Healthy Schools in a Dangerous World

Jim Larson, Ph.D., Scientific Board Member

Before I begin my remarks, it seems appropriate that we offer a moment of silence in memory of those who were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as well as those many other innocents who over the years have lost their lives to gun violence in the United States.

I want to express my appreciation to Lynn and Michael Aptman and all the wonderful people associated with the Melissa Institute – especially Heather Winters, Elise Suna, and those two recently retired, remarkable workhorses, Trish Ramsay and Frank DeLaurier -- who have all worked so hard to create and maintain this remarkable organization.

For folks like me whose principal contribution to the Melissa Institute is essentially a vacation to Miami every year, I think you’ll agree with me that what the rest of these folks do on an everyday basis is pretty darn impressive.

So, I was asked some months ago to offer a few remarks tonight about preventing violence in our schools. In the interim came the murders in Parkland and that has placed these remarks in a new context.

Like so many of us, I was deeply saddened and immensely angry and frustrated.

I sat down last week and wrote a draft of this talk and I let my lovely wife, Teri, listen to it.

“The event is called Peace and Harmony, honey,” she said. “Not Fire and Brimstone.”

So, I ripped that one up. Felt very good to write it, though.

I’ve been plugging away at the whole problem of making schools safe for over 40 years.

On this issue, I am pretty much an empiricist. My convictions about what is best for the children in our schools are strongly informed by the research literature, and with your indulgence, I will share some that with now.

• In too many schools, violence tends to be treated as an irritating, random feature of academic life… and not the highly predictable feature that it is. Simply trying to stomp out the fires as they occur and hoping to end them with this ad hoc program or that, is destined for failure.
  
  School violence should be treated as a public health emergency and approached from a multi-tiered, risk analysis -- risk reduction perspective. All children are at risk… for becoming either victim or perpetrator… and all children need to be provided the environment and the skills to avoid becoming either.
• Evidence-based classroom curricula in social and emotional learning should be implemented as early as kindergarten and maintained at least through middle school.
  
  Social and emotional learning is linked by the research to not only reduced interpersonal conflict, but also to stronger academic performance.
• Schools should take a whole school, social-ecological approach to bullying prevention that addresses the problem as a systemic issue involving the school, the family, and the larger community.
  
  Simply having a rule and then punishing a few students every now and again is a waste of time.
  
  Bully victimization and perpetration are associated with significant, later-life mental health concerns for both individuals. Bully victimization in high school is also associated with weapon carrying.
• Schools are the largest provider of children’s mental health services… and should be staffed accordingly. Mental health support services – counselors, school psychologists, and social workers – should be staffed at the levels recommended by their professional associations.
  
  The average caseload for counselors and school psychologists in the Miami Dade County Public Schools is nearly twice that, and in some cases, more than four times the recommended level. This is not unusual in schools nationwide.
• There are research-supported, school-based mental health interventions to address childhood and adolescent anger and aggression.
  
  They do no one any good if they sit on the shelf because of over-inflated caseloads and failure to provide the necessary in-service training for mental health staff members.
  
  This is a serious shortcoming in Miami and elsewhere. Taking a public health analogy, this is akin to having the vaccine… but deciding not to hire enough nurses to administer it.
• Schools need to become skilled at differentiating those numerous students who make a threat from those much fewer students who actually pose a threat.
  
  A few years ago, the United States Department of Education and the United States Secret Service collaborated on a systemized procedure for managing threats to safety in schools, entitled appropriately, Threat Assessment.
  
  Personnel in the Miami Dade Public Schools have received training in this model through the Sandy Hook Promise organization. I spoke with 50 Miami Dade school counselors yesterday. As you might imagine, school mental health staff are critical members of any threat assessment process.
  
  When I asked for show of hands of who is a member of their school’s threat assessment team… or even knows about it… not a single hand went up.
  
  Once again, vaccines on the shelf don’t protect anybody.
• Okay, now I’m at my last point. This one is not supported in the research literature, and that is perhaps because of the Dickey Act which prevents the CDC from conducting research on weapons.
  
  So, I will say that the foundation for this last observation is simply the good sense God gave a mule:
  
  Military grade weapons should, under no circumstances, be available to individuals in the general public of any age. All the freedoms guaranteed to Americans have limits. That should be one of them.