In the wake of last week’s mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, KUOW’s All Things Considered asked about efforts to keep Washington state schools safe, including physical safety measures on school campuses, how threats are assessed and prevented, and funding for those efforts. The Washington approach is layered, and there are no simple answers.Jessica Vavrus, the executive director of the Washington Association of Educational Service Districts, said the state has funded three key roles in each of the nine districts.“One is related to behavioral health navigation, so that’s just resource identification and support within communities broadly around safety and behavioral health, mental health services,” she said. “The second is threat assessment, and the third is comprehensive safety. That involves following and maintaining supports around all the requirements related to school safety, navigating that morass of state requirements that schools have from the Legislature to make sure, ultimately, that students are safe but also that school districts are meeting their expectations under the law.”
Vavrus told KUOW Washington reported just over 1,100 threat assessments statewide last year.Jason McPherson, a threat assessment coordinator at Educational Service District 101 in Spokane, said funding is always an issue as is aging infrastructure.“Even if a building’s five years old, the threats that we experienced five years ago are going to be different than what we see today,” McPherson said. “We hope that they continue to receive additional funding in the future to address safety concerns within their buildings.”McPherson said threat assessment coordinators like him wear many hats. Their main goal is to partner with school districts to implement Washington’s chosen threat assessment model, the Salem-Keizer Cascade model. Originally developed in Oregon, that approach involves collaborative, evidence-based threat assessments designed to prevent school violence through early intervention. Washington state adopted it in 2019.The model includes both public school districts and private schools that may want to partner with them, plus community agencies that work with children.“The important part is that they’re trained to look for behaviors that indicate that students are moving along a pathway to violence, towards targeted violence,” McPherson said. “It’s really not that they’re making threats, but their behaviors indicate that they may be moving along a pathway to violence. And the goal is to identify interventions that will help that student remain in the school and be a safe member of the school community.”“We want teachers to feel safe being at school. We want kids to feel safe being at school. We want parents to feel safe sending their kids to school, but how are we going to do that?” he added. “That usually includes both interventions for the student and creating safety plans to ensure that everybody at the school is safe.”
Marissa Rathbone is the assistant executive director of government relations at the Washington Association of School Administrators, which helps school districts implement state policies in their buildings and classrooms. “Our public education system is chronically underfunded for basic education,” she said. “There’s something called a prototypical school funding model. That’s basically a formula that allocates a portion of an FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) based on the number of students in the district. It hasn’t been updated for many, many years. It hasn’t been updated to respond to some of these evolving or changing needs for school safety, whether we’re talking about counselors, psychologists, or other school safety staff.”Rathbone said that chronic underfunding makes it difficult for school districts to meet all of their communities’ needs.“The message I really want to leave you with is that school districts care deeply about ensuring that students have a sense of belonging, that they’re coming to school feeling safe, that staff are doing the same,” she said. “One of the solutions I would propose is that the Legislature fulfills their requirements of basic education by ensuring that they’re funding for the basic education requirements and updating the prototypical school funding model, so the staffing allocations are updated for today’s school district needs and building needs, including to ensure that there are enough staff to ensure the safety of our students.”
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