- LTFS
- Safety
PSESD’s Safety Center is inclusive of crisis response support, behavioral health support and navigation, suicide prevention, intervention and postvention, and threat assessment. The PSESD team provides support through training, consultation, policy and practice review, and service supports. Our Threat Assessment System utilizes a set of protocols and safety planning procedures to promote safe school environments using a racial equity tool to assure all assessments operate through a racial equity lens.
We launched our Safety Cooperative five years ago, and it is in its third year of leading an intensive threat assessment cooperative. We are grateful the legislature has provided three years of support for ESDs to provide safety support services to school communities — starting with HB 1216 in 2019, and now with the passage of HB 1214, each ESD across the state will house Regional School Safety Centers.
An Antiracist Approach
Built from the MTSS framework, our team supports youth through trauma-informed school responses and antiracist principles as primary ways schools approach violence prevention. We know from research and data from the hundreds of mass school shootings in the US since 1966, there is not only a need to respond to safety incidents, but a much larger imperative to invest in mental health supports in schools is needed as means to prevent violence. All children deserve a comprehensive, whole child, whole community approach, supporting healthy school culture and climate where they can thrive.
We celebrate the efforts across the region and districts’ commitments to creating thoughtful and tailored safety approaches in response to the needs of their school communities. The PSESD team is here to support continued regional collaboration and sharing of gap-closing practices aimed at interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline and creating racially just and humanizing school systems.
Join our Regional Networks
- School Safety
- Student Support Services
- School Counselors and Social Workers
For more information, contact Cassandra Dempsey at cdempsey@psesd.org.