(upbeat music) (indistinct students chattering, footsteps) (soft music) - I'm Eric Olson, President and CEO of KSMQ Public Television coming to you from a school classroom, a location familiar to many of us.

While it may be familiar, this place of course has changed.

Certainly since I was here, here is one bit of proof.

Recently KSMQ was invited to listen into a fascinating live discussion among Minnesota's professional educators.

The topic was school violence, specifically school shootings.

Understand this discussion was meant for professional educators, but we found the information so important, so relevant that KSMQ is arranged to bring this now to all of you.

The organization presenting this research is called The Violence Project.

Founded in 2017, The Violence Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center located in St. Paul.

Their goal is data-driven violence prevention, and what progress they've made.

Today, this Minnesota organization has assembled the nation's most comprehensive mass shooter database ever compiled.

Here now is just some of what they have learned.

- My name is Katie Pekel and I am a board member of The Violence Project and a former middle school principal.

The work of The Violence Project is of course important and near and dear to my heart as a former school principal, who now works at the university of Minnesota in leadership development program, working with school and system leaders all across the state.

So The Violence Project, as you may be aware, is the nonprofit nonpartisan research center dedicated to reducing violence in society and using data and analysis to hopefully improve policy and practice.

However, as I sometimes like to say, what does that mean in a school on a Tuesday or today, a Friday morning, school leaders are faced with really challenging times right now, not just because of coming out of COVID.

I'd like to say coming out of COVID, but because we know that the mental health pressures surrounding what has taken place, not just in terms of COVID, but also racial unrest in the last 18 months.

So today we're really thrilled that Dr. Peterson, Dr. Riedman and Dr. Densley are gonna be willing to share with us their work and their experiences and tools that can hopefully be helpful as you think about decisions that you need to make as school and system leaders.

We know that this is a topic that is a nightmare scenario for school leaders and it keeps us up at night.

I am about to turn it over to our folks on The Violence Project, but first I just wanna do a very quick introduction.

Dr. Jillian Pearson is a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She did launch her career as a special investigator in New York City, researching the psychosocial life histories of men facing the death penalty.

So she has a very unique background, but I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Peterson and Dr. Densley, who is a professor of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University, also in St. Paul, who's originally from the UK and an opportunity to meet with them about four or five years ago, as they were saying how can we help schools, and school leaders understand mass shootings and prepare to respond to prevent those.

So that's why they are...

So happy to have them with us today.

And then also joining us is David Riedman, who is from the... excuse me, has a master's degree from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.

He is actually the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

He also teaches graduate courses in Homeland Security in policy.

So we're really glad to have all three of them with us today, and I'm gonna turn it over to Jillian.

- Hi everyone, good morning.

So thanks Katie for that introduction.

Like she said, I'm a psychologist by training.

I'm a former investigator who worked on understanding the life histories of people facing the death penalty.

And I'm a professor of Criminal Justice at Hamline University.

We planned this webinar last week because we were hearing from so many principles that they were experiencing these threats and were unsure what to do.

And then last night with the TikTok challenge, it's just kind of unreal that this is happening and kind of collided with the webinar this morning.

So we're really happy to be here and to able to share some of our research, some of our results, some of our recommendations.

And we're also happy to be a resource moving forward for questions or concerns as you have to navigate this space.

Let James introduce himself.

- Yes, good morning, everybody.

It's a pleasure to be sharing this morning together.

I wish it was about maybe a nicer topic, but my name is James Densley.

I'm the co-founder of The Violence Project with Jillian Peterson.

As was mentioned before, I'm a professor of Criminal Justice, but I'm a sociologist by training.

And in a previous life, I was a middle school special education teacher.

I taught in the New York City public schools for a few years.

And so I like to think that I come at this issue, not only as a researcher and as an academic, but as a practitioner and as somebody who has worked in schools, worked with young people and cares very deeply about the climate of our schools and the safety of our children.

So as we move forward today, it will be through that lens that I try and navigate this challenging space that we're in today.

We are gonna be sharing resources from The Violence Project and a sort of spin off from that called off-ramp.

On the screen in front of you are the web addresses to those two sites where you'll find a host of resources that are relevant to the conversation we're having today.

A lot of the stuff is free, accessible, downloadable, and we invite you to check them out after this presentation.

The other resource that is free and accessible and downloadable is the K-12 School Shooting Database.

And to talk about that and to talk about the latest data on threats and school shooting trends, I'm gonna hand over to my friend and colleague David Riedman.

So David, over to you.

- Thank you very much, James.

And thank you all for are participating today.

Again, my name's David Riedman from the K-12 School Shooting Database, at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey California at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The aim of the K-12 School Shooting Database is to be different from a lot of the other of kind of shooting trackers that are out there.

This is a nonpartisan holistic picture of all types of gun violence that occur on school property from 1970 to 2021, and anyone can download the raw dataset available on the website.

Just looking at the numbers for this year, it's very alarming, 2021, 249 different gunfire incidents on school campuses, 165 of those were just this fall in winter.

So put that into context, that's more than double the number of incidents for 2018, 19 and 20, and it's four to eight times the number of incidents per year from 1970 to 2017.

Now, in addition to the actual gunfire incidents for the last three years, we've been tracking threats at schools and over that period of time, most weeks, there were a few threats and they ranged from online threats to a note found, to graffiti in the bathroom, but consistently for a three year period, there were a couple per week.

This fall that has escalated to being a couple dozen per week.

After Oxford, there have been more than 100 a day in some cases, and now after the TikTok threat, 1000s across the country.

So that's the trend we're seeing, both actual gun violence increasing on school campus, as well as these anonymous online threats that schools are having to deal with.

So thank you very much for having me.

I'll turn it back over to James and Jill.

- Thank you, David.

So over the last year, The Violence Projects and David K-12 School Shooting Database have been collaborating together to try and pull together our resources to better understand the picture of violence in schools across United States.

The work of The Violence Project really was around mass shootings, looking not just at shootings that occur in school buildings, but also in other public spaces as well.

And for the last four years, we were embarked on a research project where we interviewed perpetrators of mass shootings in prison.

We interviewed their family and friends.

We interviewed survivors of mass shootings, first responders, and those affected by these terrible tragedies to get a sort of 360 degree look at this phenomena.

And we also build a database of cases where four or more people have been killed in a public space.

We're gonna be sharing with you some of the findings from that research and then the implications of those findings for prevention.

'Cause that's really why we're here on this call.

We believe that this is preventable and we just need to really rethink maybe some of the things that we've been doing to try and stop this phenomena.

Now, the question of course, though, is given the data that David just shared, given this rise in shooting threats and shootings themselves in our school buildings, why is this happening now in 2021?

The truth of the matter is no one quite knows why.

The data are a little bit messy and it's unclear of how you disaggregate and disentangle all the potential risk factors that have been exacerbated over the last 18 months to two years because of the global pandemic.

But we do know that the pandemic has had a huge impact on the economic, sociological, psychological prosperity of our children, our families, and our communities.

And that may well be one of the reasons for this rise in threats.

We also know that social media is a game-changer.

If you've ever spent time on social media or know that rarely do you come away from it feeling better than before you were engaged with it, it has a tendency to make us angry.

It has a tendency to make us feel insecure or to make us feel inadequate.

It also has a tendency to spread rumor and gossip.

So social media is a big part of this equation too, that it's exacerbating maybe the tensions underlying violence and maybe propelling students to want to lash out violently in their schools.

We've also had a chronic lack of faith in our traditional institutions, we no longer scientists, journalists, politicians, all the police in the last year or so, because of the events that are going on in our society.

We know through history that at times where we have a lack of faith in our institutions, violence tends to rise.

And so this is a challenge that we are all faced right now in terms of how do we start to trust one another again, believe in one another again, and help each other out.

And then of course you have the eroding away of our social safety net, the lack of great access to services that our kids most desperately need at the moment.

Right here in the State of Minnesota, we have one of the worst student to counselor ratios in the country at a time when we need those types of supports within our schools.

And on top of all this we've had record firearms sales.

Kids are now in close proximity to guns than they have ever been.

This is because in the last year alone we've had between 20 and 40 million legal gun sales.

Now, even if one of those guns finds its way into the hands of a child that is increasing the risk, that there might be gun violence on a school campus.

So these are all risk factors that are complicating the picture for how do we go about prevention in this way.

Now, one of the challenges that we've also experienced is in our approach to school violence and school safety, there has been a tendency at least post Columbine, which is over the last 20 plus years to really emphasize the idea of practicing for what felt like inevitable violence.

We have fortified our schools through a kind of homeroom security apparatus where we have built metal detectors, cameras, bulletproof glass, locked doors, active shooter drills.

Now in the event of an actual tragedy unfolding in our schools, that may well save lives.

But as we've seen from the terrible tragedies, just in the last few weeks with Oxford, Michigan, none of those things actually prevent a shooting from occurring, they only help us react and respond to it if it occurs.

What we want to do today is try and shift that emphasis toward prevention.

What can we do to get upstream of this violence, to prevent it from ever happening in the first place?

There is definitely a time and a place and a need for those more reactive practices, but that's not what this webinar is about.

Today, we are focused more on prevention, getting on the front end of this phenomena.

So we can notice when somebody's on the pathway to violence, build more off-ramps to get them diverted away from that pathway and get them the help that they need.

And the other thing I want to stress here is that everything we talk about today has a broad diffusion of benefits.

So yes, we are trying to prevent school shootings and school mass shootings.

That's the big priority, but at the same time, some of the strategies we'll talk about today could also prevent a suicide, could also prevent an accidental shooting, could prevent bullying in a school, could just get somebody who's in need of support and needs that connection, get them connected and get them the help that they need.

So there is this broader diffusion of benefits that goes beyond just preventing school shootings.

And that's why the work that we're doing here is so important for everybody.

So we have analyzed the lives and the life histories of mass shooters and mass school shooters.

Also using data from David's K-12 School Shooting Database, we've also looked at cases that didn't reach that threshold of a mass shooting in a school building, but came very close, meaning that a student came to school with the intention of perpetrating a mass shooting, but for whatever reason, it never rose to that threshold, taking over 130 cases over that time period in the database, we've been able to identify some commonalities around the pathways to violence for school shooters.

So just some things to kind of keep in mind as we move forward.

These types of events tend to occur in public schools.

Now there's lots of reasons why that might be the case.

Is it a resource issue?

Is it a class size issue?

Is it a socioeconomic status issue?

I think all of that could be to be pointed to, but it's just recognizing that these do tend to occur in public schools.

The perpetrator are themselves, school children.

That's really the most important thing to think about here.

School shooters are school children, they're insiders, not outsiders, that has important implications for intervention because it's not necessarily something we can lock out of our schools because these are the same individuals who are walking through the school building and the safety procedures, every single day of their lives.

They tend to be young men.

In fact, the average age for school shooters is about 15 or 16 years old.

They often have a disciplinary record or a history of violence, and many have also experienced some form of bullying.

Jill, a little bit later, is gonna talk more on the details of the mental health warning sign.

But I just want to emphasize something in terms of trends with school shootings, school shooting is tend to occur in the morning.

This is important because often many of the steps we take to mitigate these shootings, active shooter drills and things, don't usually take into account the idea that the school might not be in full session when a shooting occurs.

So we've had instances for instance, where shootings have occurred before even anyone's even taken the register for attendance that day.

And people are even in their regular classroom spaces.

The most common day for a school shooting of this type is the 20th of the month that actually speaks to the contagion aspect of the Columbine shooter.

Columbine became a blueprint for many school shooters.

And because that occurred on the 20th of April, many school shooters copycat that date.

And in terms of the most common times for shooting to occur, it's usually at those transition periods in the school calendar at the beginning of the school year, just after winter break or toward the end of the school year.

And we feel that there's may be a correlation there because these are particularly stressful times in the lives of young people, where there's a lot of things up in the air.

Now I mentioned before about the role of Columbine and the influence that this has had.

This is something that we saw in the lives of mass shooters that we interviewed, but also ones that we researched from afar.

This is actually a direct quote from a school shooter that we interviewed in prison.

He mentioned to us that, "I heard some things about these shooters, either in movies or news articles.

And I wanted to know more about what they'd done.

I was curious after researching the Columbine massacre, I found a link to them and other school shootings started to read on them, a few I had already heard about, but I wanted to be better informed."

But this is the key here.

It's not just about researching Columbine.

It was the fact that this individual who was undergoing so many struggles in their own life, actively related to the school shooters at Columbine, he saw himself in their lives.

They were suffering from depression and then also died by suicide, and it was something that he too was longing for.

So it was a relationship that he had formed in his mind with the past school shooters, which was tipping him over the edge to want to perpetrate his own.

This is a big red flag.

If you've got students in your schools who are actively researching school shootings and have an unhealthy obsession with past school shootings, that's an opportunity for intervention, not necessarily to punish that student, but to open up a conversation, to ask why, and to start to think about how do we divert them from that pathway.

Now, as you saw in that quote, the shooter that we interviewed mentioned suicide.

This is also really important when we think about prevention.

A mass shooting, a school shooting is maybe intended to be a final act.

It's rare that people think they're gonna get away with it.

You will be caught, and in fact, our data show that the vast majority of mass shooters die on the scene, they either take their own lives or they're killed by law enforcement.

And if they're caught, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.

And depending on the states, they may even face the death penalty.

For all these reasons, we have to start thinking of these school shooting events, not just as homicides, but as suicides.

And this is clear in the language here from one of the school shooters, a famous case, because at the time of the shooting, she had announced that she did it because she hated Mondays.

But if you dig a little deeper, it was about more than that.

She told the head parole commissioner that she wanted to die, and that was the reason why she perpetrated the school shooting.

"Why did you pick the school across the street?"

She was asked.

"Because I knew if I fired on the school, the police would show up and they would shoot and kill me.

And every time I tried suicide in the previous year, I had screwed it up."

If we can change our mindset around these shootings to implement suicide prevention techniques, we can get a lot of traction in how we go about prevention.

- So one thing I wanna be clear about in going through those statistics that James went through is that there's no profile for a school shooter.

We don't have a risk assessment tool that you can check off, bullying and traumatize and say, "Okay, they're high risk for every..." I mean, there'll be millions and millions of students who have trouble backgrounds and who are bullied and who have mental health concerns.

What we do see again, and again, is these four patterns.

So this is data on school mass shooters and attempted mass shooters.

Like James said, they're students of the school.

I think that alone really changes our framework.

We're not trying to keep bad guys out, right?

That we're not trying to run from dangerous people we've never seen before.

We're not rehearsing to respond to some outside stranger.

These are children in the building that we see every day in some ways that makes it harder in terms of security, won't keep them out.

But in some ways that makes prevention easier because we know them, we're seeing them.

You can see change is in their behavior and they can sort of alert you to when something's going on.

87% of the perpetrators were in crisis prior to the shooting.

So we define a crisis as a market change in behavior from baseline, this could be because of mental health.

This could be because of other outside circumstances that could be triggered by something in the school or at home, but they are noticeably behaving differently.

And people around them are noticing that no one's thinking, "Oh, I bet they're planning a shooting," but they're thinking, "Oh, they're more agitated than usual.

They've started showing up late.

They seem angrier than usual, that there's these shifts in behavior."

80% were actively suicidal prior to the shooting.

So this means they were talking about suicide.

They were writing about suicide.

They had suicide attempts.

We know suicidality is a major risk factor for this and 78% leak to their plans ahead of time.

So leakage refers to any form of letting other people know about your plans, whether that's specific or non-specific, whether that's online or offline, the most common people that perpetrators leak to are their peers, so they're telling classmates and friends.

We study instances where 50 people knew what was gonna happen, and nobody came forward and told an adult.

So we can use this as a framework for prevention.

And like James said, broad diffusion of benefits.

So you're not just preventing a school shooting, you're also preventing suicides and other forms of violence.

The final thing that they have in common is that most perpetrators of school shootings take their guns from their parents.

They're too young to buy guns, they're kids of this school.

They take weapons that are not secured.

So actually safe storage, encouraging safe storage, having safe storage campaigns, having safe storage resources like gun law, talking to parents about safe storage.

That's actually a really effective prevention strategy, not only for school shootings, but for accidental shootings, for suicides and for other form of violence.

And we know from research that the vast majority of people, gun owners and non-gun owners alike support safe storage.

So what does it mean for prevention or research?

We know that the perpetrator is most likely in the building.

We know that they are showing signs of crisis, which means training all staff in the building in crisis intervention and building crisis response teams is critical, and we'll get into that next.

We know if perpetrators are actively suicidal, that strategies and suicide prevention may be more helpful than punishment.

Punishment, if someone is in crisis and suicidal, criminal charges, exclusionary practices like suspension, expulsion, can actually exacerbate their crisis, exacerbate their grievance, right?

So we wanna do things to sort of bring them down, not make things worse.

And we know that leakage is key.

And so those threats become really key intervention points and it becomes critical to build reporting systems, to respond to those.

So this is kind of high level recommendations of responding to threats, and then we'll get into more detail.

So high level recommendations, having reporting systems in place.

We know that that's really key, whether that's a Google Form, whether that's an email address, something where students can also report anonymously.

And we know that anonymous reporting increases reporting, making sure that all parents and students and staff know how to use those report systems and they know how the school is gonna respond.

So it's not that if I say, "I saw this on TikTok," that the police are gonna show up at this kid's door and arrest him, and then that's my fault.

But if I say I saw this on TikTok, I'm expressing concern, and that's gonna be met with the same type of holistic care and concern to increase then reporting and build that trust.

We know that all threats should be taken seriously.

The vast majority of threats are not real threats.

They might be jokes and they might be hoaxes or they are not credible.

But we also know that kids that end up doing this do threaten beforehand.

So for that reason, they do have to all be taken seriously.

But at the same time, recognizing that a threat is a cry for help, that if someone's saying, "I'm thinking about doing this," they are putting that out in public.

They want someone to see and hear that.

And they want someone to respond to that.

We saw that in the Oxford shooting where the perpetrator literally wrote the words "help me" on their paper, that those threats are an opportunity.

It's kind of like this last ditch cry for help to see if anyone is listening or caring.

We know that using a team approach for assessment is really critical, and a lot of these cases, lots of different people were holding lots of different little pieces of information, and one was putting it all together.

Again, what we saw happen in the Oxford case, where there's a lot of different missing pieces and they have to be brought together and you never want the decision to rest solely on one person.

So ideally a team would have a school administrator would have a mental health professional, and would have someone with public safety.

You can also include other teachers or other community people, but having a team that looks into these threats that assesses them within the context of that student's life and then responds with appropriate intervention and continued follow up.

We also know that communication is key.

Just anecdotally, I've been talking to a number of principles the last couple of weeks, and it seems to be when there's a delay in communication, that can cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of people.

And it's difficult because you can always say everything that's happening, but that's why it's really nice to have these systems in place beforehand, so when there is a threat, you can say, "The crisis response team is responding to it.

We are taking appropriate steps, we're on it."

And the faster that communication can come out, the better.

This is a paper that we published in Jama not long ago, just a few months ago actually, where we tried to look at predictors of leakage, amongst mass shooters.

And we found that the predictors were being young, having been in previous counseling and being actively suicidal.

So it wasn't that purple traders were leaking their plans for fame or for attention seeking.

It really did seem that the leakage followed this cry for help model, which has a lot of implications for how we respond to those threats in that leakage.

- So, as we mentioned earlier, we want to try and leave everybody today from this webinar, not just with this one hour of advice, but with ongoing support and resources.

So one of the reasons why we built what we call the off-ramp project, as we said, the pathway to violence is often quite long.

We need to build more off-ramps.

Now building a crisis response team, I want to say that many of you will already be familiar perhaps with the terminology of threat assessment and some of the best practices in that area.

And we are real advocates for that approach.

In building the crisis response model that we're talking about today, we did some consultation with the Minnesota School Safety Center with colleagues out in Colorado who are working on this sort of practice.

And we also spent some time with the United States Secret Service on their threat assessment protocols to get as much input and feedback as possible in this.

So there are examples of that, but one of the things that we noticed in the course of our research was the terminology around threat assessment was often confusing to school leaders and administrators, and perhaps in some ways was distracting them from the broader purpose of the endeavor.

That is to say that in Minnesota schools, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, that even the terminology of threat assessment was almost like a veiled attempt at sort of profiling and surveilling black and brown children.

There was a real skepticism about the role of law enforcement in our schools and whether or not we should be collaborating at all with police in our buildings.

So what we want to try and do is soften that a little bit, pivot a little bit and rethink that threat assessment model, which is why we're talking about crisis response teams.

This is not just about responding to a threat, determining whether or not it's credible and then moving on.

Instead it's about building holistic, compassionate, and appropriate supports and services that are ongoing.

So what we're gonna do is investigate threats, but also support the students who are demonstrating that they are in a crisis.

The idea here is not to label children and not to process them through the criminal justice system, but it is instead to get them connected to any and all types of resources that they need.

It's recognizing that a crisis is a market change in baseline behavior.

It's gonna look different for every student.

If you've got a a student that's always angry and then they're angry, well, that's not a change in baseline behavior, but if you've got a student that's always angry and then all of a sudden is really happy, that is, and that might just be an opportunity to check in and see what's going on, and what's changed in their lives.

Not because they might be the next school shooter, but because you might be also preventing challenges that are going on in that student's life at home, at school or in the community.

The key thing here is to emphasize that if you are being processed by the crisis response team, it's not because you are a troublemaker and that you're going to be punished, it's because we concerned about your overall wellbeing and we want to help.

And that's really the key thing here is to think about that suicide prevention piece we talked about earlier, which is how do we change the narrative that this is around providing support and not punishment, or even if you do have to punish a student, how can we do it in a way that is restorative and can reintegrate them back into the school society?

So for instance, you're gonna suspend or exclude a student, okay, that's fine.

But if they've made a threat, that's had to close down the school.

How about you sit that student down with a chief of police, a griever mother who's lost a loved one to gun violence and initiate a conversation about why what it is they did has impacted so many people's lives.

That is an example of a way in which you could change that conversation and have a bigger impact than just simply excluding someone from school and punishing them for wasting everybody's time.

So this is a step-by-step process.

And the first step is getting ready.

Jill.

- Yes.

And I'm not gonna sort of walk through all of this.

So like James says, this is all available on our website, and this is all very consistent with other models of threat assessment that you may be using in your schools, but just some things to touch on that promoting a safe school climate.

I've been seeing some of the questions roll in, and the fact that students aren't reporting is kind of the biggest problem with these teams in our threat assessment models, right?

Like your team can only respond to things that they are aware of.

And so how do you build that culture of trust between students and administration, students and teachers?

How do you make sure that every kid in the building has at least one person that they feel comfortable talking to?

And that, I mean, that's sort of a bigger, broader picture, but that's the foundation for a lot of this work is those strong trusting relationships in the building and that culture of safety and trust.

I think I've seen some communication in the last 24 hours that things like if anyone is involved with this, they'll be around and criminal charges that doesn't encourage students to report.

Right?

So students need to know that if they're reporting, they're not landing somebody in jail, they're getting sort of the right response that they want from that report.

You wanna establish those crisis response teams in your schools, identify what resources you have.

So this could be in a dream world of school-based mental health that you could say, "This person needs resources right here in this building right now."

If you don't have that, building those relationships in the community with service providers, understanding who's open to crisis appointments who takes sliding scales, how the referral process should go in building those relationships ahead of time, defining what behaviors need reporting.

This is gonna be a little different for every school, depending on the size of your school, depending on the challenges that you face.

So what is it that the team wants to know about and address creating whatever centralized reporting mechanism that you're using, determining the criteria for different intervention, making sure everybody in the building is trained on how to use this, especially the students, and then planning your communication strategies ahead of time.

So the email is already drafted to parents before something comes in.

Our materials about kind of the four Ds of behavior that you might wanna keep an eye up for.

And this is based on our research into the crisis signs that perpetrators were showing in the weeks leading up to a shooting.

So disruptive behaviors, dysregulated behaviors, distressed behaviors, dangerous behaviors.

And again, this is all change from baseline, but in order to know that someone has changed from baseline, you have to know their baseline, right?

And so I think one challenge is kids have been outta school for the last few year and we've lost a sense of their baseline, right?

And so a lot of times the people who know those baselines and how students are behaving and when something's off are the teachers and we know teachers are overwhelmed.

We know they have not enough resources.

We know that there's so much on their plates.

So also keeping sort of an eye open for this stuff and knowing how to report it and knowing how to intervene.

That's adding things to plate.

So how do we give teachers those resources that they need to do this?

There are some bigger centralized statewide reporting mechanisms that can be incredibly useful.

So this is the one that's been established by the Minnesota BCA.

The tips come in, they can come in anonymous.

They are really focused only on threats.

So not those 4 D behaviors I just talked about, threats only, this needs more resources.

It is only as good as it is resourced.

Right now, it doesn't have the personnel to respond to all the threats.

Right now, threats are only going back to the local police department if they think it's serious, it's not looping all the way back to the school, which you really want this to be looping back to the school.

So even if the police determine it's not credible, the school can still follow up and figure out what happened.

But this is a resource there.

We are working on lobbying the legislature to actually put the versus behind it that it needs.

This is a better program that Colorado has called Safe2Tell.

It's an anonymous reporting system.

So students, parents, teacher, staff can submit tips.

It goes to two centers that are staffed 24/7 that search through the tips that gather additional information.

And then they do loop all the way back to the school when tips come in so that the school can respond appropriately.

And this is an absolutely incredible system.

This is Sandy Hook Promise's Say Something anonymous reporting system.

Tips that come in through this app actually go to a crisis center that is staffed 24/7 by trained crisis responders and mental health professionals.

They respond to each tip within one minute of it coming in.

They engage in a conversation over text with whoever sent it in, make sure that they resolve it in some way.

They bring in law enforcement if needed.

They bring in the school if needed.

It's a really beautiful national model.

This is based in Florida.

They do work with districts across the country.

As far as I know, they're not working with anyone in Minnesota, but this is something else that I think statewide, we need to be thinking about resources to help schools be navigating this.

Crisis intervention is another skill that can be really important when dealing with these cases.

So crisis intervention, I like to talk about it like a kid in crisis is a balloon ready to pop, and all you need to do is let a little bit of air out.

A lot of times when we're responding to threats, we're adding air to the balloon rather than letting some out, so just kind of thinking through that model, that a threat is someone communicating that they are not okay.

And so how do we respond to that?

- So the next stage in the protocol is once you've established this kind of baseline, that the team's in place, there is a clear reporting mechanism, whether it's just a Google Form or a tip jar in the classroom, all the way through to a district's or statewide anonymous reporting system.

And you have really identified what resources are available in a community.

The next thing of course is that the team will eventually have to respond to some case.

So we're just gonna walk through some of the examples here on the respond protocol, if you skip forward.

So the key thing to think about is identifying who on the team and in the school building is gonna be the best person to connect with the student in crisis.

And that might look different depending on who that student is.

And it's recognizing that it might not be the one-size-fits-all approach in so much that you might have a coach, a person in the front office, a teacher or someone else who may well be the best person to get that student talking and get that student connected with who you need.

What's also important is recognizing that building partnerships in advance is really key.

You don't want the first time you pick up the phone and speak to your local police department to be in the event of a crisis or an emergency.

You want to have already made those types of connections with your local police department, so that you on first name terms with the people that you've got to connect with, and that you can get a response quickly.

As much as you can, you've got to conduct additional fact finding interviews and gather records and information.

One of this is really important is about information sharing.

And often people will say things like FERPA or a barrier to this, but actually with a strict reading of FERPA guidelines, and we actually write about this in the online protocol that we talk about, that there are times and places where information can and should be shared.

And we can't let that be a barrier to the types of interventions that are necessary.

And really what it comes down to is about risk management.

This is important for thinking about how do we evaluate a person's crisis in context, what's going on in that young person's life, what's going on in the community at this particular time, what are the broader kind of contextual or individual factors that we have to be thinking about so that we can make a better and informed decision about how to respond, ensuring that the response is a customized or bespoke response for that particular student because it's not gonna look the same for everybody depending on the nature of the crisis and what's going on in that given time and space.

So the third step here is around referrals, choosing the best course of action based on the seriousness of the threat or of the crisis and the student's level of risk and individual needs.

So what I mean by this is to say that you might identify that a student has ready access to a firearm at home, is making a credible threat online, and all the warning signs are that this is an immediate and imminent problem.

Well, that's gonna require law enforcement response right away, but there may be another situation where a student has just posted a vague threat in a classroom, doesn't have access to a firearm, but you're still worried about them.

That doesn't mean you just say, "Well, they're not a threat, and so we move on."

Instead, we've got to still connect with that student and think about how to develop an individualized plan of support.

That's gonna get them the help that they need.

What's the action that needs to be taken.

And then let's check in with that student and check in with their family to see where they're at and how we can go about helping them.

The key thing here is to try to avoid as possible punitive responses, which could exacerbate the crisis and the grievance the student has with the school.

We've seen from past examples of school shootings that we can't suspend and expel our way out of this problem because students can come back to the school and could still perpetrate a shooting.

And this is the piece that often gets missed.

The fourth step is to revisit.

Often what happens is we think that we've mitigated the threat, we've addressed it.

And then we say, and so we can move on, but any student who's crying out for help or making a threat, or is in some sort of a crisis is gonna need ongoing support, which is why we think the crisis response team shouldn't just meet when there's a crisis.

It should be a standing meeting.

It should meet every week or every two weeks where people get together and they check in and they say, "How's that student doing now?

What's changed?

How are they getting on?"

So we can continue to revisit and have that dialogue ongoing as opposed to it being a one and done situation where we sort of wash our hands of it and don't move on.

And again, this is not a about tracking and labeling students and putting things in their permanent records that are gonna follow them into perpetuity.

It's using this as a lens to continue to have those conversations so that people don't fall through the cracks.

I saw something in the chat, which is really important, an organization called One Trusted Adult.

That's the key here.

Students need one trusted adult in the building that's gonna be their advocates and is gonna be looking out for them going forward so that we can prevent any sort of relapse on the challenges that they have been going through.

- When we talk to perpetrators of school shootings, one question we always asked was, "Is there anything or anyone that could have stopped you?"

And every time the answer was, yes.

And actually many times the answer was "Probably anyone could have stopped me.

But at that point I had no one," that it's really amazing that when we look at mass shootings, that didn't happen, that were thwarted, where someone came in and they changed their mind.

Often time, it was a human connection.

Somebody connecting with them, someone letting some air out of the balloon, someone getting them through that moment.

These are kids in our schools that we see every day and we can do that for them.

It feels like an impossible problem to stop.

But time and time again, in this research, we saw that what stopped it, sometimes it just wasn't that much, it's less than you think, and so empowering ourselves, empowering teachers and students in how to handle a crisis in how to ask about suicide and to feel confident in those conversations and comfortable with that work and carving out the time and space for it during the day.

That's all things that we can do without needing sort of major acts of Congress.

- Thank you so much.

We really appreciate the information that you've just shared and wow, a lot of questions.

And so I'm gonna try to group them into a couple of areas.

So the first one I think is around these ideas of easing fears and anxieties, and I see people wanting to know things like, they're worried about the fears and anxieties of not only the students and parents, but also the teachers in the building.

One specific question around this, as you talked Jill about leakage is as we think about lockdown drills, and what's some ways that we can, as you know, in Minnesota, we're required by state law to participate in five lockdown drills a year.

So what are ways that we can best practice those without causing more fear and anxiety?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

And there's several concerns around running kids through these lockdown drills.

We know from research that they do cause anxiety, that they increase perceptions that you're not safe at school and that a school shooting may happen.

And there's also this sort of contagion idea that we're kind of normalizing this for kids and making this part of our daily experience.

There are ways that you can do lockdown drills where you're not using live actors.

You're not juggling door knobs.

You're just sort of practicing, locking the room for a variety of reasons and making sure that you're talking through that with kids that you're giving time and space to talk about their feelings and anxiety around that, that you're making sure parents know when it's happening so they can be talking to kids, but also you can run lockdown drills without kids as well.

So you can train the staff and the teachers in the building.

When we've talked to people from sort of the FBI or different people who have been involved in these sorts of shootings, they say a really the best thing if this is gonna happen, is those strong relationships and communication strategies, because you never quite know how it's gonna play out.

So anything we can do to build those relationships, to increase communication, to increase the dialogue with kids when they're not feeling well, or if they're anxious or concerned.

And after today in this TikTok stuff, I think creating this space in schools for kids and teachers and staff to be talking about this and their experience is going through it.

- The next area I wanna get to is unfortunately around social media.

So there's a sort of straightforward question that I think you may have answered about school shootings being preceded by announcements on social media.

And I think the answer to that is yes, but correct me of course, if I'm wrong, but more so folks are wondering about how they, as school leaders can help engage in social media and helping to alleviate the fears as a result of that.

So any thing that you wanna share around social media and what might we be doing to advocate even at a policy level with regards to that?

- Yeah.

So I think the challenge is social media is it's like, the genie can't go back in the bottle to some degree.

So when you have threats that go viral, it then becomes really difficult to try and disentangle the origin of the threat.

And one of the things that we've been talking about in some recent op-ed pieces that we've published around this very issue with the threats is that all policing is local in the United States, and so is all schooling.

And so some schools are not as well resourced in some police departments, not as well resourced, to truly investigate the origin of a social media threat and to understand its context and where it's coming from.

So what ends up happening is that schools feel like they have to respond and do something.

And so the only thing they can do is close the school and sort of have a more of a knee-jerk reaction to these types of things.

I think there is definitely questions around liability for the economic costs and the social and emotional costs of school closures and these viral threats, particularly on the shoulders of the social media companies.

On a local level, the key thing is this, the best people understanding social media are young people.

They're the ones that use it.

They're the ones that know the language.

They also the best at decoding the connection between emojis and gifts and everything else and how they speak to one another much better than the adults are.

So to some degree, as was mentioned before, empowering young people, if you see something, say something, is the kind of buzzword here.

Students at schools need to feel comfortable to report if they are concerned, and there is this sort of thing, the CIA gut operative sort of memo here, which is, if something feels wrong, it is wrong.

Trust your gut on this.

Students need to really be empowered that if they feel like something's wrong, and they're seeing something on social media, that's not driving with them, they've got to report that to a trusted adult and it has to be treated seriously.

So a lot of it comes down on the level of how do we get kids on board with this?

They are the most important component to this because they're the one on who are engaging with this content.

And they're the ones that understand it better than the adults do.

- Yeah, just building on James point, we recently conducted a study where we surveyed 230 different school resource officers and other police officials involved in evaluating threats and across array of different hypothetical threat scenarios.

The social media threats were assessed as a lower severity than other modes of threats.

So that's an element where the adults that are making decisions need additional training and need additional awareness of how to understand social media.

Prior to Oxford, there were students who stayed at home that day because of the threats that they saw.

School officials didn't weigh that with the same severity.

That's not blaming anyone.

It's just a soft spot where there needs to be additional education and additional experience.

- You can see all of this information for yourself and download the most recent findings at no cost by visiting theviolencproject.org.

I'm Eric Olson, KSMQ Public Television.

Thank you for watching.

(indistinct students chattering, footsteps) (soft music)