, you know, the students who were going
to use the non-supporting system were also really likely to report the concern to either a trusted
adult in their community or to a friend or a peer. Oh, it's fascinating. So there's a residual
benefit, too, is that if they have the confidence to call it in or report it electronically,
they may also talk to somebody else. Right. And so there's actually opportunities, I think,
within our communities to think through, you know, can we leverage additional adults to engage
with these systems? And I've heard Anna Dota Lee from his parents, if you like, you know,
my child came home and told me this, or I heard from, you know, I overheard between my child,
another child talking about a concern they had for a third, you know, student. And I didn't really
know what to do. Like, I didn't feel comfortable calling the parents of that student. I didn't want
to disclose that my child was one who gave me some information and have them have a social kind of
any sort of social negative. And so parents are actually able to use a non-supporting systems or
confidential reporting systems as well. And so again, like, there are multiple people who can engage
with these systems. And letting people know that there's a concern, it's beneficial. It allows
for the opportunity to investigate a little bit more to try to gather additional information.
And I think as we bring this back to kind of school shooters, like, a lot of the indicators
in terms of content engagement. And in terms of the type of violent kind of social media or
media that they're going to engage with and repost or comment on, that's within a space that
is hard to regulate in any other way besides someone seeing it, you know, and saying, oh,
so this thing, maybe I should say something.
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Ranna, how does your work overlap with this? It's also in prevention.
Yeah, so some of my work that I do is in partnership with the Seinehook Foundation
and the Seinehook Foundation does a lot of educational programming about knowing the science.
Knowing the signs that someone might be planning or considering perpetrating violence
and actually in 90% of violent school incidents, a teacher or another student
noticed a concerning sign. And so this is where Elise's work also becomes really important is
when someone notices a sign, where do they go or who do they tell?
You know, some warning signs include students that are isolating themselves from their peers,
drawing concerning things in their notebook, posting things on social media that are concerning
that might suggest that they're considering planning violence.
And a program and project that I've been really involved in that helps to prevent some of
these symptoms or signs from occurring is called the Youth Empowerment Solutions Program.
It's an evidence based after school program for middle school edged youth that empowers them
to make positive changes in their community and build team building skills and work with other
peers to create positive change. So a pillar of this project is a community change project where
the students work with adults in their community to plan a project in their community to improve
life in their spaces. These are things such as community gardens, painting murals, anything
really to bring people together and improve their relationships in their community and
and improve the school culture as well. And it empowers them and encourages them that their ideas
matter and that their voice matters and that they have autonomy in the world. And they take that
into their school spaces and they maybe carry that into the rest of their life and helping contribute
to them developing positively in terms of advocating themselves, gaining team building skills,
communicating effectively, leadership skills, those sorts of things.
Related to this work, one of the things that we've been talking about is anonymous reporting
systems and knowing the science and Sandy Hook and just sort of building off of that. One of the
projects that Bri and I have been working on is with Sandy Hook. It's an evaluation of implementation
of programming in a city area looking at really the cultural relevance of these programs because
it's super important that when you're implementing a new program, you take into consideration the
context of the school because we know that no two schools are alike and it's really like at least
that earlier, you zoom out and you think about what's my school like, what's going to work for the
school community that I'm part of, what do my students need, what do all members of the school
community, what will they respond to. So we've been examining the cultural responsiveness and
developmental appropriateness of this particular program. And one thing that we've noticed is that
sometimes the programs that we think will work everywhere might not work in a particular setting
or they might need to be a little bit more culturally specific because like reporting
might not work for certain groups of students because you know, they have this mentality of like
snitches get stitches. So maybe instead you have to think about different reporting mechanisms so
that you know, you're thinking a little bit more strategically about the cultural relevance,
the developmental appropriateness. And what does this school need, what does this school culture
like. What are some of those other methods? I know when I'm a reporting systems, you said maybe
they need to use another method. What are those other methods? And do you use more than one method?
Yeah, having multiple mechanisms or different methods can definitely be one way,
breach. Do you remember any of the other cultural relevant mechanisms that we had suggested
for programming? Well, I think like relationship building is really important when you think about
like relationship building between students and other adults in the community, whether that be
teachers or family members, even aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and identifying a trusted
adult might be one way in which students or even adults thinking about this bidirectionally
might confide in each other about concerns in their community might be one way in which reporting
may happen. I think you have people to join in in a variety of ways. Maybe they call in an
anonymous reporting system. Maybe you're not getting a lot of activity on that, but you get more
interaction from the parents themselves or the students themselves. And how they report, who
do they report to? Then I guess it becomes a critical aspect of making sure from a prevention
standpoint that you have, you know, a police station or a school counselor or, you know, a cardboard
box with a slit in the top for tips, whatever that is. Yeah, so I mean, I think also there's a
contextualizing piece of like, is there trust? And are the sources that are being provided to
students and to the broader community, feeling trustworthy based on perception as well as prior
experiences? And so I think that's a really important contextualizing factor, especially in our
current, you know, society, there's a lot of uncertainty and derision around certain types
of responders and certain experiences with responders. And so it's really critical. I think
As Sarah was saying in his previous day, like to really think about what is relevant for the school
and for your school population, there's not a one size fits all. How do anonymous reporting systems
and other interventions? How many do we need? And can there be multiple layers? And, you know,
what are the most effective ones then based on what you're seeing about, especially anonymous
reporting systems? So I first want to say not all systems are created equally. So I think what's
one of the pieces is to think through, identify what is available through your school.
Some schools are having like local forms of reporting through like a Google form, right?
Some schools are contracting or districts are contracting with a commercial vendor or a
nonprofit vendor at the school or district level. And then some schools have access to their
statewide system. And recently as given analysis, we found that 34 out of 50 states have statewide
systems. So last days do have them, but their uptake is very different depending on the state.
Understanding the pros and cons. Like not all anonymous reporting systems are confidential
reporting systems are able and capable to address all concerns. So if something isn't monitored 24
seven, I would not advocate for a parent or a community member to use that for an urgent problem.
Like that's not going to solve an issue. And in that case, you have to contact directly emergency
responders or someone who's going to be able to answer live. So that's part of this is building
the trust around these systems is understanding exactly what they're doing, what they're meant to be
used for. And that's where she's school personnel, as well as vendors of these systems, our statewide
systems can be really helpful in being really explicit and saying, this is the goal of this system.
These are the types of concerns that's trying to address. This is how we're going to try to address it.
It sounds like a lot of it is training. It's a lot of it. You have to know when to call here,
when to call there and what to tell them. Yeah. And honestly, I think what will be helpful in a lot
of schools is a decision tree. Like if that is coming from the school personnel, if that's coming
from parent groups to say, like, here are the available resources. And as far as we know, this is
what they do. And this is what they do well and hear the drawbacks, hear the positives. Like,
that might be a helpful, you know, magnet to have on a fridge for parents. I wanted that idea.
You guys should invent that. Well, I think families are bombarded with choices, right? Because you
also have things like national hotlines like 98 and the crisis text line, like, there's a lot of
resources out there. So again, it's thinking about what works for your community. And then we have
families within communities that have different needs and desires. And that's going to also depend
on their context like not all families are going to be comfortable reaching out directly to one
resource. They might want something different. And there might be like community-based resources
that are more appropriate based on their religious affiliations based on their social affiliations
or community affiliations. And that's some of the importance of why layering multiple interventions
at the school level is important too. So back to your question, Kate, about how many interventions?
Well, that's why we want to take a comprehensive approach for school safety, right? So we want to
make sure that when we think about the three environments, the social, the physical and the
attentive environment, we have school safety strategies that are influencing all three of those
and effort to really support the psychological and the physical safety of all members of the
school community. So things that are really moving into the prevention space. So things like
supporting the school climate, fostering social learning, curriculum, anti-bullying programs,
things like the youth empowerment system that Marie was talking about with proud assessment.
So things that really stop any active potential violence before escalate. So things that we know
have a strong evidence base as well and that are really prevention focused. So really layering
these interventions so that if a student isn't comfortable using an anonymous reporting system,
for example, they can go to a trusted adult or they know if there's a positive school climate
program or a social learning curriculum or maybe there's an after school program that they
can go to and they have a peer that they could talk to one-on-one there. So having these layered
interventions that really influence these three different environments that we talk about and
will context into consideration are important. And I'm just going to say Sarah buzzed right past
these three and I'm going to for the benefit of all take a quick reverse step and look back and say
you said there are three aspects of an environment that we need to take care of. Physical
is one that you mentioned and physical meaning the physical security in a location whether it's
a school or business or your home. The physical aspects of locking doors and whether or not you
choose to put up bulletproof doors or magnetometers or surveillance equipment that allows you to see
weapons ahead of time or detect them or a school resource officer or doors and locks that
create man traps we call them meaning they can get to the first door but they can't get through
the second door. That's the physical security. Then the second part you mentioned can you mention
it again? Yes, so there's the social environment which is really like basically what breeze
studies. So really making sure that every member of the school community feels like they're connected,
they are welcome, they are really integrated collectively into the school community. So there's
what we call the culture of people always say oh you need to have a good school culture.
It's the social aspect of it. Exactly, like having a really positive social environment,
having school climate, the social learning curriculum, things that really make the social aspect
that all feel like it's real everyone is connected. And the third one is the one that I think most
people never think about in terms of language which is it's kind of like what at least studies
the attention. So having a school community that is attending to certain things before,
so if a particular like there's a warning sign that everybody is attending to the environment
and they can report it or they can talk to somebody and they can stop it before it becomes a
larger active island. So they're really attending and they're paying attention to their surroundings.
Offstanders. Offstanders. Yeah. And there's mechanisms in place so that they can report those things
and their report will get actually acted on in a timely manner so that it will stop the
particular threat before it becomes a larger active island. So it's sort of what people think of,
what you see, attentive and social. Love it. Love it. So Bri, what's some of the most important
things in in terms of prevention from a cultural social aspect? Yeah, so it's important that
students feel like they belong that they have, you know, peers that they can connect with,
that they have teachers and adults in the community that they can feel connected to and have positive
relationships with and that can be facilitated a few different ways. There's, you know, mentoring
programs, extracurricular groups, affinity groups for students with different identities or
interests and hobbies, extracurricular sports. It's important to have kind of a myriad of options
for students. Also that, you know, students have lives outside of school and it's important that
students, you know, they come to school and they may not have had the opportunity to eat breakfast
or they may have had a long commute to school. And so, you know, schools that can provide fruit
breakfast for students or that can provide like quiet places for students to support their mental
health. Those sorts of things can also really help the culture and help everyone feel like they
are included and are taken care of at the school. Part of being able to build that culture
then it seems to me would be that you need to know your population and you need to ask them what
they need. Yes, yeah. Having relationships with families and parents, this also means, you know,
holding like parent-teacher conferences during times that parents can actually attend, you know,
may be offering in-person and virtual and some families and parents might be working at different
hours and just providing accessible opportunities to communicate with parents and families to help
keep the best interest of their student as the primary goal. And also supporting staff. We
have been doing some of our research about staff wellness as well and the importance of
supporting teachers. A lot of teachers feel burnt out and it's important to ask the teachers what
they need so that you can best support them too. One of the things that we've seen in our research
is that when we talk about school safety and the victimization that's occurring, it's not necessarily
just between peer-to-peer anymore but we're seeing a larger number of teachers who are actually
reporting victimization as well and that can be one of the things that's contributing to this
potential burnout that we're seeing. So another one of these systematic reviews that we conducted
like that interventions that have been in place to really help mitigate this teacher victimization
that's happening and we only found a small number of interventions that have been implemented.
And one of the most supportive mechanisms that we saw was from leadership really advocating and
making sure that they were there to prevent the victimization that's occurring across teachers.
Can you describe to the layman what is victimization of the teachers mean?
Yeah so it can be a variety of different things whether that's actual physical abuse that's
being perpetrated from students to teachers or verbal abuse. The physical abuse can also be from
parent of a student or sexual abuse so any kind of actual abuse that's being directed at the
teacher and it's a large number of up to 75% of teachers who are reporting 20 to 75% of teachers who
are reporting being victimized by this so it's a really 20 to 75% all right come on you statisticians
that's a big range. It is a big range yeah but it runs on the type of abuse too so whether it was
a student threatening them or yelling at them versus sexual abuse it was perpetrated
against them it is quite a large range though. But you're saying that that impacts the whole
school environment then because the teachers are reticent for whatever reason they're being
self-protective then. Right exactly and this sort of speaks to the importance of having like
teams that are there to support all of the school safety and making sure that if
that we have a leader in place who's really helping support the entire school safety mechanism
and we have behavioral threat assessment teams and all of these structures in place to protect
everybody from the students to the teachers to making sure these strategies are implemented
and sustained over time and that we think about evaluating these school safety strategies too.
Yeah and at least I wanted to ask you this because to me it seems like if I'm a teacher who I'm
worried about getting yelled at or by parents or you know beat up by a kid or a parent
I'm not being attentive to anything else except for my own safety. I'm not looking at seeing
you know I'm not even seeing the kids in my classroom that might be in danger.
Yeah I think that in the quality of work that we've done you know we've heard from teachers
feeling concerned and I don't think that's that they're not attentive to anything else but I
think that they're having to balance and and address multiple concerns and one thing I think
that Sarah was kind of touching on that's really important is that administrators need to be
supporting their teachers as well and to parents Sarah's point like parents are sometimes the
perpetrators of especially the verbal violence and I think less the physical but again that maybe
Sarah has a bit more on this statistics on that side but what I've heard is that actually this
is where an honest reporting system sometimes come into play where you know there have been examples
of a particular concern that the administration of the school for whatever reason is not where
either the student or the teacher feels like the administration has not taken sufficient action or
has not taken action and whereby you know then a tip going into a statewide system where there's
now a very clearly logged documented you know concern can actually help to kind of nudge administrators
is kind of a perception of your students and or teachers at times I will say that one of the
challenges we do see is that schools at times are in a tough spot right and it's not just that
administrators are being neglectful they're also really busy and we have to give them benefit
out you know as well but they're they're not always able to act upon every every particular concern
or or act robust in every concern right there there does have to be some level gradient system
and this is where planning in advance is really really important for schools so I think Sarah
and potentially break and talk more about this but threat assessments are becoming more popular
threat assessment teams these are multi-person teams that get to contribute to evaluating
the threats present in of the situation and to monitor it and determine what is the appropriate
response those are really oriented around kind of these mass harm events and or kind of more
the bullying side of things and escalation of interpersonal violence those are really important
there's not really a existing similar system for other types of concerns that might also be
important so for something like student withdrawal or having challenges at home where there is
kind of this great area of like how far can schools get involved maybe they can't get very involved
in dealing with the situation directly but the harm from that situation or the consequences of
that situation are being brought into the school and therefore affecting the school climate
affecting a given student affecting a relationship between students all that starts
to play into the school environment and so it's challenging for schools I'm not you know this
again is not saying oh schools are just being negligent they're really at maximum capacity
in some ways and this is where additional resources and and you know doing things where we have
policy legislation to support our educators to support our schools to try to ensure that they
have the relevant resources that they need in order to be able to do the work that they're there
to do which is to ultimately educate but in order to educate they have to make things safe.
Hey I'm Josh Spiegel host of the podcast lunatic in the newsroom if you enjoy journalism that
drifts into mild panic wild overthinking and a guaranteed nervous breakdown lunatic in the newsroom
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you know one thing that you said at least that it kind of struck me I think about a call coming
into an anonymous reporting system and it may be an emergent issue and you worry that there's a
threat of harm to sell for others that you mentioned you you know be great to have a decision tree
right that's the kind of part of what the threat assessment does but what do you do afterwards
I think a lot of times we don't think about the afterwards part okay the school gets a anonymous
reporting tip that that there's a bully who's doing X and Y okay it's not an emergent problem
but what do you put into place at the school to support the teacher who has to deal with that kid
who's now coming back after being kicked out of school for three days what do you have in place
that's the decision tree on the other end I guess I see and and maybe that's an awkward way to put
it it's certainly a challenge I want Sarah to jump in and talk about wrap around services because
she has a lot of experience in this but what I also want to say is that schools less so with teachers
because teachers can see this data but particularly for students who submit information about for
example bully and then they sometimes feel like nothing happened schools aren't always legally
allowed to disclose to the student who was the complainant even if they know who that is oh yeah
we did something you know and sometimes it's obvious like an expulsion people kind of know about
that because that student is no longer in school but like there's again this grading of steps
and it's not like under FERPA that information cannot be released to students there's also
ethical reasons why that probably shouldn't be released to students so I think you again you want
to create a culture where you you're able to say if the students like you know if you submit a tip
and you feel like nothing's happened like please submit another tip please reach out to your teacher
please like liaison and what I've heard is that sometimes like students will submit a tip then
they'll go talk to a teacher you know after a bit of time when they're like hey nothing's happened
and the teacher says okay all the time I hear that all the time yeah but the teacher can then
if the teacher is trained and to understand like how these systems can can work like another tip
might be able to escalate the situation again and again it's a log of what's happening so we don't
want to have to go back and retrospectively say hey there was a log of this and the school didn't
do a good job or you know as responders didn't do a good job like but you know there are opportunities
to continue to kind of like track these situations and again coming forward and saying this is still a
problem might give school actually you know more information like they may have previously acted
it might have just not done the affected outcome so having you know more information like oh it's
still going on that could actually you know help the school to say okay next step yeah I was just
going to build off what you were saying a little bit there at least which is we're currently
conducting or we did conduct semi-structured interviews with students from Michigan to understand
their perspectives on safety so what makes them feel safe what recommendations do they have to
increase their feelings of safety in the school and one of the things that we've heard them reflect on
is some apprehension or brown utilizing these anonymous systems for reporting because they don't
know what happens after they submit a tip and it just sort of goes into a black box and they don't
ever necessarily have the the follow-up in that wrap around and they don't know well if I submit it
what's going to happen what are the next steps am I sure that it's actually going to be acted on
and if so what's going to be the ramification for the bully who I'm reporting about and what
will happen to me and so there are all these sort of unknowns and this ambiguity that students
are facing and that speaks to the importance of training so if there's better training on the
front side before these systems are implemented and the students can understand better what actually
happens when the tip gets submitted and how it's resolved maybe there's a better fidelity of
implementation and a higher likelihood that students will utilize these sources because they
actually know what happens when the tip gets submitted and how it's resolved in the end so we're
hearing this a lot from students saying like well I'm not submitting a tip because I don't know
actually what happens after this anonymous thing happens then what how well I be sure that it's
actually acted upon so and then thinking about it from the BTM side behavioral threat assessment
and management the importance of documentation cannot be understated so really after the entire
process is done really having this comprehensive paper trail of the entire BTM process and what was
done in case the event has to be revisited or a student gets transferred really having comprehensive
documentation the undergirds the entire process will really ensure that you know you have a really
solid way of knowing what worked and importantly what didn't you know if you have to revisit or if
you have to try something different here's what we tried for this particular situation and here's
what was effective here was what didn't work so well but you have a whole documentation paper trail
that demonstrates the entire BTM system and let me just jump in here just add you know if you're if
you're hearing the word but you don't catch it BTM is behavioral threat assessment teams and it's
the same thing threat assessment teams TATs the same concept some states mandate it lots of schools
are implementing it more companies should implement it but they don't I would just say doing the work
that I do with companies but it's a way of doing a systematic analysis of threat information that's
coming in whether it's coming in from at least is anonymous reporting systems or from from a cultural
aspect of tips and things that come in from the teachers comments that come in from the teachers
like the work that Brian is doing that information comes into a threat assessment team but one thing
I know you're aware of is a Dewey Cornell down at University of Virginia UVA is he's got a big
team doing research for years on you're looking back and you know certainly seeing that one of the
one of the many takeaways on their work at UVA is that consistency in a threat assessment
team allows consistent analysis of information that comes in and more confidence in that things
are going to be handled properly because if a there's a bullying threat it's kind of handled
this way it doesn't matter who it is or what their race is or what their age is that that the
analysis is going to be this way and gives people confidence that's all gives people confidence
that the analysis are being done wisely and so I think that we're seeing we'll see continue to see
more information come out that tells us that that training ahead of time it is something that
really solidifies the value of this behavioral threat assessment teams yeah and that's something
that's coming up in October 2026 will be a mandate for Michigan school so we'll be able to see a
little bit more even from a data slide what is working and making sure that schools are prepared
to be able to have those systems in place so that they know who's on their team they're comprehensive
BTAM teams because it requires if they have a multidisciplinary team in place and that
that documentation should be there too so really having wraparound services connecting students
with resources that they need so that it's not just all right we dealt with the tip but really
having the entire wraparound process in place and documented so that it really addresses an entire
issue and it doesn't escalate into a larger act of violence yeah it's it is definitely a cultural
I speak as a person who worked with the FBI for 20 years and you provide tips you provide tips come
in information comes in there's a very specific process when I was there for how they look at an
examination of any potential misconduct you know internal or external for an FBI agent or any
FBI personnel and knowing that that specific process was in place gives everybody confidence that
they may not know the outcome but they will know that the work that was done to look to see whether
there was a concern or a threat is addressed in the same in consistent manner and I think that
if you have that that helps with the culture right yeah yes yeah staff feeling prepared to deal with
concerns at the school level feeling like they have the you know systematic process to go through
and assess a threat and then also going back to follow up what happens when the student comes back
returns to school or you know the week after the incident feeling that I think the
threat assessment processes to have also a process for the follow up to is important so that people
feel safe but I think that what we're doing today I love the idea that this is something that we
talk about better informed community on a community that better understands how they can
be part of the solution and I think that's what this kind of conversation provides so with that in
mind I'll ask each of you closing thoughts or what have we missed or what else did you want to
talk about so maybe I'll start with with with Brianna yeah so I think what I want to leave people with
is that there are a lot of school safety and school violence concerns we often hear about
school shootings and while they are tragic they are also actually quite rare about 1% of all
school violence incidents are school shootings and there's a lot of other school violence incidents
that happen in schools like bullying and physical fights and verbal aggression and relationship
concerns that is also really important to address with a lot of the interventions and prevention
strategies that we've discussed today in the upstream factors that can help intervene on a lot of
school violence events like bullying that can help to prevent issues of shootings or other
more serious school violence incidents as well I think starting upstream is really important
in ensuring that all students feel safe attending to both their psychological as well as their
physical safety with the prevention strategies that we discussed is is really important I love that
at least I think my big takeaway is that like school shooting everything has gone wrong it's the
end of a very very very long path of things going not well that's an excellent description I'm
gonna I'm gonna steal that but for people who want to get involved and who are interested in this
area there are so many opportunities you don't have to be a principal making the big decisions if
you are a principal making the big decisions kudos to you please continue to be thoughtful around
the different types of overlapping strategies you're applying but the biggest thing we can do is
build communities where people feel included safe welcome we have a lot going on right now in the
world that is really scary and really hard but getting involved in ways that kind of support people
in your communities support teenagers in your communities support your own children checking in
with them even and how's everything going like you know they're ways to connect in a lot of
opportunities that are upstream as well you know it's kind of small commitments into the really
big commitments and so thinking about that piece and then when it comes to actual strategies like
this is a collaborative process there's not just one solution there are overlapping pieces that
have to be applied and it requires a lot of communication collaboration and teamwork we are a team
we are teams trying to keep ourselves our families our communities our schools our loved ones
safe so in the name of teamwork let's be inclusive in our team building again trying to think
through inclusion and being collaborative is really important is there already yeah I think you
both have summed it up beautifully and just to add on to that like when you're looking at the team
of school safety who's not at the table and invite them in so what voices aren't represented
are there youth members who don't necessarily have their voices highlighted because
they are advocates for themselves too and we need to make sure that they feel empowered so I would
also say take a look at the school safety strategies at your school that are being implemented
do you know what those are and if you don't ask you know and it's important that we're all really
we're knowledgeable we're filled in we are educated about our school safety strategies
and understanding how those influence the different environments that we talked about so
if there's not a strategy that's influencing the attentive environment or the social environment
advocate for one of those because it's it's important that we really have this comprehensive
approach so that as Brianna was saying it helps foster the psychological and the physical safety
of all members of this school community so making sure that we're all on the same page with the
ultimate goal of making sure that everybody's safe and we're fostering positive youth development
so that kids can fully focus on learning in school so yeah making sure everyone has a seat at
the table and then we're all on the same page and focusing on the strategies that will get us there
I love it I couldn't have said it better I couldn't have said it that way if I if you paid me
can I have more thought that might be like yes you might include an actual episode
that's okay jump it in there we're all we're all in okay great and we haven't really touched
on this again it might be a little bit off the rails not important for this episode but if you're
come on it's all important at least everything you say is important that is so not true
I think that as an adult you know if you are someone who has a young person in your life
you're a parent you have nephews nieces you have kids in your community and you are a firearm owner
the best thing you can do is confirm that you know where every single one of those firearms are
and that they are fully locked and unloaded and ideally you're storing your ammunition
deferentially in a different place in your storing your actual gun that is one of the best things
you can do that's a low lift for anyone who's a firearm owner and just from the institutes perspective
or the institute for firearm injure prevention we are non-political we are not advocating for people
to be without guns but some of the research that we kind of are coming out with and the other group
you know other researchers in this piece are coming out with is that's one of the most important
things because firearms at school this is not specific to mass shootings this is just generally
a firearm injury in adolescence like 75% of the firearms used in an injury whether that's self-inflicted
accidental or interpersonal is coming from either the use on home or from a home where they are
often at so a family member of friend etc so that's all the rails
no that's what you go ahead Sarah's jumping in there doing a good circle back to the previous
episode that was really thinking about the link between school safety and firearm violence
if firearm violence prevention so I think that's a really nice reminder that these are really
and inextricably linked and that just because we're talking about school safety doesn't mean that
we're not also talking about the things that you can be doing in your home that are so deeply
connected to what happens in school so it's a it's a good reminder that everything is so deeply
entrenched in one another as it relates to like school school violence generally mass shootings
are not like the most prevalent incident of school violence when you think about bullying and
cyber bullying and all the things however 21% of all active shooter incidents compared to other
firearm incidents occur within an educational setting so when do you think about firearm violence
generally 21% of general firearm community violence is happening within schools so it
is a very important and all related to school safety and school violence and I just wanted to add
from the perspective of a law enforcement investigator right who has worked on this for years
that those on secured guns I know people who say I don't have kids that live in my house
but if a person under the age of 25 knows that you have a weapon at your house and they can get to
it and they want a weapon you're one of their sources if they can buy it legally they buy it legally
if they can't buy it legally they can't buy it from somebody else they'll try to take one
from somebody's house that they know and they don't view it as stealing because this is somebody
they know their grandfather their friends and they're just going to I'm just going to take this
because it's not stealing like they don't think of it as breaking into a home so those weapons
are taken in and it's equally important you know at least you mentioned ammunition people who want to
commit targeted violence want high volumes of ammunition so it's very important to think about where
you keep your ammunition and I know ammunition and those of you who don't have guns it's heavy
and it's a big boxes of stuff and it may not be something that you think about always keeping
locked up I know shotgun shells are routinely you know kept in basements and garages and
addicts and not addicts probably but car trunks because they're big boxes right so just kind of
keep that in mind it's one more thing to consider anybody want to jump in here and make a final
comment Sarah our resources are always freely available and I know that there's plenty to learn
out there nc2s.org so if you have any questions related to school safety firearm injury prevention
or anything that we can do to support you and these efforts please check out all of our free
resources and be in touch in any questions that you have that we can do to support you and your
ongoing school safety and community violence prevention efforts and thank you for listening
so everybody here they'll take away should be what's one thing you can do to make your community
and your school safer when it comes to targeted violence like a firearms violence but also creating
a warmer and a better and more inviting collaborative community that's the goal isn't it right so
we're all going to be upstanders after today and we're all going to be supporting everybody else's
efforts thank you guys so much for coming on today I really appreciate you taking the time
thank you for joining us on stop the killing remember these conversations aren't just important
the necessary if you're ready to dive deeper into the issues we cover Catherine's book stop the
killing and also how to talk about guns with anyone are available now at catharine shwite.com stop
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