The team would include a counselor or vice principal familiar with students and the school culture who could gather information, a trained mental health professional and someone with a background in law enforcement, such as a school resource officer. To help the threat assessment team, each school would maintain records about earlier threats and crimes. The team also would receive training on threat assessment, suicide prevention and student confidentiality. The commission recommended a state task force to develop a threat assessment model. Everybody is sensitive to threats right now.
Threat assessment is a real question.
While every threat is taken seriously, he said guidelines on how to better determine which threats are legitimate would be useful. He said school staff, including principals, counselors and school resource officers, work together to evaluate threats, even though they aren't part of a formal team. The commission didn't recommend security cameras, metal detectors and other hardware as effective in deterring violence. Instead, the emphasis was on making sure threats are reported and taken seriously. Sleeper said chipping away at the code of silence among students is a priority for schools.