Tools to identify, assess the threat
Kentucky School Advocate
November 2018
By Matt McCarty
Staff writer
Identifying and assessing a school threat is vital to school safety, but how should officials make appropriate decisions about students for whom physical and emotional safety is a concern?
Oldham County Schools’ Jonathan Wosoba, director of student services, and Jill Canuel, mental health consultant, shared their district’s processes and tools for threat assessments during the Safe Schools Coordinators Symposium at Eastern Kentucky University in September.
“It’s a worthwhile piece that I think schools are unfortunately going to have to pay a lot more attention to just because of the times and days that we live in,” Wosoba said. “It's something that's necessary and schools need to be trained on it and know how to do it.”
Wosoba and Canuel detailed Oldham County’s threat assessment referral form which officials use to assess imminent warning signs and early warning signs. They then look at risk factors, precipitating events, stabilizing factors and the answers to 11 questions.
“Those questions are so important to just know and just keep in the back of your head when you’re working with a student who’s making threats,” Canuel said.
When assessing a threat made by a student to either themselves or others, it is important to have two or more people involved. A team approach is helpful because one official might be aware of an issue with the student that another one doesn’t know.
One in five students has some type of mental illness and while that doesn’t mean the student is going to commit violence, there is a need for more mental health consultants in schools, Canuel said.
Wosoba and Canuel, along with officials at the Kentucky Center for School Safety, met with several state legislators in Trigg County this past summer to detail Oldham County’s safe school threat assessment guidelines in hopes that legislators “mandate some sort of process that schools have to follow when they see kids or they suspect kids having some issues with violence or imminent threats in schools,” Wosoba said.
“The whole idea behind safe school assessments is to get out in front of potential situations where students become trapped in their own emotions and their own problems and act on that in a school versus being able to get some help before that,” he said.
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