Following a campus incident, school leaders quickly learn strengths and weaknesses within their emergency plans or other policies and procedures. Weaknesses that are brought to light often involve some sort of breakdown in communication among school leaders or law enforcement.
The final report from the 2021 Oxford High School shooting determined the superintendent failed to communicate which district administrators were responsible for student behavioral threat assessments. The report said that “OHS administrators, faculty, and staff were unaware of the District’s threat assessment policy or the District’s threat assessment form.”
In Georgia, a Jackson County sheriff whose office interviewed the Apalachee High School shooting suspect and his father about online school shooting threats said the teen’s then-school district was not notified about the investigation. Therefore, concerns about the student’s behavior was not communicated to the district where he carried out the shooting.
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Many “near misses” in schools have been attributed to proactive information sharing between schools and various stakeholders, including local police, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service. Although more and more schools are adopting case management systems that aim to help identify trends in student behavior before problems escalate into violence, many also ensure the data remains internal despite past incidents showing information sharing is crucial to prevention.
“It’s not just the sharing information in a single school or in a single area. It’s what happens now when that child moves from one school to another, when they get in trouble and their parents move them or their parent has to move for a job again. Life happens, right?” Rohan Galloway-Dawkins, Chief Product Officer at Versaterm, told Campus Safety. “And now this student has gone from one school where they maybe had a support team, had a course of care that they were being supported through. Now they move to another district, another school. Their academic records will eventually show up but none of this other content is made available to that new school, to that new environment.”
Supporting Students Who Exhibit Warning Signs Isn’t a One-Size-Fits-All Approach
While many schools have these systems in place, many also take a disciplinary approach without getting to the root cause of a concern and subsequently offering tailored support.
“We have to keep in mind that these are students. There are not full-fledged adults that we’re talking about here, so as we talk about that course of care, it is a course of care and support. When we talk about intervention — when we talk about stopping a threat, those words a lot, especially in public safety, come with that connotation of action — we’re talking about disrupting a pattern of behavior or a student in a way that is supportive and helpful for them,” said Galloway-Dawkins. “The entire reason we [track data] this is to ensure that the student is not a threat to themselves first or other people. This can’t become a stigma. It can’t become punitive. That’s the first thing to keep in mind when we’re talking about this. Threat can be a scary word but threat is only a risk that hasn’t happened.”
Schools must also establish response plans, which Galloway-Dawkins says can be “as varied as human nature.” There is no one-size-fits-all plan for supporting students through their struggles.
“A lot of school violence incidents have been predicated by bullying. So you can imagine in that type of case where the threat indicator may not even be something that someone said at that point, it may be that, ‘Hey, this student is being bullied, and we’ve had repeated incidents, repeated reports of bullying of a student or a student bullying someone else,'” said Galloway-Dawkins. “It may be addressing the root cause. It may be a course of counseling to talk to that student growing up this hard on all of us. And before you’ve really gone through that maturation process, learning how to regulate yourself, learning how to regulate your experiences, just having an outside vent to be able to speak to someone about those feelings in a more healthy manner can be part of that course of care. But really from there, it can cover anything from athletics to counseling, to all of the different types of support that we can give a student and their home life.”
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Because student needs significantly vary, Galloway-Dawkins says a multidisciplinary team must have access to student data to help identify how a school and the community at large can best support a student and their family. Galloway-Dawkins points to a model being used in Florida that he says has been successful in identifying warning signs and providing follow-up support to those students.
“They’ve identified layers from down at the individual school level up through the district and onto the state level. So it’s identifying different personas, different people at each of those different levels that are responsible for managing,” he described. “At the highest level, you’re not managing students at that point, but you are managing the teams that manage the students and all of that to say oversight, to make sure that students don’t fall through the cracks.”
During this interview, Galloway-Dawkins also shares:
- Additional benefits of digitizing and centralizing knowledge to help authorized staff identify warning signs among students (1:12)
- Who within a school district should be monitoring student data (4:36)
- How schools can access funding for student data management systems (10:45)
- Final thoughts on the importance of information sharing (14:51)
