From the Field: Building Safer Schools through Prevention, Training, and Community Partnerships

Transcript

Brent Miller: Hi everyone, welcome to today’s panel discussion. My name is Brent Miller. I am the training manager at the National Center for School Safety, or NCSS. We are the STOP School Violence Program’s National Training and Technical Assistance Center. We’re housed at the University of Michigan and we’re, like many of the STOP grantees, funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The National Center for School Safety brings together researchers and practitioners from all across the country to provide expert-led trainings, one-on-one support, and evidence-based resources. Our mission is to help schools and their partners address a broad range of school safety challenges by providing them with tools and strategies to prevent violence and create safe, supportive learning environments. You can learn much more about us at our website, nc2s.org. Today we are so excited to have three STOP School Violence grantees with us to share more about their work and describe some successes that they’ve experienced in doing this work. We also have an internal audience of NCSS staff joining us. Each of our panelists is gonna share about their work for about 15 minutes, or up to 15 minutes, and then at the very end of today we’ll take some questions from the audience. So for each of our panelists, I’ll ask you to please introduce yourself, your work, and describe what’s been successful, however you see fit. Sherri, would you mind kicking things off, introducing yourself, your work, and talking about your successes?

Sherri Cripe: Absolutely. Thank you, Brent, for asking me to join this panel discussion today. And I would also like to thank NCSS for this opportunity and BJA to share about MESA’s STOP School Violence grant. So let me explain to you a little bit about MESA. MESA is a community empowerment violence prevention program that is housed at Purdue University in the College of Agricultural Business and Economics department. So we are 100% grant funded and we are a department of two. But during our STOP School Violence grant, we did have a student assistant that was funded through the grant. But we were awarded the STOP School Violence grant in 2020 during COVID. So that was a very interesting beginning to our grant. So here we were funded to do bullying prevention through our grant initiative with the schools in Indiana closed. So that made for an interesting start and the need for some out-of-box thinking about how can we meet our grant objectives and the goals of getting bullying prevention into the schools with teachers overloaded, administrators stressed out, and our schools closed to professional development and outsiders coming in because they were tracking COVID. So what I did was started with five administrators that I knew that had been colleagues because I’m a retired teacher and retired administrator. After 31 years, I took early retirement and then came to work at Purdue University with MESA. So I reached out to five friends, colleagues that I knew from being an administrator and I said, “Hey, I have this awesome grant opportunity.”

I know that you guys are shut down and you’re tracking, but hey, we can do virtual training. If you’re open to it, I will wear a mask, I will do COVID testing, I will come and do training in-person, whatever you want. And so they signed memorandums of understanding, I got the curriculum to them, and we used Second Step from Committee for Children’s bullying prevention units. And so that’s where we started. And lo and behold, things started to open up just a little bit more as the year progressed. And so I ended up doing in-person trainings with all five of those schools to kick things off. So we started with just the teacher trainings and doing professional development there. And then into the second year, then I was able to come in and do parent workshops as they were opening up for more of that, and then actually come in and talk with the students. So that was how we started. But then I’m like, okay, how do I expand this? Because this is fantastic. I was getting really positive feedback from the five schools. And I also selfishly picked people that I knew and respected because I knew that they would give me honest feedback and I knew that I was going to be able to grow the program if somebody was honest about, hey, this was really great, but you could really tweak this, you could grow in that area.

And that’s what I received from these five administrators. So I changed some of my presentations. And one of them, I think I was on a call actually with NCSS, one of the networking sessions on Wednesdays once a month, and we were talking about how do we engage people, how do we get people to participate? Because we were all struggling. And so I ended up getting the idea from another grantee about doing a newsletter. So that’s what I started doing, reaching out to schools. And I did a monthly newsletter to engage schools, counselors, principals. And I started out with the Committee for Children, like an outline of what that program entailed. And then I started applying to speak at conferences throughout the state, anywhere I could potentially get an audience to start networking. And it started out really slow, and then it grew. And so through the course of our grant, we applied for two no-cost extensions because of the late start with COVID. It did impact, and the fact that we had substitute teacher shortages, we couldn’t get subs into the building. So we had to really rethink our whole professional development. So I started buying donuts and showing up at 7:30 in the morning or 7 o’clock to teacher trainings before school and used the little catchphrase donut bully and did after school trainings and had trail mix and things for them. And so anyway, it grew, and through the engagement that we had every month through bullying prevention, people would be like, I don’t have time right now, or push it on the back burner. And they would get that monthly newsletter that I would focus on a different topic, like perhaps belonging.

How do you create belonging in your classroom? And I always used books so that teachers, knowing teachers need to work smarter, not harder and so then I would include read alouds that they could use to meet their literacy standards, their social-emotional learning that they were doing, and then also integrate how to be a friend, how to explore empathy, all those things that contribute to having a bully-free culture, climate in your building. So we focused on building kindness, belonging, empathy, those things that we know through research that are best practice in creating a bully-free environment. And it just grew. And so by the end of our grant implementation, we had an original goal of providing the Second Step bullying prevention units to 48 schools. We 100% met that goal. Our goal also focused on rural, high-poverty schools across Indiana, some of those desert communities that just aren’t getting the resources. So that was our focus. So we had those 48 schools. But then through speaking engagements, administrators talking about, there’s this fantastic program that MESA is implementing with Purdue University to… And then Purdue did help with their brand, get our foot in the door sometimes as well. So it started growing, and we ended up providing technical assistance to 11 schools outside of the 48.

They would reach out and be like, “Hey, I’m a school here in southern Indiana. We don’t have a bullying reporting form.” I can help you with that. So we provided that technical assistance, language that they needed updated or to address, or maybe they didn’t have anything, like bullying reporting forms. So we worked with 48 schools providing curriculum. We provided technical assistance to 11 schools throughout the state. We had 85 partnerships or engagements each month through disseminating the newsletters. So at the end, when our grant concluded, we had reached 24 counties in Indiana. We had touched 25,928 students, and we trained 1,609 teachers through the grant. So we were pretty proud of the outcome. It started out really slow, but it really did gain momentum in years three and four. Some of the other opportunities that just happened was we were contacted by an organization in Indianapolis that’s called Events by Us, and they conduct a summer camp for at-risk youth. And so we spent three summers with them working with students on cyberbullying, bullying prevention, how do you respond? And we used art as a basis to meet the kids at their level and to learn to express. Not just someone standing up there telling them what to do, but using art to express themselves. And that was highly successful. At the conclusion of our grant, we had to apply for a Grant Award Modification, a GAM, and revise our budget because we had allowed money in our budget for substitute teachers to come in and cover classrooms for schools while teachers were trained.

Well, since that didn’t happen, we needed a new focus for that money that we had set aside. So what we did was we used bibliotherapy, because here we were working with these really low-income rural schools. And as I was working with schools, being in the schools, oftentimes I would do professional development in a library or work with kids in the gymnasium, and I would walk through the library and really see the lack of books for kids and knowing that school counselors just don’t receive a lot of resources. So that’s when I started researching bibliotherapy. And so what we did was… So this could, as part of our sustainability, is provide a bullying prevention library to each of our 48 participating schools. So that when we were done and the grant concluded, they could still use those read-alouds for mini lessons, for teachers to use if they were having a particular issue in their classroom with teasing and bullying. So when we delivered the books, the schools were just… I mean, some of the counselors honestly cried. Like, this is for us? And then another school contacted me and told me that they had read a book during the morning announcements every day. So I thought they were using it in such a creative way that I hadn’t even thought of.

The other thing that came out of this was a partnership with our local Kiwanis group, and Kiwanis is throughout the United States. So our local Kiwanis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we have these comfort dolls that we would like to donate to you.” So when I would visit schools, I would give the counselors two comfort dolls, one they could use, one they could wash. And these are just almost… They’re gender neutral, almost like stuffed dolls. And the kids can write on them with washable markers how they’re feeling, where they may be hurt. If somebody was bullying them, they could put the words that maybe they couldn’t articulate or weren’t able to express. They could put it in a non-threatening way on their doll or circle that their heart was hurting or, in other forms of violence that may occur, that they can use them in that capacity as well. So we were able to pass out 178 comfort dolls through the collaboration with our Kiwanis group there in Lafayette, Indiana.

So the other part that really helped grow this networking was, I said I had applied for opportunities to speak at conferences. MESA spoke at the Indiana Association of School Principals Fall Conference twice about bullying. We also spoke at the Whole Child Summit. We also partnered, the Indiana Department of Education attended one of my presentations at the Whole School Summit, or the Whole Child Summit. So they ended up reaching out to me and said, “Hey, we want to collaborate.” So the Indiana Department of Ed would often refer people to MESA if they were having a child who died by suicide due to bullying or they were contacted that they were having an issue. I would also follow things on the news. If I heard something that had happened, I would reach out to that school corporation and say, “Hey, we’re here for support in any way you need.” So we ended up then, through the Indiana Department of Education, connecting with INSOURCE, which is a group that works with parents of children with special needs. And so I would present…

I presented during the month of October on cyberbullying and bullying prevention to parents. And then it was recorded and on their YouTube channel. And they told me that the MESA bullying prevention webinars were the most watched webinars that they have on their Facebook or website. And so we also presented to Purdue Extension, their professional development conference there in Lafayette, and then the Indiana School Health Network, which we’re actually next week going… I’m going to be doing a keynote that has just continued to grow in STEM for that conference. And then we were at the Indiana Extension Educators Conference for two years in a row presenting. And then I also had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer in a class at Purdue University for four semesters and talking to college students about engaging communities to address bullying. And we had some great conversations about social media and the impact of bullying and just phenomenal. So it was… This opportunity was phenomenal. I grew as a professional, and it grew and touched teachers and students and parents in ways I couldn’t even fathom when I was struggling at the beginning to get even five principals that were my good friends to jump on board with me and just see where we could go with this. So it was a phenomenal experience. And now MESA is the go to for the Indiana Department of Ed. We are in collaboration with the Indiana State Police, and we have become the go to in the state of Indiana thanks to this great opportunity when it comes to violence and bullying prevention.

Brent: Sherri, thank you so much for sharing. You mentioned something early on about attending one of the STOP grantee networking sessions and getting an idea. And I just wanna let you know I think what you’ve shared, I think folks are gonna get lots of ideas for maybe the GAM they’re working on or maybe something else that they might wanna focus on. So just thank you so much for sharing. And like I mentioned, we’ll get to questions at the very end. But yeah, I really appreciate you sharing all that.

Sherri: Thank you. I appreciate you as well.

Brent: All right. Kelvin, we’ve got you up next, so I’ll hand it over to you to take it away.

Kelvin Walston: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Kelvin Walston, the Chief Program Officer for Wholistic Stress Control Institute. On the call with me, I have my executive CEO, Ms. Tarita Johnson. She was the one that wrote the grant. So we’d like to thank NCSS, BJA, Allison, who’s been wonderful as our TA. Such a good comfort and a great person to talk to. So I really enjoyed the camaraderie and the relationship that I’ve established with Allison. We received our first BJA grant in 2022, and we successfully implemented all of our attributes. But before I jump into BJA, allow me to explain a little bit about the history of our organization. Wholistic Stress Control Institute was founded in 1984, incorporated. However, we were founded in 1979, 1980, ’81 due to the Atlanta child missing murders. So our inception and our founder, Ms. Jennie Trotter, founded the organization out of trauma and hurt and pain. And so from 1979, 1980, she began working with Atlanta Public Schools and Fulton County Schools to serve their community and to calm them from the fears of the mass murder. So from 1984, we got incorporated, and from then we have written several grants, state and federal.

So I came on in 2004, Tarita came on in 1996. So we’ve been working in the field of prevention for 41 years. This is our 42nd year coming. And for a community-based organization to survive and thrive for 42 years is remarkable in this climate. So I just wanted to give you a background. So in 2022, we received the first BJA grant and we were very, very successful. We worked with four Atlanta Public Schools. Our mandate was to serve over 450 students. We surpassed that by serving 600 students each year. We served and conducted workshops for over 35 teachers each year. And in the midst of serving the students at each site, one of the most important things that we found out before we started implementation, we meet with the principal and his administrative staff to find out what gaps they have in their schools. And after we meet with the principal, his administrative staff, we meet with the support staff. So we were able to implement our program in the health and PE classes. Our evidence-based curriculum was Positive Action. Positive Action been around since 1980, 1982, ’83. So we use Positive Action as our evidence-based curriculum.

And we also supplanted Positive Action with our own evidence-based curriculum, our stress and anger management. Once we met with the principal and administrative staff, some of the gaps they mentioned was gang prevention, gang violence, intimate partner violence, bullying. But one of the, I guess their most concerning was gang prevention. In Atlanta, in the state of Georgia, there are over 300 gangs, either national established gangs, Crips, Bloods, Gangster Disciples, and then you have loosely affiliated gangs, offshoots, local gangs named after streets and neighborhoods. So roughly about 300 gangs. And those gangs all populate in Atlanta metropolitan area. And so the principals that we work with mention the fear and the concern that they have because community violence oftentimes leads to school violence. And the school violence was, how can I say, perpetrated by social media clashes and social media conflicts. So in our curriculum, we conduct 12 class sessions, intervention sessions, and our intervention sessions last for an hour to an hour and a half, depends on the school and the amount of time they give us. So we work with those students for 12 weeks. And after the 12 weeks, we nominate students to become peer ambassadors. So for our first grant, we have served over 30 peer ambassadors. And those ambassadors are in place in those schools to reinforce the messages and the evidence-based curriculum that they were taught. Also, they conduct community events, they attend festivals, they attend citywide events. And while they attend those events, they distribute information on violence prevention, gang prevention, intimate partner violence.

And our staff works closely with the RSOs at those schools. RSOs are the police officers that are on guard. In our schools, we have metal detectors and we have police officers just to ensure that violence may not erupt. However, violence happens in Atlanta, and the schools call on us to intervene, to work with them. One of our schools, one of our successes, we reached out to Morehouse College, which is a HBCU, and they provided the football team as bodyguards to help with the students getting on the buses after school. So the principal had his staff, he has about nine male staff and the police officers, but he reached out to us to ensure that there was no fights before the students got on the bus. So we partnered with Morehouse College, and they provided about 20 to 30 football players to come and monitor the students when they were leaving school. And that was a success. And from then on, we were able to monitor the bus situation in addition to providing our 12 sessions to the students. So we serve over 600 students. That’s two high schools and one middle school. We attended workshops, we conducted workshops. We were awarded, I can say, partnership of the year in our cluster in 2024, ’23. So we received this grand award from Atlanta Public Schools.

It was a great gala, and they recognized our contributions and the ability to work with the students and the parents. In our grant, we carved out a niche to work with the parents because we believe that working with the parents in the homes also helps the students begin and understand the importance of remaining on the straight and narrow. And so the students have external influences, the music, the peers, potential gangs. And so it’s not an easy task. And so when I meet with Allison, I always tell her one of our successes is to be able to work with the administrative staff and the principals, because without making that connection, we would not be allowed to serve in those schools, because the principal has the final say of what organization can serve in their schools. And so not only are we serving in those schools, we have received recognition and we have conducted workshops nationwide on our violence prevention program. In 2023, we applied and received our second BJA grant. And so we serve four more additional schools in different districts, Clayton County and DeKalb, DeKalb Public Schools. And what we found, with the proximity to Atlanta Public Schools and those other districts, violence and gangs are still prevalent. Therefore, we use Positive Action as our evidence-based program with our Wholistic Stress Control Institute stress and anger management program to implement this in the classes. And we implement during school hours, during the health and PE classes. Therefore, we serve about 650 to 560 students each year on the second grant. So we’ve touched over 3,600 students in the Atlanta metropolitan area in four school districts. And those school districts have allowed us to expand to Savannah and a few more districts where we’ll be working with them this year.

So hopefully we’ll receive funding for the next wave of BJA, because we found that the momentum that we have with the principals and the support staff and the local city officials, they are on board, they support us and they welcome the free services. And one thing that we learned, although we are grant funded, the gaps are kind of important for the schools. They can hear you and listen to you, you can have a great model, but some of their needs must be addressed. And sometimes, as you know, working within the framework of a grant, you can’t reach those needs economically. So therefore, we rely on our community partners to meet some of the needs. And this coalition that we established also helps. So we help with prom, toiletries for prom, we help young men get prom suits, tuxedos, we help young ladies get dresses. So these are the external factors that’s not written in the grant that we are able to find resources through ourselves or our community partners to provide these things. We also provided free haircuts to the young men that were going to the prom. And although we think our classes are vital, which they are, but the principal and the neighborhood recognize simple gestures as haircuts, getting them suits and also providing things for their field day.

They really welcome that. And oftentimes that’s overlooked when we write these grants because sometimes the grants won’t pay for it. So that’s a success story that I tell anyone that’s working with youth, a youth-serving agency. Make sure you connect and understand what those gaps are and try to find those resources that the school needs as well as they welcome you in to provide this free training. We’ve trained over 120 teachers on both grants. We’ve conducted workshops at several schools. We’ve conducted violence prevention panels in our schools. One of our panels’ names was Guns Up, Hands Up, Guns Down. A second panel was Reducing Violence and Crime in the Schools. And we brought in people that were locked up before and that had cleaned themselves up and they spoke to the kids. And we had staff, we had some entertainers to come and speak to the kids. And that provided another umbrella of creativity that the school appreciated and valued. And so Wholistic Stress Control Institute, two BJA grants, has done a wonderful and a magnificent job, not only meeting the school needs, but meeting the needs of the community and the parents. I’m not saying we stopped gang violence, but I can say some of the kids that were affiliated with the gangs, they kind of withdrew from those gangs. We didn’t follow them long-term longitudinally, but while they were at some of our high schools, we were in contact with them because some of them became our peer ambassadors. And a number of them went to college. So of all the kids that we touched, excuse me, about 100 students went on to college, went on to explore on the secondary level of their higher education. And so we really appreciate the work and the opportunity given by BJA and NCSS for us to do this work, because the work is not easy. It’s a tall task. And any day of the week, something may happen. And so crime is all around and we’re doing our best to play our part. My name is Kelvin Walston, I’m the Chief Program Officer for Wholistic Stress Control Institute, and thank you for allowing me to share this with you.

Brent: Thank you, Kelvin, that’s… You covered a lot of ground. And I think something I’m hearing that Sherri also kind of touched on is this importance of partnerships and starting with the right people. And also, it sounds like you and your team really became, your reputation sort of preceded you in how you were able to serve as this connector and also meet some of these other needs that, as you mentioned, aren’t necessarily afforded when you get a grant like this. These grants are pretty specific in terms of what they can and can’t pay for. So it’s really great to hear how you and your team figured that all out to do the work. So thank you for sharing. All right, Joe, I’m gonna hand it over to you. Thank you.

Joe Holifield: Thanks, Brent. Wow, great panel. Great work that’s being done here. I’m like, gosh, now I have to go after all these great programs. [laughter] So thank you, Brent, for the opportunity. And just I really wanna acknowledge just, again, NCSS, Allison Schreiber. She just, she was almost like a therapist to me at times, just helping me out through some of the tough parts and just great advice. And the team at NCSS and then BJA, just for the opportunity, for the money to make it happen. I’m Dr. Joe Holifield. I’m a clinical psychologist, school psychologist. I was trained in behavioral threat assessment right after Columbine, 2000. Worked in the schools as a school psychologist. Had a private practice, still do, as a clinical psychologist now. And recognized just some… Our community needed more of a holistic approach to behavioral threat assessment and management and trying to prevent targeted violence, potentially school mass attacks, and really see if we could measure upstream prevention. So part of what I do now after the grant is I still do some trainings with Public Consulting Group on the Salem-Keizer Cascade model, which we used, and through Safer Schools Together on digital behavioral threat assessment.

And I also teach part-time in the doctoral program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, forensic and clinical programs. So that’s what I’ve been doing since the grant. But I was pretty much contracted. The District Attorney’s Office in San Luis Obispo County in California was the awardee, and I was a sub-awardee along with Tulare County Office of Education and Public Consulting Group, which John Van Dreal, who’s the architect of the Salem-Keizer Cascade model, is a part of. And everybody’s probably wondering, where is San Luis Obispo County? Well, that is exactly on the coast, exactly between LA and San Francisco. So Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is the school there. It’s a mix of ranch land and wine vineyards, a lot of wine tasting there, so just letting you know. And Tulare County is inland, so it’s south of Fresno and north of Bakersfield. So it’s in the San Joaquin Valley, which is a large county, it’s very agricultural. So part of what we looked at is we did the San Luis Obispo School Threat Assessment and Management Project. It was two counties in California, and the goal was to implement the Salem-Keizer Cascade preventative behavioral threat assessment system. And what’s unique about that is that there’s a level one, which is more your school site teams that have your behavioral threat assessment teams, and then there’s a level two, that is more integrative of your community providers, so representatives from school districts, law enforcement, and behavioral health agencies.

So really, it’s that silo integration. Oftentimes we hear like, “Well, information’s siloed.” So the goal is to have a community team to really take a deeper dive into those more concerning students that are showing a pathway towards targeted violence. So what we do is we set up three goals here. And one was a training goal to measure training outcomes, the Salem-Keizer Cascade training that John did and eventually I was trained to do it and a few other people. So we wanna look at training outcomes, increase in knowledge, and then how confident are our professionals after the training to go out and actually do a threat assessment? The second thing we wanted to look at is the implementation of the protocol. So you’re trained in the protocol. How are the districts implementing the protocol? Are they doing it to fidelity as we trained them, or are they starting to kind of go rogue and kind of change the questions and do it their way, right? And then the third thing is, as a mental health provider in the community, oftentimes I would get referrals for kids or adolescents who the schools had recommended parents come in. And I’d go through and they’d talk about what the concerns and diagnoses, and then in the interview, a parent might say, “They’ve been suspended because they’ve made threats to schools.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not on the intake form.” So recognizing that if we’re going to do behavioral threat assessment in the schools or in the community, that there have to be mental health providers who understand what targeted violence is and be willing to accept referrals for intervention and support.

So part of it was to pilot a training for school-based and community-based mental health providers. Because in our community, if a youth is a danger to self or others, there’s not a crisis stabilization unit or an inpatient facility. They’re sent 200 miles away, either to LA or to the Bay Area. So you go for a 72-hour hold, they’re back. And so we need mental health providers in the community to be able to take that role and support youth and work with schools. So what we did is really, it’s looking at the fidelity of a system, right? Ensuring gains in training and knowledge and the protocol’s implemented, measuring the validity of that system once we do it. So the training we do, we train professionals to look at threat assessment, addressing all types of bias, and then in making their decision and then creating a safety management plan. So we look at multidisciplinary teams with school resource officer, school administrator, school psychologist, or a school counselor, mental health professional as a team. So we had one was a training goal. So we trained 328 professionals in our three-year period in both counties. We showed significant gains in knowledge pre-post training as well as confidence to actually implement the protocol. We increased the case presentations to our level two team, our community team as well. So we trained them in more advanced principles of behavioral threat assessment. The goal being is that you just can’t call a company or private professional all the time to come in and take on the case. We have to create our own local expertise. So that was one of the challenges, is like, who do we call? Like you. You’re the expert now. And you start to see this over a three-year period, the same people participating, this increase in confidence and knowledge of behavioral threat assessment.

The second goal was really the implementation goal. So creating a behavioral threat assessment structure, increasing the capacity, and creating a sustainable system over time so that once the grant was done, it just doesn’t end with the funding. And that’s the hard part. It’s like, hey, we’ve got all this money, and then boom, no more money. And like, okay, two years later, hey, what happened to that system? Right? What happened to that process? So with that in mind, the end game really being, can we do this? Now, I was contracted as the sub-awardee with the District Attorney’s Office. So I was the project director. So I’m a private entity. It was kind of interesting when you look at the stakeholder development over time. One was really kind of working with stakeholders, and everybody was interested, but no one wanted to take the lead role on this. So I kept telling people, hey, look, the grant ends in a year. I’m just an individual in a business. It really needs to, either County Behavioral Health, the District Attorney’s Office, or the County Office of Ed needs to do this. Well, that was San Luis Obispo County. Tulare County, their County Office of Ed was the lead. So it was interesting to see how these two counties worked.

So what we did is we developed a memorandum of understanding among all the districts, law enforcement agencies, behavioral health, and had them sign it. Now, that was hard. That was hard. That took about three years, almost at the end of the grant, to get everybody bought in because we had to deal with the district counsels and the county counsel, the lawyers. The biggest concern was getting them to agree to share information, right, even though all of our laws say that we can. Right? So that was a sticking point, but we got it to work. So our preliminary data, which from this grant, I’m working on about four, maybe five publishable studies, one has been tentatively accepted into the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. So we’re looking to get these published. But for both counties, in a three-year period, we triaged 664 threat cases. And then the school districts that have their own level one, out of those, they did 207 threat assessments. And then the level… Out of those 207, 28 level twos were seen by both counties. Meaning that there were some kids that were starting to have fixations, identified with mass attackers, were starting to prepare, gather like getting tactical gear and so forth. So we stopped it and diverted them into intervention.

For the level one threat assessment case outcomes at the school districts, the most frequent reported outcome from the assessment was referral to a mental health therapist or a school-based therapist. Hence why we needed to train the therapist so they can understand. And so behavioral intervention, IEP meeting, all student supports were utilized. When we came to disciplinary practices such as suspension or expulsion, that was way down in terms of being utilized. So really, it’s prevention. We’re starting to see this upstream prevention and diverting youth into support rather than… As opposed to kicking them out of school. Right? Which is in line with the CSTAG and Dewey Cornell’s work as well. Our community cases, our level two cases, again, were more complex, which the goal is to triangulate more like a wraparound support around targeted violence in the community so the experts now also know about their own resources of support. Right? So we had a lot of violent ideation in the cases. We had a high percentage of co-occurring homicidal and suicidal ideation. Again, training the therapist to understand that we’re gonna have to make those referrals.

So really, if you think about it, I think the biggest success is during three years of the grant, of the 664 threats that we responded to, only one student case was forwarded to the district attorney’s office. So it’s really… The student was then released to the parents, there was a court date, and the student was eventually placed on a diversion program with probation, who was also our community partner. So if you look at it, it becomes more of a community-based prevention model for the schools. Everybody’s involved, everybody has shared ownership. The last goal was increased knowledge of mental health providers on the capacity… Or on targeted violence warning behaviors and then really increase that community capacity for mental health providers to accept referrals. So in both counties, we trained 157 school-based and community-based mental health providers. There was a significant increase in understanding warning behaviors associated with targeted violence. There was a significant increase in willingness to collaborate with school-based behavioral threat assessment teams. More importantly, there was a significant increase in providers willing to accept referrals for therapy.

Oftentimes in the trainings I would do, private therapists were like, “Well, I just won’t accept referrals. That’s too much liability.” I’m like, “Well, how do you know you don’t have a student or someone on your case who’s showing the warning behaviors? You just don’t see it.” And then, “Oh, okay.” So it kind of shifted, it changed the dialogue more. And then more importantly, the significance of confidence in therapists willing to provide more case management and support. The last thing of this goal was really knowing that mental health providers have been trained, they’re gonna probably need peer support among their therapist colleagues to reach out and get a consult or triage. And so we created a threat assessment consultation team within our county behavioral health system. So therapists now who are trained to check out, is this a warning behavior or not? Or, this youth or this adolescent said something in therapy and I just don’t know. It sounds like it might be targeted violence, they can refer up to this consultation team and get support. And so we instituted that in May of 2025, about a year ago.

We finished the grant in September of 2025, and during that period of that system implementation, seven therapists referred youth to this consultation team saying, “Hey, I’m concerned. I’m seeing something here.” One of those went to a threat assessment by the school, so they notified the school, the school did a threat assessment. So it’s almost like a reverse process here. So to me, that’s a system success, right? We now are implementing these catchment systems. I think one of the big things, and I know I’m running a little bit on time here, we had some lessons learned here for those who wanna implement not only a school-based threat assessment team, but how do we wrap community support around this? Is really developing that buy-in with stakeholders. Initially, for both counties, people were like, “Oh, we’re just gonna do our own thing.” And we do our infomercials and our presentations and they’re like, “No, we got this.” “Okay, well, you’re welcome to join whenever you want to.” And then guess what? They would have something, a severe or significant case come up and like, “Hey, can you guys come over and help us?” “Well, yeah, but you’re not trained yet.” It’s not that the district attorney or law enforcement wouldn’t help, but then it took, unfortunately, it takes a concerning situation to bring light to this, right?

I think, it’s just about ongoing engagement with stakeholders. I think that’s the key. Creating and maintaining that community team, really identifying your key professionals in your law enforcement agencies, your mental health community, your school districts who need, who wanna be experts, empowering them to be experts. And then really agencies, really having that in-kind donation of staff time. People weren’t paid for this. The grant didn’t pay for them. It was that shared responsibility. Getting those school districts knowing when to refer and encouraging them to refer just if they just had questions about, “Hey, I have a case here or a student, I don’t know.” Hey, this is what the community team’s for. And then really creating a system of documentation, management, follow-up. That was kind of our, who owns the documents, right? We had to work that out. And then really identifying system gaps. Once you start collecting the data and start looking at the data and reviewing it, with each situation we started recognizing like, hey, the schools are doing great at doing behavioral threat assessment management. We would get situations where parents… Schools would offer all this support and parents were like, “No, thank you. We’re going to charter schools.” Or, “We’re gonna homeschool our youth.” So they didn’t want the schools in their business, and so, which was more concerning, especially if we had concerns. So trying to figure out how we track or monitor that, how do we do that as a community, was something we started to figure out. And then really at the end is creating a sustainable program. Eventually, for Tulare County, they were moving towards looking at some different funding sources, but they already had an office that was focused on this with their County Office of Ed. For San Luis Obispo County, it was just me as… Look, I’m a one person with a grant manager. I can’t manage this for the whole county. It was finally the San Luis Obispo County Office of Ed, the superintendent said, “Hey, this is our role.” They offered a part-time administrator and a part-time school psychologist to continue the program into this school year after the grant. So that was positive. So that’s the SLO STAMP project.

Brent: Thank you so much for sharing. I think we’ve got time for a couple of questions, so I’ll hand it over to anyone, really. If there’s a question on your mind to ask the panel, please do.

Cassandra Johnson: Alright, I can get us started.

Brent: Thanks, Cassy.

Cassandra: First of all, thank you all for all the work that you do and congratulations on your successes. It’s some very impressive work. And one theme that I heard through all of your programs was the importance of partnership, right? We’re only so many people, we can only do so much work. And those partnerships, whether it be the NCSS school safety specialists or a local football team or our local agencies and mental health providers, it’s so, so important. And Joe, you started to, you gave us some good insight here, but I’m wondering what advice would you give to someone starting out with a new grant or a new program that really touches on how do you begin to form those partnerships and what are the key points that you would tell them to do?

Joe: That’s a good question. I mean, for me, it’s kind of understanding where I am in the community in terms of kind of like what… You know I… When I started this, I worked with… I had worked in schools as a school psychologist and I’d done threat assessments. So the school counselor or the assistant principal that I’d done that in 2010 or the behavioral health therapist that was on that case, eventually a lot of them had moved up into the system into mid-level management positions. So I kind of used my own relationships with people like, hey, what do you think about this? And, remember those difficult cases we had? And so got buy-in at the mid-level and then worked up to the key decision-makers, their bosses, their administrators like superintendents. A few were assistant superintendents at that point, so they saw the value of trying to… So really for me, it was about working relationships that I already had and a shared common interest.

Brent: Yeah. Kelvin, would you mind answering too? I don’t know if there’s any additional insight you might share.

Kelvin: Yes. Could you repeat the question?

Cassandra: Yes. What advice would you give someone just starting out with a program or a new grant as far as building partnerships and how important those are? Like, how do you begin that? What are the key things you wanna pay attention to at the beginning?

Kelvin: Well, if you are trying to serve within the school system, one of the first things is to introduce yourself and your program to the school principal, his administration staff or her administrative staff, and try to build a rapport with them. Oftentimes, some schools may be reluctant to bring in brand new organizations who they don’t have a history with. And so if they are not gonna allow you to serve, then just tell them you’re willing to volunteer to demonstrate your willingness to work and help within the schools. In the community part, I would say establish partnerships with organizations that have resources, that that particular school site or school sites could use. If they need vouchers for housing, if they need food assistance, or if they need any additional community service that can help the family, then that’s another avenue that you can leverage with the school by demonstrating that in the community, we are assisting and collaborating with other organizations that’s willing to serve and help us meet the needs of your students and their parents. In addition to that, after they conduct your needs, I got to say your… The Needs Program or the research in your area about what is missing and the gaps in your particular locale, then start to build a coalition. Reach out to those organizations and businesses that’s in that ZIP code or nearby that may have affluence or influence that can also serve on your coalition and help your name spread. Those are three key takeaways that I would tell any new organization that received the funding to begin to work on.

Brent: Sherri, anything to add?

Sherri: Yes, thank you. That’s an excellent question. And I would echo what the other two panelists have said, but I would add, and maybe this comes from me being at the heart of everything I do an educator, but I think that you need to increase engagement by making people understand what the need is and your why behind it. And connecting the why behind the need and being a resource, being flexible, being willing to do whatever it takes to support them in your efforts and just continually getting your message out to a network as far as you can spread, casting your net as far wide as you can and just continue to be positive and continue to contact and just share your why.

Brent: Thank you all so much for sharing today.