Ohio Dave Yost Threat assessment School violence | school shooting
It’s not just a guidance counselor thing,” Yost said. “This is multidisciplinary. It requires lots of people, including parents. “This could be of interest to folks at home because this can’t just be a teacher thing. It can’t just be a cop thing. One of the steps is to identify warning behaviors, concerning behaviors that can be — are not necessarily but can be — red flags for a young person who might be in trouble.”
It could be as simple as a teacher asking a student, “Are you okay? What’s going on with you?” Alathari said at Jost’s news conference at the Ohio Statehouse on Wednesday. The goal is to assess and identify kids who might be in distress and get them help, said Lina Alathari of the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center.
Like other states, Ohio has wrestled with how to protect schools against mass shooters, including fortifying schools, arming teachers and hiring police officers to walk the halls. Yost said he doesn’t know how many Ohio school districts currently have threat assessment teams in place.
Police officers and school staff are constantly trying to spot the warning signs before a student hurts themselves or someone else.
A student might start acting differently or grades might suddenly begin to slip. That could be a sign something is going wrong in their life. Experts said the warning signs often are subtle.
“There are warning signs on almost all of these things. Somebody knew that something was wrong.” “There is no profile for a lot of these kinds of things," said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
The Attorney General's office posted a series of Ohio School Threat Assessment Training videos online for police officers, teachers, parents and anyone else who wants to learn how to spot the early signs of trouble.
“We identify the person having trouble," said Stark County Sheriff George Maier. "We look to the student who is struggling, maybe having some personal issues, bullying, all those things.”
The US Secret Service helped with the training by showing how to do a "threat assessment".
"Their records academically have gone down or they may be looking depressed. A teacher is doing a threat assessment by just asking a student, ‘are you okay? What’s going on with you?” “A threat assessment could be as simple as you noticing that a student’s behavior has changed," said Dr. Lina Alathari with the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center.
The point of the videos is to identify students at risk, figure out how much of a risk they may be and then figure out how to intervene.
“Sometimes parents don’t know," Maier said.
Yost said he hoped there would be someone in every school who would know what to look for and have the courage to do something about it.
“Think about what you would feel like the next day if you saw something and you decided, ‘I don’t want to get involved’," Yost said. "Then you pick up the newspaper, you turn on the television and it happened.”
