Trusting your Instincts: How crisis teams can support educators and students
First Presenter's Institution
Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents
First Presenter's Brief Biography
As a career educator, Dr. Wanda Shelton has been a high school social studies teacher, a school counselor, a school activity coordinator, instructional supervisor, and she served ten years as a superintendent of schools in Tennessee. She has served as an adjunct professor at several colleges and universities, most recently a teacher in the doctoral program at Lipscomb University. She was selected as a TEA Distinguished Classroom Teacher while in the classroom, and as Tennessee’s Superintendent of the Year in 2015. In 2016, she transitioned to work with the Tennessee Superintendents of Schools, as their Assistant Executive Director in charge of creating a new professional learning environment for principals and supervisors across the state. She has previously presented at state and national conferences on the topic of school shootings, most recently sharing her research on threat assessment. She communicated directly with an incarcerated school shooter in 2000 and from that work, developed her theory on the need and the implementation strategies for school and system crisis teams. Dr. Shelton believes that educators need to be fully supported by a trained team when they have “a feeling” that a student is a danger to himself or to others.
Document Type
Event
Primary Strand
School Safety
Relevance to Primary Strand
Having worked in a school setting as a teacher, counselor, and administrator, Dr. Shelton understands that non-educators often conduct school safety research. This presentation seeks to align the need for school safety planning with the needs of today's educators. The focus is on school violence prevention and crisis intervention in all public schools across all grade levels. Understand school safety planning categorized by prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The presentation will clearly help attendees "identify sustainable school safety strategies that create safe, stable, and supportive environments for all staff and students, and to "Understand school safety planning categorized by prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery."
Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics
School Safety
Brief Program Description
Most teachers can name one child that they think might be at risk of committing acts of violence in their building. This session outlines how those feelings have been managed by educators in the past, and what programs might be implemented to create immediate support for those students in the future.
Summary
For many years, school and system leaders have tried to create safety plans that help students, teachers, and the community feel safe in school. This presentation will outline how safety plans and emergency MOU's can support safe facilities and community connections, but still leave students and teachers at risk. Teachers often have ‘that feeling’ about a child at risk but have no idea how to find the correct or necessary support to help the child in the school setting. The attendee will hear about one school’s experiences with a school shooting. The presentation will outline work that was done with an incarcerated school shooter, his teachers, and his friends after the death of a fellow student. The presentation will also review research that led to the security hardening strategies used by schools. Attendees will be presented with a clearly outlined model of crisis intervention grounded in research and created to recognize the personal responsibility of every child and every adult in a school to help prevent violence. Attendees will learn how to create, implement, train, and manage crisis intervention teams. Time will be spent in supervised small groups as the roles and responsibilities of the crisis team members are discussed. The session will end with real life examples and scenarios that have been managed using a well-trained crisis team in a school or school system. This event will focus on both the role of the administrator in school violence prevention and the role of the teacher/counselor. The presentation will seek to empower leaders to both plan for success, and to feel confident that their instincts can be trusted and will be supported by a clearly developed and well-implemented crisis team.
Evidence
Usually, school-based crisis interventions focus on improving the well-being of the whole school community after a crisis experience, as opposed to individual-level counseling prior to an event. (Anewalt, 2010). That does extraordinarily little to support a teacher who has ‘that feeling’ either completely from their own intuition or from prior evidence collected over time.
Beginning in 2000, schools and school systems in America received a copy of a manuscript produced by the Department of State that outlined how and why to use the ’threat assessment’ perspective with potential school shooters/school violence. (The final report and findings of the safe school initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attacks in the United States. (2004) United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education. Washington DC.)
Some school systems used this data and began implementation of system and school crisis teams as early as 2005/2006. This presentation is based on the data compiled by one school system employee that suffered through a school shooting in 1998, then collaborated with teachers, students, and staff to determine post-crisis concerns. That research was used that data was then incorporated into the USDOE report to develop the crisis team model in 2006. This model's implementation reduced acts of violence, suspensions for behavioral issues, and bullying over time. Since the presenter no longer works in that system, exact data is no longer available to publish, but over time, the crisis model reduced threat to all schools and reduced teacher referrals for specific student concerns. The program has now been active for almost 17 years, has expanded to a three-tiered model, and has been used to train and support other school systems in the state. Currently, widely accepted data is also being presented across the state and nation on the importance of using crisis teams to support students in schools. (Navigate360/ Safe and Sound Schools/TDOE)
Learning Objective 1
Participants will be able to create a crisis intervention plan to support learning and safe school environments for all students.
Learning Objective 2
Participants will be able to understand how a shooter can become active in rural, suburban, and historically safe schools.
Learning Objective 3
Participants will be able to evaluate security hardening techniques and crisis intervention techniques and to see the value of both in schools.
Recommended Citation
shelton, wanda c., "Trusting your Instincts: How crisis teams can support educators and students" (2023). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 39.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2023/2023/39
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Trusting your Instincts: How crisis teams can support educators and students
For many years, school and system leaders have tried to create safety plans that help students, teachers, and the community feel safe in school. This presentation will outline how safety plans and emergency MOU's can support safe facilities and community connections, but still leave students and teachers at risk. Teachers often have ‘that feeling’ about a child at risk but have no idea how to find the correct or necessary support to help the child in the school setting. The attendee will hear about one school’s experiences with a school shooting. The presentation will outline work that was done with an incarcerated school shooter, his teachers, and his friends after the death of a fellow student. The presentation will also review research that led to the security hardening strategies used by schools. Attendees will be presented with a clearly outlined model of crisis intervention grounded in research and created to recognize the personal responsibility of every child and every adult in a school to help prevent violence. Attendees will learn how to create, implement, train, and manage crisis intervention teams. Time will be spent in supervised small groups as the roles and responsibilities of the crisis team members are discussed. The session will end with real life examples and scenarios that have been managed using a well-trained crisis team in a school or school system. This event will focus on both the role of the administrator in school violence prevention and the role of the teacher/counselor. The presentation will seek to empower leaders to both plan for success, and to feel confident that their instincts can be trusted and will be supported by a clearly developed and well-implemented crisis team.
