Monterey County Office of Education STOP School Violence Program

Abstract

Monterey County Office of Education is implementing a multi-disciplinary Monterey County Healthy and Safe Schools and Communities Coalition (MCHSSC). The goals of the coalition are to standardize policies, practices and protocols, as much as possible, to promote synergies with community partners, and develop common language, tools and forms that Monterey County school districts and partner agencies will utilize in order to improve communication and respond mental health and safety needs. The mission of the coalition is to ‘identify and address safety needs of Monterey County youth, to work across agencies to implement best practices in emergency response and mental health. 

The Monterey County Office of Education is applying for the STOP School Violence Program to improve school safety by providing students, teachers, and staff with the tools they need to recognize, respond to quickly, and help prevent acts of violence. We are asking for funds to implement a Master Emergency Operations Plan across all districts so that we can increase standard protocols within and across Districts, law enforcement, mental health providers, and other support partners.  Further, our hope is that we can create data sharing agreements that protect the student’s privacy and give the MCHSSC required data to show gaps and trends in safety that need to be addressed.  To this end, we are asking San Mateo COE to help us train the trainer on the Master Emergency Operations Plan roll out in regards to safety events created by nature or human violence.   We will then roll out detailed Incident Command Systems training to ensure Districts are prepared to operate efficiently during an incident or event.

We are proposing solutions that will help us to proactively identify threats of violence. By implementing Behavioral and Digital School Threat Assessment tools and training, we will be able to identify individuals that may pose a threat to the safety of themselves or others.  We will utilize a referral system so that we can refer students to a community partner or counselor who can help.  We think it is important to help parents and students understand the threats of social media, promote digital citizenship and reduce cyber-bullying and help prevent acts of violence.   We have included training and rollout of an anonymous reporting tool and social media awareness training about digital citizenship and cyber-bullying.  Each District will add the tool and the training to their website.