GREENFIELD — Educators and law enforcement personnel took time to learn threat assessment guidelines on Thursday as part of the annual Safe & Healthy Schools Summit organized by the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office.
This year’s summit, which brought representatives from approximately 40 schools and 18 police departments together at Greenfield Community College, focused on how to assess the severity of different school threats and respond accordingly.
Sharmila Mehta, a clinical psychologist who is involved with the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, led attendees through the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG) and different scenarios in which the guidelines can be used to ensure schools are adequately responding to threats.
“The main challenges of threat assessment are you don’t want to under-respond and you don’t want to over-respond,” Mehta said. “The risks associated with being overly responsive, punitive, really off-track kids from their social-emotional development because they made a threat, but we also don’t want to under-respond and miss when there’s a potential for a serious act of violence.”
Over the years, Mehta said, threat assessment has become more complicated, particularly due to social media and media coverage of school shootings. When every response is documented and broadcast, there can be a lot of pressure from schools and law enforcement to respond when threats are made, but it’s important not to overreact when threats are not substantive. She added that schools also have to be careful not to diminish what could be a real threat of violence.
“It’s a balance,” she said.
Mehta led educators through the CSTAG process and talked them through practice scenarios, where they evaluated situations in which students threatened to beat up a classmate after school or created a “hit list.”
CSTAG was developed by Dr. Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project, in 2001. The guidelines break threats into two categories: transient threats, expressions of temporary anger, frustration or jokes with no sustained intent to harm; and substantive threats, where intent to harm is present or unclear or where a physical/verbal attack is planned.
“The purpose of threat assessment is to prevent violence,” Mehta told attendees.
In a summary of the guidelines, Cornell wrote that in studies of school shootings, students who had attacked had communicated their intent either directly or indirectly in advance.
“Had these threats been reported to authorities and investigated, the shootings might have been prevented,” Cornell wrote.
The CSTAG model asks educators to evaluate threats by interviewing the person who made the threat, the intended victim and any witnesses, and see if it can be resolved.
“That initial interview is always going to be at the start of that threat assessment process,” Mehta told attendees.
In mock scenarios, participants at the Safe & Healthy Schools Summit were able to work out which threats were “transient” and could be more easily resolved. In one example, participants determined a student who had posted online threatening to fight another student after school was just angry and frustrated by a bullying scenario, and an apology and early intervention from staff were able to prevent any fights from occurring.
In another mock scenario, participants responded to a reported threat of a student creating a hit list. Attendees determined that although the student did not actually intend harm, and was just struggling with mental health and family issues, staff intervention was required to ensure that the threat did not become serious.
Mehta continued to walk participants through different scenarios and threat assessments, and showed them the CSTAG process for not just assessing threats, but creating safety plans to respond to them. She said she hopes the training helps educators in the region feel prepared to respond to any situations and threats that may occur in the future.
“My hope is that they leave with the tools. I really think what lets you not overreact or underreact is following an evidence-based system that keeps you on track,” Mehta said. “They now have the tools to maintain the fidelity of the process so they don’t get pulled into an underreaction/overreaction.”
She added that to prevent violence and protect students, more people should be trained on how to recognize threats, assess their severity and respond appropriately.
“We just need more people,” Mehta said. “It can be any of us who can be part of this prevention.”
