NORTH CAROLINA, USA — The “North Carolina Task Force for Safer Schools” is working on ways to protect students, teachers and staff on campus.
The task force was established 10 years ago and is made up of several groups including educators, law enforcement, and mental health professionals.
The goal is to give children an environment where they can learn and feel safe in their classrooms.
The task force met Thursday and is looking at several initiatives from a major campaign pushing firearm storage safety to reduce children’s access to guns to recommending threat assessment teams in every school to identify troubled kids before they endanger themselves or others.
"You can see so far this fiscal year there have been 1,145 school threats made on school campuses,” said William Lassiter, task force chair and NCDPS deputy secretary for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation’s threat assessment unit reported over 1,100 school threats on campus where police action was taken. Pre-pandemic numbers range around 840 campus threats.
“That includes anything from small threats from like I’m going to beat you up and to major threats like of mass violence on a school campus,” Lassiter said.
The task force is working to add threat assessment teams in all public schools -- people who would help identify risk factors and warning signs of children in crisis.
“Suicidality is a risk factor that we see in a lot of these cases, alcohol and drug use, financial issues, school challenges,” Earl Sam with the North Carolina SBI said. “These are all challenges that our subjects of concern that when we uncover that they are dealing with those issues that help to guide our management and mitigation to alleviate those issues they are dealing with.”
Meanwhile, over 10,000 tips came in through the “say something” anonymous reporting system from August 2022 through June 2023. Bullying was the top problem and multidisciplinary teams are being developed to address these issues.
“Looking at the bullying from the perspective of the child that's being bullied, the child that's bullied, the parent of the child that's being bullied, and the perspective of the parent of the child that is doing the bullying,” Karen Fairley, NCDPI Center for Safer Schools executive director, said. “We definitely want to be able to be that resource that the center is and provide some if you will steps or best practices and how to handle children who are the bully or being bullied.”
Task force members also talked about the importance of connecting children with positive role models to keep them on the right path.
“We learn oftentimes there is a person that is a positive role in this student’s life, but they don’t know it," Sam said. "They don’t know they’ve made a positive impact. But if we can communicate that to them and they can engage more them for more support, then that's even better."
The task force is also working on a curriculum to make better use of school resources officers putting them in more of a mentorship role, so students view them as trusted adults they can come to if they have any issues.
Contact Jesse Pierre at jpierrepet@wcnc.com or follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.