Schools Deploy Programs to Track Potentially Violent Students

Sixteen months after the Columbine High School shootings, districts across the nation are quietly implementing a variety of “early warning systems” to identify students bent on violence.

Some programs are modeled on law enforcement methods used to track dangerous criminals and analyze workplace dangers. Others are in-depth psychological surveys developed by school districts.

Critics say violence prevention programs are ineffective and run the risk of unfairly stigmatizing children. But many educators say they feel a duty to prevent tragedies like Columbine on their campuses.

Generally, the intervention programs kick in after a violent incident or a threat is reported on campus. A team of teachers, administrators and mental health experts then asks the students involved a list of carefully crafted questions: Do you have access to a gun at home? Are you depressed? Have you abused a dog or a cat?

After school officials have the answers, they have a number of alternatives. They can provide counseling and mental health services--before the issue escalates into a threat or violent outburst. Intervention techniques include in-school counseling and after-school mental health treatment, and social skills courses in which students learn to take responsibility, cooperate with others and control their anger. If necessary, officials can transfer the student to another school or ask the police for help.

“We have an obligation to assess all threats and determine how viable they are,” said Bert Rakowitz, in charge of psychological services for the Dallas Independent School District, which implemented a threat management program two years ago. “It’s hard to tell if it has made a difference; you can’t very well run a control group in these cases. But we’d be glad to share our instrument with anybody who wants it.”

Many experts in juvenile homicide contend that these programs are an extreme reaction to the April 20, 1999, Columbine shootings, in which two seniors killed 12 classmates and one teacher. After all, they argue, of the nation’s 50 million students, only about a dozen a year are killed at school.

“They’re bogus, a complete waste of money,” said Lawrence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. “The only people who will profit from them are the people peddling the threat assessment programs. They’re capitalizing on extremely rare national tragedies.”

Trying New Tools

Nonetheless, districts in numerous states are trying new tools to single out, treat and track students with behavioral problems.

The Dallas school district’s program uses special work sheets designed to help a principal decide whether to call police or a student’s parents.

Atlanta psychotherapist Joyce Divinyi has been training educators to use her method for identifying emotionally volatile and potentially dangerous students. She said her copyrighted theory, called the E-T-A method, explains that these students behave “purely on emotion (E), bypass the thinking (T) process and act (A) without awareness of the ultimate consequences.”

In Cincinnati, a violence prevention program developed by Keith King, assistant professor of health promotion at the University of Ohio, earlier this year asked 320 fourth-graders at a public school whether they had ever taken a weapon to school, tried alcohol or drugs, been in any fights over the past year or were failing two or more subjects.

The survey, which was conducted with parental consent, was ostensibly used to match troubled students with adult mentors. It turned up “a sizable percentage of kids who’d considered suicide, had as many as six fights in the previous two months, who’d carried weapons to school and sniffed paint and glue,” King said.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, 20 districts have adopted a threat assessment system that is a modified version of one developed by the Los Angeles Police Department for the workplace, and 10 area schools are testing a computer program created by Gavin de Becker, who has developed similar programs used by the U.S. Marshals Service and the CIA.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has consulted with the LAPD’s threat assessment expert on how to help troubled students, but has not formally adopted the system. For the time being, the district plans to begin a broader-based program to identify children with a range of emotional and behavioral problems that interfere with learning, including a propensity for violence.

All of the threat assessment programs are based on the premise that a child who turns violent doesn’t just “snap.” He or she gives incremental signs of trouble that can be identified and remedied.

Irene Lavinia, a second-grade teacher in Boyle Heights, expressed misgivings about the threat assessment programs.

“Why are we going to people who deal with the dark side of life to enlighten our children? Why not provide kids with more wholesome after-school programs instead of analyzing their tics?

“Instead of spending this money on behavior intervention,” she said, “it should go to truancy programs, family assistance, housing, nutrition, recreation.”

For the time being, most of the attention is being focused on identifying and treating students deemed potential threats to classmates.

The LAPD program is the brainchild of veteran law enforcement psychologist Kris Mohandie and Det. Greg Boles, head of the department’s threat management unit. They charge schools $225 for each three-person team that attends their training seminars, officials said.

Their program teaches educators how to assess the risk factors and “stability factors” in a potentially violent student, then to categorize the severity of the threat posed to others and develop an appropriate response.

“It’s not like Big Brother watching you with a camera at your back,” Mohandie said. “Yeah, there’s a monitoring process involved. But it also has a built-in system to let schools know when to rescind.”

Similarly, De Becker said, his program, called Mosaic for Assessment of Student Threats, “comes into play when students make a threat to kill someone else or when the school has reason to believe students will act out violently.”

Then a team of school psychologists, teachers, administrators and police officers goes to the Mosaic computer program, which asks a series of questions and analyzes the range of danger factors. It is then up to a school’s response team to develop an appropriate course of action.

The program costs each school about $100 a month to operate, De Becker said.

‘A Cry for Help’

Orange County’s Yorba Linda-Placentia School District turned to De Becker’s program earlier this year when a high school senior handed a letter filled with vague threats against the establishment to another student, who promptly delivered it to the principal.

“Five years ago, that letter wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow,” said Sharon Cordes, director of technology and information services for the Yorba Linda-Placentia district. “Not anymore. We felt we had to know if it was written by someone just blowing off steam to get attention, or worse.”

Ultimately, she said, De Becker’s computer program “indicated it was a low-risk threat. That letter was a cry for help. We provided him with special attention and we relaxed.”

Steinberg insisted such programs are freighted with potential risks for tarnishing students--even destroying their academic ca

reers--by falsely labeling them as violent or troubled when they are not.

A major flaw in these programs, experts say, is that they have a propensity to produce excessive numbers of “false positives,” or cases in which students meet the criteria for violence but turn out not to commit violent acts.

The problem becomes acute when educators try to predict which students are bent on homicide, because such acts of violence are so rare.

During the 1990s, for example, the number of school-age children who were murdered averaged about 2,000 a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those homicides, however, fewer than 0.5% took place in or near a school.