Five takeaways from the first meeting

Colorado’s interim school safety committee met for the first time Thursday and heard from experts in public health, law enforcement and other fields. The Denver Post has broken down some of the most important takeaways for those who didn’t have six hours to watch the testimony.

The committee will meet three more times and is authorized to produce up to five bills for the full legislature to consider next year. A previous committee tasked with considering the same issues didn’t offer any solutions after meeting for one year.

It’s difficult to know what works

Though they may seem common, school shootings aren’t a major cause of death for U.S. children. That’s positive, but it also makes shootings extremely difficult to study — it’s hard to build a large enough sample to determine what schools should look for to prevent future killings, and what’s meaningless noise. Studies haven’t been able to show whether most security technology works, or whether lockdown drills actually make kids safer.

Most research has focused on reducing more common problems, such as suicidal thoughts in teens and lower-level aggression, such as bullying. The good news is, mass violence shares many of the same risk factors as suicide and more typical aggressive behavior, said Erica Manoatle, a research analyst at the Colorado Children’s Campaign. So while there isn’t enough research to be sure whether any programs will prevent a mass shooting, there’s reason to believe that improving students’ mental health and relationships with other people could help.

The committee isn’t supposed to be political

Chairwoman Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, an Adams County Democrat, started the first meeting with an assurance that it “isn’t about politicking,” and that farleft or far-right ideas are going to have to wait for some other occasion. Half the committee members are Democrats and half are Republicans. That said, the questions members asked their expert witnesses hinted that they came in with different ideas about what might be important. Vice chair Sen. Rhonda Fields, an Arapahoe County Democrat, asked repeatedly about access to guns, while Rep. Susan Beckman, a Republican also representing Arapahoe County, wanted to know about drug use. It’s difficult to say whether either of those lines of inquiry will result in any legislation, however, because of the wide range of information the committee has to digest.

The committee faces some serious constraints

Colorado is a local control state, which makes it difficult for the state to mandate that school districts take certain actions on security. There are indirect ways of encouraging districts to behave differently, though. For example, the Colorado School Safety Resource Center reported requests for training on assessing threatening behavior went up after the Claire Davis Act passed, allowing families to sue if schools didn’t do enough to prevent violence. The state also has offered grants for security, which some districts have taken advantage of.

State budgets are always tight, however, which makes it difficult to offer too much grant money, and some districts may not have the resources to apply for them. That could make it hard to eliminate the current patchwork of safety practices.

The issue looks different, depending on the school

Suburban areas are more likely to embrace some ideas, such as stationing police officers in schools, than urban communities, where students of color report fear of being profiled and arrested.

Felicidad Fraser, a social worker in an alternative school, said students she works with don’t feel comfortable talking about feelings and concerns with most adults in their school, partially because the adults haven’t listened.

She gave an example of a Colombian-American girl who was told not to take a joke so seriously after her teacher told her to go back to Mexico.

“Do you think that kid is going to report anything again?” Fraser asked the committee. “Before kids will tell you anything, they have to trust you. And they don’t trust most of us.”

Those on the ground say they need more help

Kayla Steele, a teacher in the Thompson School District, said the professional development she received hasn’t been particularly helpful. The trainer laid out the scenario of an hours-long lockdown and told them to buy snacks for students and buckets to use as toilets, she said.

“Then they said, ‘Have a great school year,’ and that was that,” she said.

Jennifer Martinez, a first-grade teacher in Colorado Springs, said schools don’t have the number of people needed to deal with sometimes extreme behaviors in young children. In a recent year, nearly every student in her class of 30 had a history of trauma, she said, and this year one student was physically and sexually aggressive toward others.

“The availability of support has to increase,” she said.

Fraser, the school social worker, said she and one other social worker try to meet the emotional needs of all students in the alternative school where they work, but they can’t spend enough time with each kid.

“We triage, triage, triage, triage all day long,” she said.