February 22, 2019
COE works with Pitt County Schools to Identify Potential Threats and Prevent School Violence
The COE Department of Educational Leadership takes our University’s motto, Servire, to heart.
Pitt County principals and counselors receive training on the how to identify potential perpetrators and deploy team-based interventions to prevent school violence.
Recent school shooting tragedies like the one that occurred at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida just over a year ago led to a collaboration between Pitt County Schools and Dr. Travis Lewis, ECU Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership, to develop training tailored to the specific needs of North Carolina school districts on how to effectively implement behavioral threat assessment & management strategies within local schools. The initiative, Implementing Tailored Threat Assessment Processes to NC LEAs, seeks to reduce targeted violence within our schools by using threat assessment and management techniques to identify potential perpetrators based upon their specific behavior and intervene with available school and community-specific supports prior to any escalation resulting in an act of violence. This approach has been demonstrated to be effective in several other states and is strongly recommended by the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. Implementation began with training of school principals and school counselors in February 2019 and will continue to expand to additional school personnel in the coming months.