A trend of keeping a closer eye on students

To many schools with less-than-rigorous threat assessment systems, the past year's spate of school shootings have been a wake-up call.

Over the past year, many universities around the country have responded to shootings at Virginia Tech and other colleges by forming new groups to monitor students who display troubled behavior and assess whether they pose a wider threat to the community.

Penn, however, has not, according to Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush.

"There's nothing new that we're doing since Virginia Tech," said Rush. "We've had a longstanding practice of anticipating situations that could put the University at risk."

She said Penn had already stressed "active communication" among groups like the Vice Provost for University Life, Public Safety and General Counsel."

Throughout her 15 years at Penn, Rush said, case conferences - meetings to discuss individual students who seem to be having academic or social difficulty - have been a "staple" of Public Safety's risk management activities.

But those initiatives have only recently become common at other schools.

The University of Kentucky, for example, just established a new threat-assessment group called Students of Concern in March.

Students of Concern is a group of counselors, police and administrators that meet every two weeks and discuss, on a case-by-case basis, students whose behavior seriously concerns a member of the group.

Based on the nature and frequency of the reports received about a particular student, the group might ask the student to meet with Kentucky's Department of Safety, send the police to check on the student or contact the student's parents.

After Virginia Tech, "criticism centered on that campus not being able to 'connect the dots' represented by persons who had specific concerns about the gunman," said Mary Bolin-Reece, director of Kentucky's Counseling and Testing Center.

Students of Concern exists to connect those dots: "to be proactive rather than reactive whenever possible - and that requires information."

But troubled students share a lot of crucial information during confidential counseling sessions.

Penn counselors can only disclose that confidential information if a student expresses homicidal or suicidal intent, Rush said. But Bolin-Reece said that, now, "there's a shift to break confidentiality if lives appear to be at risk."

The Education Department recently proposed modifying the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to give "greater flexibility and deference to administrators so they can bring appropriate resources to bear on a circumstance that threatens the health or safety of individuals," according to the Department's proposal.

Despite Virginia Tech's influence on how schools handle troubled students, Kirk Heilbrun, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, says the shooting did not necessarily herald a new type of threat on school campuses.

"For years we've known that there are a few kinds of individuals who, because they're isolated, because they were bullied, want to be famous and go out a la Columbine," he said.

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