The Wisconsin Department of Justice Office of School Safety is offering training to all Wisconsin schools to help officials respond effectively to traumatic events, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
Director of the Office of School Safety Trish Kilpin said the main goal of the OSS training is to teach people how to act effectively when students experience a traumatic event, such as a shooting or sudden student death.
“If there’s a crisis event that impacts either an individual or the school community in general, there are ways that the school staff can respond that will decrease psychological trauma symptoms for youth and help them recover more quickly,” Kilpin said.
The OSS program provides schools with the knowledge to respond specifically to acute traumatic stressors, according to the DOJ release.
According to University of Wisconsin Educational Psychology Program Co-Director Katie Eklund, acute traumatic stressors can come from a traumatic event but may not manifest for a long period of time. Handling this changes from student to student due to a multitude of factors, including the state of their pre-existing mental health — the OSS training aims to help schools identify students that a traumatic event may most impact, Eklund said.
The training is designed to help school teams understand how to engage in “psychological triage,” or the act of determining which students are going to be most significantly impacted by an event, Eklund said. It allows schools to plan how to effectively respond to those students first, and then how to take care of all students and ensure they are all getting the same message after a crisis event as quickly as possible.
“Following a crisis event, the sooner somebody has access to support and resources, the more likely they are to recover from that event,” Eklund said. “We’re offering this training and providing support to school staff to engage in evidence-based practices and what we know will help kids and staff recover quicker.”
The training is based on the PREPaRE model from the National Association of School Psychologists, according to Kilpin. PREPaRE stands for prevention and preparation, reaffirming physical welfare, evaluating trauma risks, providing interventions, responding to psychological needs and examining the effectiveness of being prepared, according to the release from the DOJ.
According to Kilpin, this training program will be offered to every school in Wisconsin, including private and tribal schools, and schools can request training from the OSS. If schools do not have enough staff to be trained, there are alternatives to training staff, Kilpin said.
The OSS has trained 12 teams across the state to go to schools and provide support and mutual aid if needed because schools may not have the staff or capacity to provide aid, Kilpin said.
“If you have an event that impacts many people and you only have one school counselor, it’ll be hard to meet that need, so depending on the size, ability of the response and the intensity of the response, we can provide a variety of things,” Kilpin said.
The OSS also works toward prevention with the Speak Up, Speak Out call center, which is a reporting portal for concerns about any Wisconsin youth, Kilpin said. Some of these concerns are about someone who might be planning an act of school violence, which is when the OSS intervenes and prevents escalation of the situation.
Kilpin and Eklund said this training is created and funded for K-12 schooling. While the OSS tries to support universities, it does not have training made for the post-secondary level.
The Wisconsin Legislature partially funded the training program after it created the OSS following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Kilpin said. Now, it is being funded by money from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 — funds which will run out this year.
For the future, the source of funding is uncertain. The DOJ requested that Gov. Tony Evers fully fund the OSS for the continuity of operations in the next state budget.
“The Critical Incident Response project is being funded by a $1 million federal grant that will end in September, and so if we’re going to keep doing this work, then we need to have the continuity of funding from the state to give us permanent, stable funding to keep this important work going,” Kilpin said.
