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GFPS conducts annual review of school safety, student wellness

Jenn Rowell

Great Falls Public Schools

Local officials reviewed school safety and student wellbeing reports during an Oct. 7 Great Falls Public Schools board work session.

Healthy, safe and secure schools are a goal in the district’s strategic plan and students “have to have a place to walk into that’s safe” with trusted adults and know what’s expected of them, Lance Boyd, assistant superintendent, told the board.

Jackie Mainwaring, assistant superintendent, said that students won’t excel academically if they’re not in a safe space.

One of the district’s goals is by June 2027, to implement evidence-based strategies to increase appropriate behavior among students, with a five percent decrease in major incidents as a metric, and increasing student opportunities to demonstrate the skills, traits and characteristics identified in GFPS’ profile of a learner.

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Boyd and Mainwaring said they’re working with schools to calibrate what’s considered a major incident at each school is the same district wide. They’re also working to standardize how those incidents are reported, addressed and tracked.

A major incident is anything that written up and makes it to the school principal for some sort of action, but officials said those incidents can range depending on experience and tolerance.

Major incidents district wide for the last few years, according to GFPS data:

Boyd said that a small percentage of students are responsible for the majority of problems in schools.

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Among the major behavior categories, are assaults, which, according to district data were:

Others include, attendance, fights, insubordination, school threats and harassment/intimidation.

Insubordination numbers:

School threats:

Attendance is also an issue and Boyd said he asked an assistant superintendent to account for her 40 hours weekly to get a sense of their daily life and 65 percent of the time last spring and this fall was tracking down students who weren’t in school and another 30 percent responding to insubordination issues in classrooms.

Boyd said there are occasional big incidents in schools, fights and external factors, but the biggest disruptive behaviors have to do with the basics of what students are asked to do, which is be safe and learn.

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Looking at the major categories for which the state asks districts to collect data, some are defined by state criminal codes, but some are more broad so Boyd said they’re working to better define what types of behaviors incidents fit into which categories.

Superintendent Heather Hoyer said building principals brought it up amongst themselves to better calibrate those major incidents to have more consistency district wide.

Boyd said that’s helpful in recording incidents on a standard basis since things can be missed when looking at the history of a student’s behavioral issues.

As an example, he said typically if a kindergartner tells a teacher or aide to f-off and runs out, it’s not going to be written up the same way as a teenager doing the same thing and it’s subjective.

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Sometimes an incident with a 5-year-old may not seem like a big deal for a certain school given their experience, but if there are issues when that student gets older, Boyd said they want to be able to see if there’s a frequency or intensity that needs to be monitored.

Mainwaring said that threats captured in their data were tied to a particular student and incident, not general, unsubstantiated social media threats.

School threats is also an area they’re looking to calibrate as Boyd said, if a 5-year-old makes a threat of violence, it’s interpreted far differently than a 16-year-old making the same threat.

There’s law and board policy about threat assessments in schools, Mainwaring said, and school teams spend an “incredible amount of time” when there’s a threat, real or not, determining how real or serious the threat it. She said typically a student making a threat is placed on immediate suspension to allow the team to determining whether a threat is real and how to respond.

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Boyd said they’ve developed a county safety team, which includes GFPS, the Great Falls Police Department, Cascade County Sheriff’s Office and Attorney’s Office, Probation and Parole and the Office of Public Defenders, that helps all of those entities see what’s going on in schools that’s affecting the community and that what’s happening in the community affects schools.

“If we don’t work together, we’re just passing the problem from one agency to another,” Boyd said.

The district is conducting armed intruder training district wide on Nov. 1 that will put employees through simulated training scenarios to rehearse their safety protocols that are used to respond to threats.

Teachers have asked to resume that training, they said.

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The Great Falls Police Department presented their annual school resource officer report, reviewing their role and last year’s numbers.

Capt. Brian Black said that SROs are cops, educators and informal counselors, who want to spend the majority of their time educating or counseling students, but also have to act as law enforcement citing or arresting students when necessary.

Over the last few years, calls for service at schools have increased.

Not all calls for service result in reports being filed or citations issued.

The numbers, according to GFPD, are:

At the elementary schools, the calls for service were:

Sgt. Katie Cunningham, who oversees the SRO program and is now based out of Great Falls High, said that they’ve worked with school staff to incorporate more counseling or administrative handling of some issues rather than having SROs respond.

The age of culpability in Montana is 12, she said, so they don’t want to look at charging kids under 12 unless absolutely necessary.

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A number of reports at schools are students reporting problems at home such as abuse or drugs, she said, or sometimes a parent who isn’t supposed to be at the school.

Boyd said that last school year when Alluvion Health had a clinic at Longfellow Elementary, there were a number of calls for service for the clinic, unrelated to the school. Boyd said they had to make some adjustments to have the clinic call for law enforcement if needed rather than rely on SROs who had other duties within schools.

Of the 803 complaints during the 2023-2024 school year, there were 103 citations issued at Great Falls High, 64 at C.M. Russell High, 77 at East Middle, three at North Middle and 24 at the elementary level.

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Disorderly conduct citations were up to 109 from 99 the previous school year, but vandalisms were down to 9 versus 15 the previous year. Sex crimes, assaults and threats remained steady, according to GFPD. There were 225 citations issued district wide during the last school year, of those 14 cases went through the diversion program in lieu of citation and 50 cases had district consequences versus formal citations.

Those numbers include citations issued to students who did something outside of the school, Cunningham said.

She said it’s about five percent of students causing the bulk of problems.

Over the summer, officials created a separate working group to address juvenile violence as more minors were carrying weapons and committing violent crimes, she said, and many of those juveniles had been staffed through the threat assessment process at the beginning of this school year.

Black said the some of the juveniles are repeat offenders, which is no different than adults with a small percentage causing the majority of problems.

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GFPS and GFPD have had an agreement for years for four SROs, but this year GFPD structurally adjusted to shift some of Cunningham’s duties internally, making her a fifth SRO.

Black said it made sense to base her out of Great Falls High, which has the highest numbers overall every year in terms of threats, assaults, violence and citations.

Black said that juvenile probation has signed a memorandum of understanding and joined GFPS in the SRO program, with one officer based at GFHS, one at EMS and one to cover NMS and CMR.

He said that gets probation involved at the front end of the process and thinks it will be eye opening to those officers, but also provides more accountability to students along the way.

Black said that on top of SRO duties, the officers who are also detectives, were assigned an additional 62 cases for investigation in their time that’s not directly school related.

Black said that since last year’s report, they broke school threats out in their reporting system to be better able to track those incidents.

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Social media was the source of most threats during the last school year, Black and Cunningham said.

Cunningham said they look into all reports of threats and run down as many leads as they can. As an example, she said that if a student were to post a photo or video with a firearm, officers would go to that student’s hime, talk to the student and parents to see if they have access to the weapons, or if the photo was taken at home or someone else’s house.

“We’ll criminally cite when applicable,” Cunningham said. “Rarely will we give a break” on school threats.

The night before the board work session, Cunningham said, there had been a threat between two students, so officers went to speak to those students, talk to their parents and determine whether they had access to weapons.

She said they run everything down to make sure a student, or adult, making a threat doesn’t have access to weapons or other means of executing a threat, and keeps the student out of school until the district completes the threat assessment and determines what school looks like for that student after the incident.

Mainwaring said typically, if a student makes a threat, once the assessment process is completed, school looks different for that student afterward.

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Kim Skornogoski, school board member, asked the officers if they needed more SROs.

Cunningham said that they do and adding a sixth would be ideal to get back to the DARE program and more prevention rather than being reactive.

Black said that would be nice, but GFPD is dealing with its own shortages and were short two investigators since they were short on patrol officers.

It would be good to have another SRO, he said, “but at this point in time, it’s not feasible.”

Andrea Savage, GFPS’ student mental health coordinator and district therapist, gave her annual student wellness report.

She said there’s a national mental health crisis, per a U.S. Surgeon General report, and a “huge number” of students are reporting to the emergency room with suicidal ideation and intent.

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Savage told the board that they’re seeing more depression particularly related to depression and anxiety tied to social media.

She said a common thread she hears from those students is that they feel judged with no one to turn to.

“What I consistently hear, is ‘I just want somebody to listen,'” she said.

Savage said that as of Oct. 7, her team had already conducted five suicide assessments this school year.

It’s a call to action, she told the board, and the district has been responding by implementing universal sixth grade screenings, now in its third year, in response to a high number of sixth graders presenting at the emergency room with suicidal ideations.

At three schools, Savage said her team had screened 112 students so far this year and had seen 37 of them directly because they presented with real time suicidal ideations, so a therapist was assigned to begin talking about it and developing safety plans.

The majority of those students have been girls with high levels of anxiety and depression, she said, and those students are the low fliers, the pretty good students who stay out of trouble.

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In the week before the Oct. 7 board work session, Savage said her team had seen seven students who weren’t on anyone’s radar. She said they met with the families and almost send some to the emergency room.

“This is the reason we keep doing this work,” she said. “We have to begin having these conversations.”

Savage said she’d recently talked to a student who said she’d never told anyone that she cuts herself.

“We have this huge mental health crisis, but what are we doing about it,” Savage said.

One obstacle has been a recent legislative change that now requires parents to opt in for the sixth grade student screenings, where as before it was an opt out process.

That caused a decline in the number of students being screened, she said, but her team was creative this year in sending home letters about the screenings with a line for opting in and a line for opting out, which got more responses.

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The board and administrators discussed working with legislators and the Montana School Board Association to reverse that law change back to opt out to be able to screen, and potentially help, more students.

There are about 700 students in sixth grade, she said.

Savage said they use the data from those screenings to look for trends to have conversations and develop programming around those issues.

She said GFPS is the only district statewide screening sixth graders.

Hoyer said it was something that came out of Savage’s relationship with Benefis and seeing the age of those presenting at the emergency room with suicidal ideations.

The youth risk behavioral study is done through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control but doesn’t flag issues until eight grade and isn’t individualized, so the counseling team can’t get to that student to intervene, Savage said.

The district has also implemented a strength based screening that looks at what students are doing right and their adaptive behaviors. The district piloted that mini assessment last school year with five schools.

“It’s really just about having conversations and making it okay to talk about this stuff. All of this stuff is about culture change. As a clinician, the only way to make culture changes is to be able to talk about it,” Savage said, and that students will tell you what’s going on if they have a relationship with you.

Savage and her team began a relationship with Benefis emergency room a few years ago after realizing so many students were presenting there with mental health concerns. She said the entities are now able to share information through a memorandum of understanding and they’ve updated the agreement to work with pediatric providers to ensure follow-up with the students and they’re working with families to help those students, rather than siloing care.

Hoyer said that the Montana Office of Public Instruction sang Savage and her program’s praises at a recent event for how unique the agreement was with Benefis and the results they’ve been achieving.

Peer mentoring groups were established in recent years under Savage’s team and this year, they were the recipients of the Jeremy Bullock Youth Safety Spotlight Award.

There are now 130 mentors across the district, empowered to alter perceptions around mental health, she said.

Ambria Green and Maddie Hall are high school students and peer mentors and told the board about their experiences.

“There are so many kids that you would not realize actually needed help because they just flew under the radar. Yes, there are a lot of kids who need help, but if you look deeper, there’s probably twice as many,” Maddie said. “We really are the middle men sometimes. There are a lot of kids who don’t feel safe talking adults, I’m not saying you guys are scary, but it’s really hard for a lot of kids, because they didn’t grow up where it’s okay to talk about mental health.”

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Ambria said they help get resources out for students who won’t ask for them. She said she didn’t realize when she joined how many students would come to her because they needed help.

The peer mentoring groups also do a hygiene drive to gather various hygiene products that are made available to students in their schools.

Maddie said they recently went to speak at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine’s Great Falls campus about peer mentoring and the Question, Persuade, Refer, or QPR, training for recognizing the signs of suicide and how to intervene.

Hoyer said that Touro is now looking at implementing that QPR training through their programs nationally and said that was the impact Great Falls students were having on on their community and beyond.

“What you guys are doing is so important,” Gordon Johnson, board chair, said. “It’s colossal all that’s necessary to be done.”

Jenn Rowell
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