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By: Dr. Amy Grosso
With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy after a school tragedy to view the situation with eyes of judgment and blame. Instead, we would be wise to use the information we learn to critically reflect on current practices and how they can improve. The problem is not the lack of policies in areas such as behavior threat assessment; it is how the policies are implemented.
School Safety. A Collective Responsibility
The responsibility for school safety often seems to fall on one individual or a single department. A common misconception persists that they are the only ones responsible for safety. While it’s true these departments handle many important tasks related to safety and security, it is critical to remember that school safety is everyone’s responsibility. From the school board to campus administration to all staff, all have a piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring the safety of students and staff.
For example,
- The School Board is responsible for setting the policy and holding the superintendent accountable for policies being followed.
- The Superintendent is responsible for ensuring policies are turned into actionable guidelines.
- The Superintendent Cabinet is also responsible for ensuring the actionable guidelines are shared with their campuses that campus personnel also have the training and resources needed to follow the guidelines with fidelity.
- The Campus Administration is responsible for following policies and guidelines set forth by the district and ensuring key staff are properly trained.
- All staff are responsible for reporting if they notice any change in a student, even if the change is small. There are many early warning signs that a student may be struggling with a problem they are unable to manage. If staff report problems at these early stages, it is much easier to guide the student to a safe path.
Protocols, Training and Accountability
Many states mandate behavioral threat assessment and management policies for school districts. Having the policies alone is not enough, however; each policy must also be actionable at the campus level.
There are three key steps to creating an actionable policy: Protocols, Training, and Accountability.
Let’s look at the considerations related to each of these steps.
Protocols
- Protocols are the step-by-step process campus teams follow.
- Protocols should be developed out of best practices. For example, both suicide prevention and threat assessment (CSTAG, NTAC) have research-based best practices that can be used in the protocols.
- Protocols must continually be updated. As new information and research become available, protocols need to reflect these updates.
Training
- Team members: Best practice is for a multidisciplinary team to be formed for threat assessment. Similarly, districts often have a mental health crisis team for suicide intervention. These team members need a high level of training on protocols. Training for the team needs to be more than a one-time event, instead, they need to be provided with ongoing support.
- All staff: While all staff at campus will not be active members of these teams, they still need to understand when and who to contact when they observe certain behaviors and actions.
Accountability
- It is the administration at the district level that holds campuses accountable for following protocols.
- Accountability should not be used punitively but to recognize when a campus needs more support or training.
- By understanding the work campuses are doing, district administrators can better align the resources needed to ensure policies are followed.
The Importance of Centralized Documentation
Even if a district has not only policies but also protocols, without proper software for documentation, gaps can occur. Long gone are the times for using paper forms or individual spreadsheets for critical information like threat assessment and suicide intervention.
Empowering counselors to leverage technology designed for student support reduces administrative burdens and enables them to manage cases more efficiently. These tools help in maintaining detailed records of student issues, enabling timely and effective interventions by:
- Streamlining documentation and analysis in a centralized platform so every staff member can share a concern with counseling quickly and easily;
- Integrating Behavioral Threat Management and Suicide Risk Management tools into a centralized system; and
- Modernizing case management with notifications and progress tracking, enabling counselors to devote more time to direct student support, ensuring effective and continuous assistance.
“We know kids who get to that threat assessment level don’t tend to just vault all the way up there. That’s why we wanted StudentSafe. There are precursory things that happen in their life that script out some of that path. We really have a long-term vision and goal for StudentSafe: to support student wellbeing with data so we can intercede with interventions and support services with our goal being to prevent a child from ever exhibiting behaviors that result in a threat assessment.” Mike Matthews, Director of Operations at Fairview Park City Schools
Raptor StudentSafe™ encompasses several methodologies to help schools recognize, document, support and manage the wellbeing of individual students. The software provides the ability to catalog low-level concerns about student behavior and run suicide risk and behavioral threat assessment methodologies, which are shown to help schools address a student in need of interventions and support for their wellbeing.
Improving Student Wellbeing Case Management
The StudentSafe platform gives your staff the means to quickly and easily share concerns while maintaining student privacy—and it provides your trained counseling staff a complete picture, centralized communications and a full chronology of observances, incidents, actions and responses.
When school staff have a holistic view, they can make decisions in the student’s best interest. Learn more about ways to modernize your student wellbeing supports in Raptor’s free guide.
Dr. Amy Grosso
After completing her Ph.D. in Counseling and Counselor Education at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Dr. Amy Grosso began her career as a mental health counselor at Wake Forest Baptist Health. After accepting her position as the Director of Behavioral Health at Round Rock ISD, Dr. Amy’s accomplishments include:
- Creating the Behavioral Health Services Department, including the hiring and oversight of a team of social workers—and the first-ever social worker dedicated to supporting staff.
- Assisting the establishment of the Round Rock ISD Police Department and specifically designing how social workers work in conjunction with police officers.
- Overseeing the implementation of threat assessment and comprehensive suicide protocols.
Dr. Amy serves on the National Chapter Leadership Council of American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She co-authored the book Schoolwide Collaboration for Transformative Social Emotional Learning, August 2021.
Related Resources
Guide to K-12 Student Wellbeing
Strategies to Recognize, Document, and Support Students in Distress
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