School District Sets Standard for Crisis Prevention

As the people of Littleton, Colo., faced the aftermath of the worst student violence in U.S. history, about two dozen pupils and teachers gathered in a grove of pines at a peaceful elementary school here last week to grapple with a different challenge: preventing such violence.

No one knows exactly how to vaccinate schools against murderous outbursts by disturbed and disaffected students. And all across the country, especially in seemingly peaceful suburban schools, officials have too often assumed that what happened to Columbine High School in Littleton could never happen to them.

But such incidents are on the rise: The rate has more than doubled since the 1995-96 school year. And here in suburban Houston’s huge Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, violence prevention efforts such as the activities in the pine grove have become as much a part of the curriculum as reading, writing and arithmetic.

With its 19 staff psychologists, scores of counselors, and programs

to identify and help emotionally troubled students, Cypress-Fairbanks has one of the most comprehensive violence prevention programs in the country. “They have been a model for crisis prevention and crisis intervention” nationwide, said Howard Knoff of the University of South Florida. Knoff is past president of the National Assn. of School Psychologists and an expert on school violence.

Unlike school systems that drift back to other concerns when the latest tragedy fades from the news, Cypress-Fairbanks has sustained and expanded its commitment to violence prevention for more than two decades.

Scott Poland, who heads Cypress-Fairbanks’ division of psychological services after 20 years at the district, has been a nationally recognized leader in the effort to develop programs of violence prevention, anger control and mental health counseling in schools. And his efforts to build such programs here have been strongly supported by school district Supt. Rick Berry, who has made “violence prevention his No. 1 priority,” Poland said.

Positive Attitudes Clearly Visible

It is impossible to know whether the special efforts here have averted a Littleton-type tragedy, but teachers and counselors at Cypress-Fairbanks say reductions in anger and confrontational behavior, as well as more tolerant, positive attitudes toward peers and the school community, are clearly visible among potentially troublesome students who go through the system’s various programs.

What Poland and others in the field fear is that school officials elsewhere will not sustain their interest in violence prevention, once the memory of Littleton begins to fade.

“These sad incidents unquestionably galvanize public attention,” said Rodney Hammond, chief of the violence-prevention division of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “I would hope that what we do afterward is maintain an interest in prevention.”

Hammond noted that, although incidents like the one in Littleton remain relatively rare, they are increasing at an astonishing rate. Only two cases of multiple homicides in schools were recorded between 1992 and 1995. Since late 1995, there have been 10 such incidents, counting Littleton.

Exactly what causes some students to commit mass homicide is not yet known, Hammond said, and intensive research is needed to find answers. In the meantime, he said, programs such as those at Cypress-Fairbanks offer some of the most promising strategies available.

And school psychologists and others involved with violence prevention argue that the skills they try to impart are equally vital for academic success.

“Denver brings us back to what skills are really important,” said Lloyd Mattingly, a Lakeview, Fla., school psychologist who trains teachers all over the country in how to teach anger management and related skills that contribute both to academic achievement and violence prevention.

That’s what Cypress-Fairbanks students were working on in the grove last week. The scene could not have been more idyllic, or seemingly further removed from the tragedy of Littleton, or of West Paducah, Ky., or Jonesboro, Ark., two towns where violence erupted last year.

Games Teach Trust and Cooperation

Sunlight warmed the pine needles carpeting the ground. Groups of kids dressed in T-shirts, ball caps and baggy pants were engaged in a series of games.

One group confronted what amounted to an oversized teeter-totter, which they pretended was a boat they had fallen out of while at sea on a whale watch. The task was to get everyone back aboard without letting either end of the teeter-totter touch the ground.

Jumping onto the middle, where balancing would be easy, was forbidden because the imaginary boat’s red-hot engines were located there.

Any ideas? asked the facilitator, a cheerful woman in baggy shorts.

A skinny boy with a soft voice suggested having kids climb aboard in pairs, one at each end. The group chewed that over, worried about balancing kids of different sizes, considered other possibilities, then launched the first of many attempts to accomplish the task.

Nearby, a group of older students confronted two steel cables installed in the trees 30 feet above. The cables ran parallel to the ground, and although they started off close together, they gradually diverged, forming a giant V.

The challenge was for individual students to start where the two cables met and see how far out they could go on one cable--not by tightrope walking but by leaning on a partner who was inching out along the other cable. The students wore safety harnesses, but the task called for ingenuity, cooperation and trust.

How could such activities possibly help prevent tragedy?

The answer, experts say, is that homicidal violence in schools seems to involve emotionally troubled students who are alienated from their peers and their schools and do not know how to deal with the resentment boiling inside them.

Exercises such as these--part of a nationally known program called Reality Oriented Physical Experiences, or ROPES, which Cypress-Fairbanks helped pioneer beginning in 1991--teach students with different backgrounds and personalities to work together, forge bonds of mutual respect and cope with frustration and anger.

“For a lot of reasons, including working parents and single-parent families, many kids today do not have the skills to handle conflicts and social difficulties,” said George Batshe, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who worked with Knoff to develop another program that “teaches those skills just like math is taught.”

“It might sound simplistic, but it surely works,” said Kathy Valdes, principal of Cleveland Elementary School in Tampa, Fla., which uses the Project Achieve program developed by Knoff and Batshe. “The greatest deterrent to violence is a feeling of control and connectedness.”

Rick Spada, a Cy-Fair High School senior who discussed ROPES while eating lunch at a McDonald’s, said it fostered interaction between people who otherwise would not communicate. “We have sections at our school, like any school--preps, heavy metal people who dress in black,” Spada said, echoing descriptions of Columbine High School.

“In ROPES, you all work, you become friends,” he said.

A Loner Is Brought Closer

That tendency was clearly visible in the pine woods. One student in the older group stood apart from the others, nervously lacing and unlacing his fingers.

At one point, when it became necessary to hoist a heavy student up into the air, a pretty female pupil looked around for help, spotted the loner, put an arm around his shoulder and drew him into the group.

When the task was completed, the lone student returned to the edge of the circle, but now he was beginning to smile.

Cypress-Fairbanks does not rely exclusively on programs such as ROPES to avert violence among its 60,000 students. Surveillance cameras peer down in upper-level schools. Uniformed police patrol each high school campus. Principals must have walkie-talkies at hand constantly, and they can order metal detectors when needed. Drug-sniffing dogs sweep cars and lockers 72 times a year.

But Supt. Berry has added positions for two psychologists next year. They’ll join 150 counselors, 40 diagnosticians, and 19 doctoral-level psychologists already working in the system’s 20-year-old, award-winning psychological services department. Counselors visit each class roughly once a month to discuss anger management, decision-making and violence prevention.

They visit elementary school classes up to once a week because problems are usually much easier to deal with in young children than in older students.

Staff psychologists also provide group and individual therapy. Some students are referred by teachers; some request help for themselves or friends.

Another program focuses on peer reporting of disturbing behavior because school psychologist Poland, who also heads rapid-response teams that provide counseling in the aftermath of school shootings, believes that one key to averting tragedies is ending what he calls “the conspiracy of silence”--the failure of students to tell adults when they learn of impending danger.

There are no guarantees that violence prevention programs can stop every potential killer. But Poland believes that they are the key to spotting and helping troubled students. “ID badges, walkie-talkies, metal directors--I’m not saying these things are unimportant, but we can’t just stop there.”

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Kolker reported from Houston and Cooper reported from Washington. Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed from Houston.