For decades, educators have tried to prepare for the possibility of a school shooter, with no clear way to identify if a future killer might be in the classroom.
They’ve tried zero-tolerance policies to clamp down on any actions that could be a possible threat, including creative writings and drawings that depict violence – a move that has drawn First Amendment challenges. Schools also adopted training drills to prepare children and teens on what to do if a gunman stormed their hallways and classrooms, with debatable results on what that does to students’ psyches.
In light of a recent school shooting in Michigan, officials overseeing Ohio school districts are taking a two-pronged approach to tackling this issue – one dealing with handling students who are potential threats, and the other to address students’ mental health challenges as a preventative to them potentially going down the path leading to a school-shooting incident.
The first approach was put in place before the Nov. 30 shooting at an Oxford Township, Mich. high school, but it tackles the thorny issue of if or when school officials should pull a student out of school because he or she might be a threat.
In the Oxford shooting, authorities say the 15-year-old student charged with killing four peers was allowed to remain in school despite his troubling behavior that included a drawing of a handgun and a person with bullet wounds.
But a bill passed earlier this year by the Ohio legislature took that decision out of any single administrator’s hands, although he or she would still have the authority to remove a student. The bill requires school districts to create threat assessment teams at each school site whose members, among other duties, will determine whether students pose a true threat, as well as how best to respond.
Mary Himmelein, head of human resources for Educational Service Center Lake Erie West, said her organization has for years helped surrounding Toledo-area school districts create violence response plans including Rossford, Washington Local, Perrysburg, Sylvania, Anthony Wayne, and Oregon. She said district officials will now have to take training and establish clearer protocols on how to handle various incidents involving students.
“I think there was a lot happening informally before, but now the state is going to make it a more formalized thing, and districts are going to have to pay attention to that,” she said.
Heather Baker, Toledo Public Schools executive director of community engagement and student supports, said similar teams already exist in the district, but those group members will have to take new training next year to meet the various needs called for in the bill.
But the team members can’t be ones who simply work behind closed doors and make decisions about students’ futures, she said. After receiving the state-approved training, the teams will be required to work closely with all students to better get to know them and identify if and when they begin showing signs that they are in trouble – or posing a threat.
“Anytime you have a student talking about violence against their self or others, we want to assess if it’s a serious threat or if they have the tools to pull this off,” she said. “It’s not a yank-out-of-school-right-away type of thing, but it’s definitely when we would want to surround that student with support and assess what’s going on.”
That leads to the second approach toward school violence: mental health.
Toledo-area school leaders say the pandemic might have provided them the best opportunity to rethink how best to assist students by providing more on mental health resources, such as having counselors available on-site to students.
Ms. Baker said there is a focus on student mental health like never before, in part because educators are recognizing that students returning this academic year to in-person learning are struggling to adapt after spending more than a year attending classes virtually.
As a result, school officials have reported multiple fights and other similar disruptions at schools – a problem that has gotten so bad that it led to Toledo Federation of Teachers President Kevin Dalton and Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz to announce a youth violence crisis symposium in late January to improve safety.
In the past, Ms. Baker said wasn’t much open discussion about student’s mental health, and if a child displayed warning signs that they were struggling, school officials tended to leave it to parents to find them help, which is what happened with the school shooter in Oxford, Mich.
“We are trying to be that one-stop-shop,” she said. “So [the] conversation has changed greatly. You know there used to be a time where we would say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘Why are you behaving like that?’ Whereas now the questions have changed to ‘What’s happened to you?’ How can we assist?’ ‘What can we do to help?’”
Coronavirus relief money has also helped. More than $8 million in federal grant money geared toward mental-health services was awarded earlier this year to Lucas County, with a sizable chunk expected to augment resources for struggling elementary and middle-school students. Toledo Public Schools Superintendent Romules Durant said last week that district officials will release its plans in early to mid-January detailing what other measures they're taking to tackle school safety and student mental health.
Amy Klinger, director of programs and founder of Educator’s School Safety Network, an Ohio nonprofit school safety group, said violence assessment teams and mental health resources are just some of the tools to address school shootings, and are certainly not a cure-all, just as school shooter drills and zero-tolerance policies weren’t either.
She said whether these policies will be effective will rest on districts not letting violence response team members’ involvement lapse and on keeping the programs going, which will require more funding down the road.
Simpler solutions that are less costly, meanwhile, would be for school officials to consider unpopular policies such as doing away with backpacks, which she argues would help eliminate students’ ability to pack guns or other weapons in schools or classrooms or act as tripping hazards when students are trying to evacuate.
But those types of policies get pushback from parents and students, and so they often get ignored.
“Getting rid of backpacks is something that would make schools safer and you could do it today, you could do today,” she said. “These are complicated problems and you can’t just do one thing to solve them. It takes many different solutions.”
First Published December 21, 2021, 11:46 p.m.
