Psychologist led field of assessing school violence
Retiring after 29 years in SCS
Five years after two students opened fire on their classmates in Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas, and four years after the horrific assault on Columbine High School in Colorado, Dr. Ken Strong was leading the startup threat assessment team in Memphis City Schools.
The idea was to delve into the mind of every student who brought a weapon to school, threatened to shoot a teacher or made a list of students they intended to hurt. School districts across the nation were doing the same as they tried to assess what kinds of behavior — and intent — posed real threats to schools.
On Tuesday, Strong, 66, will retire after 29 years in Shelby County Schools’ mental health department — 12 of them as supervising psychologist of the four-person team that has been called 250-300 times a year to assess threats and the children who made them.
He’s tired, both by the trauma of what he has seen and the enormous tide of suffering, mental and otherwise, he fears schools can never adequately address.
“It’s hard to get the (school) system to pay attention. It’s hard not to be marginalized. It’s hard when all the focus is on academic achievement. People are only now beginning to recognize the elephant in the room is
that you can’t teach anybody who is so preoccupied with their own safety and that of others,” Strong said.
While he understands the pressure schools are under, his message is that it can’t be done.
“It’s not possible. It’s ludicrous,” he said.
He’s also concerned that young people with serious problems are being put together in alternative schools and expected somehow, he said, to “reinforce anything but negative behavior.
“It flies in the face of everything we know about adolescent or, for that matter, human behavior in general,” said Strong, who is returning to his private psychology practice and will be consulting with other school districts and agencies on threat assessment. “That’s a different conversation, but it needs to be had.”
Strong founded the district’s risk assessment team and gave it national renown. He was one of 12 experts, including members of the FBI and Secret Service, who in 2012 revised guidelines for how school officials evaluate people whose behavior suggests they are capable of serious harm.
The former MCS — and now SCS — is one of a handful of districts in the nation that gets state funding to offer a stand-alone mental health clinic.
“Memphis City Schools was the first recipient of the joint award given by the National Association of School Psychologists and the division of school psychologists in the American Psychological Association (in 1989),” said Dr. Tom Fagan, professor of psychology at the University of Memphis.
Over the years, he has placed dozens of graduate students under Strong’s supervision so they could watch how he managed crisis. “I will miss his contribution. Ken is very practical and very thorough in his understanding of crisis situations. He can talk to students, parents and teachers and understand their point of view in very difficult situations.”
SCS is one of a few school districts with experts assigned specifically to threat assessment. Strong’s been the go-to guy in Tennessee for school districts wanting to learn more about the work.
His work in Shelby County Schools put him in touch with violence in children as young as 5 or 6 years old.
“The first thing we do is make some determination about whether the situation really constitutes what is considered a substantive threat — some evidence that the student intends harm beyond the incident in question,” Strong said.
He’s deeply concerned that with the merger of the city and county system, referrals for risk assessment dropped “dramatically,” a low of 79 last year, largely because of changes in disciplinary procedures and related policies that resulted in some students being assigned to alternative schools without having been assessed.
Revisions to school board policies that Strong says should resolve most of those problems were approved on first reading last week. Strong has been pushing for the changes for more than two years.
“Now, it depends on an alternative school to say, ‘Whoa, we can’t place this student until you are seen by the threat assessment team.’ That has been such a change, such a dramatic change. It’s been difficult to make it work consistently, so a lot of kids have slipped through the cracks, which makes me not sleep nights,” he said.