Onondaga County has teamed up with an Oregon-based consulting firm that will train all school districts to identify and prevent potential threats such as school shootings. Officials say the effort will work in tandem with the school mental health clinics supported by the county.
District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick says without the proper training, it can be challenging for teachers or administrators to know when to intervene. He's part of the county's school safety task force.
“How do you distinguish between a kid who was acting out foolishly at school from a kid who was hell bent on it and is actually serious about doing something that would bring harm to his brothers and sisters at that school?”
Colleen Viggiano is deputy superintendent of OCM-BOCES. She says superintendents want to work with the county, the community, and other partners to get at-risk students the support they need.
“While our districts do have some systems in place for threat assessment, the idea of being able to have a system county wide and this excellent training available to us, I know people are very enthusiastic about," Viggiano said. "My understanding it's teams of school psychologists, social workers, principals, potentially SRO's are involved in this training.”
SRO's are school resource officers. About 300 people are expected to take part in the two-day training in December. Forensic psychologist James Mikesell represents the CNY Psychological Association. He says the nationally-recognized model is easily learned.
"Everybody's learning the same language, but John's model has a lot of protocols and infrastructure that make it easy to take back to each building and have a uniform system in place for what the role and function of each team member is," Mikesell said.
County officials say all districts are interested in the program, which is being offered at no cost to them. The county is picking up the tab.
Consultant John Van Dreal says his model focuses heavily on prevention and intervention strategies. He joined the press conference via zoom.
“The goal of this is to capture these situations early on, before people get hurt, obviously. Also before people make bad decisions that would lead to long term detention or possibly their death," Van Dreal said. "So we care for everyone involved. We don't want people arrested and expelled, we want them turned around.”
Van Dreal says in his decades of experience in the field, a punitive system yields negative results.
