- Warning signs are often talked about to prevent school shootings, but experts say that's not enough.
- Schools need to have better protocols to assess and react to possible threats, experts told Insider.
- "You can't just call the parents when there's a threat," one said, referring to the Oxford shooting.
After a gunmen opened fire last week at Oxford High School in Michigan, leaving four students dead and several injured, discussions about how to use "warning signs" to spot potential school shooters got kicked up again.
But experts told Insider the key to preventing shootings is having pre-established protocols for both assessing and responding to potential threats in order to properly address warning signs, which are often too broad.
"There are so many false positives" when using warning signs to profile a potential mass shooter, Joel Dvoskin, a clinical and forensic psychologist who is also a professor at the University of Arizona, told Insider.
At Oxford, prosecutors said the suspect, a 15-year-old student at the school, had exhibited warning signs that were ignored by his parents, who were also charged in relation to the shooting. The suspect had posted online about his gun and produced violent drawings and notes while in class, according to prosecutors.
On the day of the shooting, school officials pulled the boy out of class and called in his parents, but after the meeting sent him back to class without searching him for a weapon or contacting law enforcement, prosecutors said. The school may have been trying to avoid an overreaction since such warning signs often do not translate into action.
But the experts said that's exactly why establishing a protocol to address warning signs is as important, if not more important, than identifying them in the first place.
"What many schools have done now is they provide special training to a small group of administrators or employees and then consult with people who know what they're doing, people who do threat assessment for a living," Dvoskin said. "Some law enforcement organizations are good at this, but not all."
Threat assessment could include warnings signs, but also questions like whether the person involved has easy access to a weapon, whether they can be deescalated without being provoked, and what can be done now to avoid a risk of violence in the future. What the assessment entails will ultimately depend on the specifics of the situation.
Robert Jordan, the cofounder of Protecting Our Students, agreed that knowing how to respond to such signs is key to preventing school shootings.
"You can't just call the parents when there's a threat or when these red flags flare up," he told Insider, referring to Oxford. "I think that the local law enforcement should've been notified as soon as possible."
He said while many schools have implemented active shooter drills to prepare students for how to respond to an active threat, there needs to be much more awareness among school administrations on how they should handle warning signs and assess risk.
"Any time there's any little hint of gun violence" schools should contact authorities, according to Jordan. Ideally, schools should proactively work with their local law enforcement agency to have a go-to point of contact that the school can reach out to, no matter how small a threat may seem.
Jordan's organization works with schools to conduct a risk assessment to determine how vulnerable they are to a school shooting. They have a risk assessment app that schools can use to answer 700 questions related to things like the interior and exterior design of the school, the school's current safety policies, and even the neighborhood surroundings.
Based on the responses, Protecting Our Students identifies the school's deficiencies and helps it make needed changes, something Jordan said may have helped in the case of the Oxford shooting.
"For some reason, they didn't recognize the seriousness of this matter," he said, adding that the warnings prosecutors identified should've been taken up to the next level.
"We can't take anything for granted at schools," he said. "Things need to be in place so this can be prevented in the future."
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