Schools, police pilot new crisis team

Longmont police and the St. Vrain Valley School District this month started a dedicated coresponse mental health team to help students in crisis.

Longmont police created the Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program in 2018 to help address the area’s growing need for mental health resources. The co-response team, made of mental health professionals and police officers, responds to calls that involve behavioral health concerns, including calls at schools.

Sgt. John Garcia, who leads the Longmont police School Resource Officer program, said the goal of the pilot is to see if there’s enough need to justify a dedicated team to respond to school calls. He said the program now averages about 75 responses to schools each year, but receives more calls that a team can’t get to because it’s out on other calls in the community.

The Crisis Outreach Response teams include a police officer, a mental health clinician and a paramedic.

For the St. Vrain pilot, there’s a team of a school resource officer paired with a clinician. The resource officers receive extra training in trauma response and child and adolescent development, while clinician Maeve Widmann is a licensed professional counselor who has worked in the program for five years.

“We respond to those higher level issues, when the school has exhausted all their resources,” Garcia said. “If a student has thoughts of harming themselves or others, we call for CORE right away.”

He said the goal is to help the kids get regulated and keep them in school, if possible. A clinician, he said, can provide an immediate assessment to help make that determination and provide resources to families. For the resource officer, the goal is to build a relationship with the student and the family, he said.

“The team is able to do a lot of follow up with the families to help them long term to address the root of the issues of what’s going on,” he said. “We want to get upstream a little bit with students dealing with significant ongoing issues, before this develops into a more major issue later in life for them.”