School District Safety Assessment Processes
By Shawn Bubb, Director of Insurance Services
The MSGIA has extended its contractual relationship with Secure Educational Consultants (SEC) for another two years, which builds on previous years’ work with the company’s founder, Jason Russell. SEC has partnered with thousands of leaders across the country to share comprehensive and executable safety and security strategies developed by their team of highly trained and experienced security experts. Jason has spoken at jointly-sponsored MSGIA and MTSBA events both in person and virtual via zoom over the past several years for our Montana members. This year MSGIA is sponsoring two in-person events for Montana with SEC. The first event will bring Jason Russell to Missoula on October 20 as the keynote speaker for the Montana Conference on Educational Leadership (MCEL). Jason was one of the first individuals to reach out and support the school district in Michigan when the tragic Oxford High School shooting occurred.
In addition to learning essential strategies and considerations, MCEL participants will learn the critical elements of crisis response planning needed for all school districts. As importantly, Jason will share strategies designed to help Montana Schools put processes into place to help prevent and avoid a tragic event like Oxford from occurring in our State.
The MSGIA will be bringing Jason back to Helena on December 6th as the keynote speaker for the MTSBA Safety and Innovation Symposium to be held at the MTSBA/MSGIA office building. Jason’s talk will help all attendees learn to harness the power of behavioral threat assessments. These tools help identify and anticipate stages of a potential crisis and, in turn, provide schools with measures to avert an event from occurring. Jason will discuss the need for schools to adopt and implement a comprehensive behavioral threat assessment process, from the threat-assessment tool to identifying the appropriate response to students in crisis. He will walk participants through the identification of school threats, the steps to develop a system to document the support available and accessed by students in crisis, and the range of responses a team should consider when a student is identified. Additionally, Jason will highlight the importance of community partners for mental health services as well as other agencies for overall financial, housing and nutrition support, and he will share accounts of when the behavioral threat assessment process prevented potential tragedies and helped students in crisis receive the support they needed.
Throughout the next 24 months, guided as ever by the goal of creating a perpetually-improving safety and security culture, MSGIA and SEC will partner to strengthen their school-security posture with the goal of serving our members, staff, students, and local communities around our great state of Montana.
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