S6E4 School Shootings Start Long Before the Gun — Here’s How to Stop Them

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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.

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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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