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County leads state for school safety planning

SCHOOL SAFETY

At Gov. Greg Abbott’s first meeting on school violence and safety, several local experts had seats at the table. Dr. J. Pete Blair, executive director of the ALERRT (Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training) center at Texas State University, Lt. Jeri Skrocki from the Hays County Sheriff’s Office and Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State, all participated in the first roundtable meeting on Tuesday.

“It was a very productive meeting,” Martinez-Prather said.

Tuesday’s meeting was meant to bring together a variety of stakeholders and start looking at an array of solutions – both shortterm and long-term – to the problem of school violence, she said. Superintendents, school resource officers, behavioral threat assessment experts and others participated in the talks.

“We had a variety of perspectives,” Martinez-Prather said.

The group discussed, as a short term response, “hardening” schools to make them more difficult targets for shooters, Martinez-Prather said. Taking measures like limiting access points and having guards at access points, or installing metal detectors, were discussed as ways to make it more difficult to carry out a school shooting.

However, participants in the talks acknowledged that if someone goes to a campus with the strong intention to do harm, “They’re going to do it,” she said. Hardening campuses could be a way to mitigate the loss of life in the event of a school shooting.

“It’s a hard conversation to have, and there are no perfect answers,” she said.

Overall, one thing that the participants agreed upon was the importance of identifying early warning signs of a potential threat, Martinez-Prather said.

“There was a lot of discussion around behavioral threat assessment teams in schools,” she said, and training education professionals to recognize students in crisis who could be in danger of harming themselves or others and to determine if a student poses a real threat. She noted that in the aftermath of school shootings, it almost always emerges that someone knew that something was going to happen.

“It’s really about training schools to have more situational awareness about these things,” Martinez-Prather said. “... I think the theme here is that if something seems off, even if you’re wrong, act on it.”

She pointed out that behavioral threat assessment teams are not meant to be adversarial or to punish a student who is in a mindset to present a threat. The teams are meant to get that student the help and support needed to get through the crisis. That support could come from behavioral counselors on campus – and more of those counselors are needed, participants in Tuesday’s meeting noted.

“There are many solutions to the problem,” Martinez-Prather said, “and it’s a comprehensive approach we need to be taking.”

Wednesday’s roundtable discussion will include more mental health experts, Martinez-Prather said, and on Thursday the meeting will focus on input from victims, students, parents and community members.

“We have a lot of work to do,” she said.

The Associated Press reported that Wednesday’s meeting would also include delegations from gun control group Texas Gun Sense and the Texas State Rifle Association, which is affiliated with the National Rifle Association. A Texas Gun Sense official has said the group will press for tougher background checks for gun sales and the creation of “red flag” laws that keep guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Abbott, a staunch supporter of gun rights, called for a series of high-level policy meetings after a high school near Houston became the latest to have a mass shooting. Eight students and two teachers were killed last week at Santa Fe High School and more than a dozen wounded.

• This story includes information from an Associated Press report by Jim Vertuno.

Dripping Springs Century-News

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Dripping Springs, Texas 78620

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