By Matt Kelly

New proactive protocol strives to keep students safe

Mar 1, 2016 | 3:59 PM

A new partnership between the two Battlefords area school divisions and community organizations aims to offer support for students before harm comes to them or others. 

The Living Sky Public and Light of Christ Catholic school divisions, along with the RCMP, Prairie North Health Region mental health services and the Kanaweyimik Child and Family Services created the Violence Threat Risk Assessment (VTRA) protocol.

The overriding goal of the protocol is to reduce risk and prevent violence from happening in the schools and the community.

Light of Christ superintendent of learning Kelvin Colliar said the divisions want to become more proactive instead of waiting for something to happen as they have in the past.

“We would have been in a reactive situation in a school. There would be a threatening situation in a school, we would suspend the student, they’d go home, they come back three days later and they would have had no intervention or supports.”

Rustlers Volleyball

Crusaders' Bell excited for next chapter with Lakeland College

5h ago

Nothing but Net

Vikings' standouts ready for national stage with Team Saskatchewan

8h ago

Missing person

Spiritwood RCMP searching for missing woman

11h ago

Under VTRA, school staff would be able to assess how a student is acting compared to a baseline and then use the other partners to come up with a way to prevent a serious incident from occurring.

The recent shootings in La Loche further strengthened the need for the protocol, as being able to recognize when someone is struggling can help stop tragedies.

“In most cases it’s not a single event that triggers an event like (the La Loche shootings). It’s things that happen in the past, things that if we were trained to recognize them we can prevent a situation from happening in the classroom.” said Colliar.

Superintendent of student services for Living Sky Nancy Schultz agreed. “It’s really a development of a pattern that we’re looking for and a pattern that’s amping up from a student having intermittent struggles, to having more frequent struggles. We want to make sure we intervene at that point in time.”

Schultz said VTRA had been in the works since the initial training in May of 2014 followed by a second training in September of 2014, with more training scheduled for the next school year.

mkelly@jpbg.ca