Living Sky School Division superintendent of school operations, curriculum and instruction, reporting at last week's board of education meeting, said the risk assessment training held in the community recently has already paid off.
Recently, said Brian Quinn, there have been two separate incidents in which a knife was present on school grounds.
In one case, the knife never left the backpack/locker, but in the second instance, a child had brought a BB gun to school, and used it, and also had a knife that he "displayed."
No children were at direct risk and there were no injuries, he said, but he wanted to inform the board about it because it speaks to the violence risk assessment training arranged through the HUB by Superintendent of Student Services Nancy Schultz, partnering with Superintendent of Learning Kelvin Colliar of the Light of Christ Catholic School Division.
Seventy people attended the seminar developed by the Canadian Centre for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response.
Quinn said administrators from all the school systems and the representatives of the other service agencies attending came away saying it was "a fantastic inservice." He said it informed them how to separate a "kid being goofy" from one with more potential for violence.
The training indicated how to analyze an event in terms of known risk factors that have a huge statistical database, and to recognize when the information says "better pay attention to this."
The second incident he reported was one of those.
Quinn was impressed by the response to the incident.
Within two days, he said, the agencies needing to be involved were involved, the child had been temporarily removed from school, a safety plan was in place, the parents had been brought into the response and follow up was occurring.
"Before we had the tool of risk assessment we would have reacted differently." he said.
He saw it as a growing capacity to know what to pay attention to, particularly in light of increased school and public violence throughout North America.
"This 'predict and prevent' becomes more and more important," he said.
He said all the division's schools have been trained in level 1 of the violence risk assessment program. It was well received, he added.
"It really answered a need and some questions we were all asking."
There is a plan to go ahead with level 2 training in the coming year.
