Idaho State School Board Reports on School Shootings

School shootings continue to be a problem for school districts in Idaho and across the country. For those of us who are a little older, we all remember the scenes over twenty years ago when students ran for their lives during the school shooting at Columbine High School.  CNN reports that a group of teenagers in Pennsylvania was planning a school shooting to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre.  

In Idaho, another student has been arrested for carrying a gun to school in Rigby Middle School, reports KTVB.  Rigby Middle School was where a middle school student shot, wounding three people. A teacher later disarmed the student. Now Idaho State Board of Education has issued its report on how to prevent school shootings in Idaho.

The eleven page reported noted the importance of how would be shooters communicate via social media. 

Here is an excerpt from the report:

One of the important lessons learned from research on both averted and completed acts of school violence is that attackers have used social media to communicate their intentions prior to a planned attack. If this kind of information is brought forward, an attack can be prevented, as happened in several averted acts of school violence.

In the case of the RMS shooting, students reportedly saw social media postings from the accused attacker that were concerning but did not report the information prior to the
attack. It is recommended that Idaho consider implementing a social media threat detection system for schools in conjunction with the Idaho State Police Fusion Center.

The Ohio School Safety Center has incorporated public threat detection capacity to help schools identify threat-specific social media communication. This tool provides the State of Ohio capacity and helps to protect all schools in Ohio by alerting schools and allowing them to take appropriate action if a threat is made towards them by any
person on certain social media sites.

You can read the entire report here.