Less than 30% of school districts in Arkansas have behavioral threat assessment teams in place and that number needs to increase, the chair of the Arkansas School Safety Commission said Tuesday.
"We have very few behavioral threat assessment teams," said Dr. Cheryl May, commission chair and director of the Criminal Justice Institute. "The last time we checked it was less than 28%, or about a fourth of the schools."
Behavioral threat assessments are designed to assess and to manage potential threats using methods employed by the U.S. Secret Service in its efforts to protect the president and to prevent terrorist attacks. Security officials say such assessments are key in preventing potential school shootings.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson reinstated the Arkansas School Safety Commission on June 10 in the aftermath of several mass shootings across the nation, including the May 24 school shooting that left 19 children and two adults dead in Uvalde, Texas.
The state's original school safety commission created in March 2018 submitted 30 recommendations in its original 124-page report, and school districts have implemented some of those recommendations.
Under the governor's executive order, the current commission is charged with reviewing the commission's final report published in Nov. 2018 and providing an update on the current status of school safety across the state.
The 2018 report stated that assessment teams should consist of a school administrator, a respected member of the faculty or administration, a school resource officer or other law enforcement assigned to the school, a mental health professional, a school counselor, coach or teacher, and an ad hoc member who is familiar with the student.
May said Tuesday that resources for threat assessments are available to schools, but the school safety commission can only make a recommendation that schools have a threat assessment team since the committee doesn't have enforcement power.
"I have no idea why the number [of threat assessment teams] is so low," May said Tuesday.
Cynthia Marble, a senior training director for the protective intelligence agency Ontic and a former Secret Service agent, spoke with the commission Tuesday about how to create a behavioral threat assessment team, the role such a team should play, and how to use the assessments to prevent violence from occurring within a school.
"The information we gather is so that we can protect," said Marble, noting that she used the method to protect presidents and while working on counter terrorism cases as a member of the National Security Council. "That is the basis of what threat assessment is ... not waiting for the obvious threat or waiting for a weapon to enter the school. We can act way before that. Think of it as protective intelligence."
Behavioral threat assessment teams should identify the concern, gather information and make assessments based on previous actions of previous school shooters, she said.
"Are we seeing the same pre-attack behaviors that have come to our attention in the past. Or are we seeing behaviors of someone going through a crisis," Marble said.
Marble said most schools already have the groundwork of a behavioral threat assessment team in the works because it's about connecting with students, asking questions and looking at things with a school mental health provider. The problem is most of that information comes from independent groups, which means information can get isolated from others.
"We want them to work as a team," Marble said. "When you start doing a threat assessment investigation, it's all about bringing different pieces of the puzzle other people have and bringing it together."
John Allison, a teacher at Vilonia High School, brought up the issue of how do schools deal with privacy concerns when it comes to behavioral threat assessment teams.
Marble said a common misconception among schools is that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act prevent teachers from sharing information about students.
"Oftentimes we get cases where a student has written something concerning, but the teacher is afraid to bring it up because it might violate privacy laws," Marble said. "First of all, don't fear FERPA, because you won't get sued. There has never been any type of actions towards any school. The most that might happen is that you get re-education on what FERPA is.
"That is why it's important to train not only our teams but our entire staff that if they see something concerning, it doesn't violate privacy to bring it up. If you can articulate a safety or security concern, you aren't going to get in trouble.
"I would rather get my wrist slapped by FERPA than take that chance of not providing that information to the behavioral threat assessment team."
One of the most important parts of fact-gathering is to make sure information comes from different sources, Marble said. This might mean having an outside mental health provider on the team, an information technology person familiar with social media, or including the elementary art teacher who knows all the students who have passed through her class.
"One of the things we have seen go wrong is that information comes to us from one person and they make the determination about it without doing any of the leg work," she said. "What we do in threat assessment is the 'why' behind the behavior."
An anonymous reporting system is also key to any behavioral assessment team.
"There has to be a flow of information," Marble said. "Students are the best source of information. They see what is going on with their fellow students, but a lot of them in their 13-, 14-, or 15-year-old minds don't want to tell anyone because in their minds they are tattling or they don't want to see anyone get in trouble."
The message that schools and the commission must communicate to parents and students is that behavioral threat assessments are not an adversarial process, Marble said.
"It's not meant to get people in trouble or get people arrested, and it's not meant to have a law enforcement action attached to it," she said. "It's meant to intervene and help."
Marble said in her 13 years of working for the White House, she rarely found a case that required her to act as a law enforcement officer.
"What I did mostly was take people to the hospital to get the mental health help they needed," she said. "That really is the crux of what threat assessment is about -- intervention and helping people."
Marble said a behavioral threat assessment team can't control everything, which is why protective measures also must be put in place.
"When a student is at that point ... they are at a point of desperation and despair," she said. "They don't think there is another way out. A lot of these are suicides with collateral damage. They don't want to feel the pain any more, and they want others to feel the pain they were feeling.
"We can't control everything, but we can manage a situation by helping a student first and then putting those physical protective measures in place."