Dozens of staff members from both the Lambton Kent District School Board (LKDSB)and the St. Clair Catholic School Board (SCCDSB) recently attended a two-day seminar to learn about Violence Threat Risk Assessment (VTRA) training.
Staff, along with community partners including the Sarnia Police Service (SPS), Walpole Island First Nation (Bkejwanong Territory), Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), and both school boards’ Safe Schools and Student Support Services teams, came together for the training to strengthen shared protocols, enhance early-intervention practices, and encourage cross-agency collaboration.
"We have run this training for over 20 years. Actually, we bring in Kevin Cameron, or some of the folks that work for him through the CTIP, which stands for the Center for Trauma Informed Practice, and he provides us with this feature training," said LKDSB Safe Schools System Coordinator Mark Houghton. "The easiest way to describe it is that you want to identify the risk associated with an individual of concern, and so the training runs through identifiers for people to look for, and how to look for those, and why they're important."
The training focuses on collaborative assessment, information-sharing, and supports to reduce risk and ensure students receive the help they need.
"I think the easiest thing is we often get threats made online, whether let's say student to student, that threat would probably be brought to the principals. The principals would then conduct an investigation into kind of the plausibility of it, and if it met the threshold, then as part of the process, so the disciplinary process itself takes place, but also the VTRA takes place outside of the disciplinary process." he said "You're looking at why the threat occurred, and are there things that you can put in place to support those individuals to kind of keep it from progressing or getting more serious. You're trying to break the cycle of that occurrence."
Houghton notes the training improves connections with local agencies that may need to get involved, such as police and/or social services.
"The training really does reinforce our community partners and us in these really difficult situations. So, it's great to pull those community agencies in, allow the people to talk to one another, and to take part in that training together, and it builds a much stronger and coordinated response when we come across these situations."
VTRA training focuses not just on how to identify a threat and to contact the right resources to handle it, but also on the immediate response and reaction by those involved.
"The feedback we get from our administrators and anybody that we train is that it is excellent training by way of giving them the ability to see a situation a little differently, in which it differently right questions to help with that interchange process with someone whose behaviour is escalating in situations like that."
The session was a way to encourage collaboration across all agencies and ensure schools in Sarnia-Lambton and Chatham-Kent remain safe and supportive.
