Pandemic Response: COOP and Communication for High-Risk Students

Hello, everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to join our webinar. I'm Greg Peterson Content Manager for CrisisGo. Today, we have Jeff Kaye of School Safety Operations and Teresa Campbell of Safer Schools Together here to share their safety knowledge. The speakers will introduce themselves in a moment. But first I want to share that all the slides used in the presentation will be emailed to the webinar participants after the webinar has concluded. We’ll also be having a quick Q&A session with Jeff and Theresa at the conclusion of the presentation.

Everyone gets to submit questions via the questions panel on the GoToWebinar menu and you can submit your questions throughout the presentation or during the Q&A itself and we will address as many as we have time for. I'll let Jeff and Theresa take it from here. Thank you.

Thanks, Greg. So I'm Jeff Kaye and this is a third in our series of continuity of operations planning. And you know every day is a new day in this crisis. We've never been here before. My 38 years and Public Safety last 12 of them in school safety. I've never been anywhere like we are now so our continuity of operations planning is going to continue until we reach for reconstitution and we can't create a new normal. There's no such thing in school safety. There’s normal and there's abnormal. We can get better than what normal was but we can’t lower our standards to create a new normal just so we can open the schools because you know, we would have to act safely. So we are in our second 30-day phase of continuity of operations planning.

By now some states have given us a target dates to open. 43 States and said we're not opening in the school year. My state of California said we might open in July or August to a certain capacity. So we've got some dates to work with our continuity planning. So we just have to keep approaching that target date in 30-day increments. Because we just don't know where we're going yet, but we have to weigh the balances. What school safety looks like. What restrictions do we have? When is it safe to open? Because even on the giving you a date open doesn't mean you have to open on that date. It's up to you in the school district to the private school when you open and what that opening looks like. How safely can you open? So the checks and balances are what continuity planning is about. The continuity planning for this pandemic response might not fully stopped for years. We have to factor in future research into our planning.

So what's that going to look like, you know at the end of the day what is open the schools going to look like. They will not open, the continuity of operations planning will not stop as soon as school doors open. Researchers were gathering data on the effects of the shutdown for a long time. Do we have to figure out what needs to be done? What needs to be done with schools. By now you should have identified tasks that need to be done. You should be getting them done. Can we present a graduation to these kids at some point in time? If your target date to open the schools safely from your state is August 10th, then can we have a graduation the week before? Because we can social distance at graduation just by giving tickets to each student who’s graduating for two family members and then live streaming for the rest of them. Then have your graduation in a football stadium or room big enough to spread people out. The kids deserve a graduation and the families deserve to watch their kids graduate. So we can't take that away from them because science says we can't graduate. They’re saying we have the social distance, we can do that. And what will the school's look like if we have to open them wearing masks? I have a big drive on right now and it bothers me that we're even talking about that because we still have the school killer out there. We spent the last 12 years targeting and hardening our schools. How can we bring people in we don't know who's there? How can we bring people in and we don't know an outsider is there to do harm? So if you have to open your school to masks have to ask yourself, should we be opening the schools?

Because as a parent I would not send my child to a school where everybody is masked up. First off, it's not safe. It's not providing a safe environment. We can't guarantee who's there. Because tomorrow’s school killer is out there today planning what thing to do? So how intrusive are campus safety and safe school culture and climate do we want the openness to be before you say it's safer to delay open. Your continuity of operations planning is going to continue. We're going to gather research for years to come. So just because you give me a date. Remember you don't have to open on that date. That's as soon as you can open. You can delay it. So it's safer to go back to school or not. We have to put away the checks and balances and that's a big one. So, you know, I started using Therese Campbell's programs here about 2009 and together. We've been working since then to save lives and create a safe school culture and climate. So there's a lot of aspects of continuity planning that we're not talking about that Teresa's going to introduce to you today. There's nobody better in the world to talk about this stuff. So I'm going to get out of the way here and Teresa going to take you on a ride on what we should be doing, Teresa.

Thank you very much. Jeff as always amazing information and a huge shout out and thank you to CrisisGo for hosting today's session. I think it's more important than ever before that we're coming together and sharing best practices and resources. I know for our organization six weeks ago, I wasn't being asked to help schools respond to zoom bombing, team bombing of things like ISIS beheadings, pornography, and other related matters, but we've developed tools to hopefully stop that from happening which we’ll make available to you later today. A little bit about Safer Schools Together, if any of you have not heard of us, we've been around for about 11 years. I've been around a lot longer than that. We are an organization with offices in Canada and the US, we have threat analysts that work in our offices in the US and Canada. They're pretty much working 24/7. We trained in digital threat assessment, violence prevention, assuring safe and caring schools, mental wellness, and prominent form classrooms. And we also three years ago were the first organization that started to provide school districts with worrisome online behavior reports and don't get that confused with social media monitoring, it's not. Everything we do is through a threat assessment lens in providing certain individuals that may be slain homicidal suicidal behaviors, or maybe they're showing the level of fluidity. We want to make sure that we're identifying those kids to the school districts to make sure they're on somebody's radar.

If you folks have your camera's out feel free to take a picture of our QR code and you can save that QR code for quick access to our website. You'll find a QR code as well for our anonymous online reporting tool that we also implemented but 11 years ago. It won the best school safety initiative award, golden bell award in the state of California for the reporting tool. Every time a school district asks for something or law enforcement asks for something, we just we do it and we add it to our research resources tab. So, I encourage you, folks, to take a look at the Professional Resources. The Professional Resources is going to be asking you for a password. That password is sst*1016.

You'll find a whole host of resources in there that you're more than welcome to take and use however you want. There are some fentanyl-based resources in there. There's a guide for schools and responding to sextexting and sextortion. There's both a Canadian version and the US version. One of the pieces that I've been very happy about and is being utilized a lot, is to start educating people on what bullying is not, but breaking down what is the difference between peer conflict, mean behavior, and bullying behavior. There's also a violent video game montage that is meant to educate parents as to the rating systems and why we have some concerns when our kids in kindergarten or playing games like Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat. So again, please make yourself familiar with those resources and I'll introduce my other resources that we've introduced just part of the COVID response.

A lot of people feel like I'm feeding them water through a firehose. Often when I speak because I'd always wanted to share as much information as possible. And I want to let you folks know. I know I'm going to give you a lot of information today, but I want you to know that I'm not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere and if there's anything you need more of after this presentation our teams in both Canada and the US will be more than happy to assist and even if you just need to talk through something we're going to make ourselves available for sure.

It's interesting as I hear many people, of course, talking about our stock markets and other related thing and I continue to feel like more than ever that I'm screaming from the rooftops we really need to double down on our investment in our students, especially right now when it comes to our high risk and vulnerable students because when we return to school many of those are going to be returning and potentially walking in with a greater level of risk, and so we have a responsibility to make sure we are connecting with them.

In behavioral threat assessment we talked about the importance of assessing the language of the threats. I feel like it's time for us to be doing this here as well. I think all of us could do a much better job of using softer language to describe our current environment just by many of us changing the narrative of the language that we're using I feel it would improve the feelings of safety and emotional mental well-being for society as a whole right now. So moving to more consistent physical distancing and physical separate knowing that we want our folks socially connecting more than ever before and that we're not isolated and we're not all in quarantine.

So just like in crisis response well and physical or psychological first aid, we must have a plan to maintain a safe and consistent and predictable relationship with our students. And once again, especially with our high risk and vulnerable students many of those students are not showing up for their remote learning. So I'm not talking about our classes being the only form of connection we should be having with our kids. Have we put together a radar team to identify a list of students whom we should have on our radar. That we should be doing everything in our power to check in on their current behavioral baseline. It is also crucial that all school staff including teachers, our paraprofessionals, our administrators, and other staff be prepared to serve as stable foundations that students can lean on for support and guidance and important thing for us to remember this time is that children fear many things during this pandemic, but what we are seeing is that them becoming ill themselves than having to go to the doctor themselves or illness of a death of a parent or loved one are among the top of those fears that are being demonstrated daily. Above all else this isn't an opportunity to enhance the development of a very healthy connection with our students during this time.

The most important thing we can do right now as we attempt to connect with our students is we have to stay calm ourselves. Children are mirroring the actions of our adults right now. So pay close attention when we are connecting with our students. What exactly are we saying? I think many of us know there might be some staff members whom we might not want them to be the ones connecting with students because maybe they're struggling themselves. And we definitely have had some cases where the staff members lack the ability of modeling calmness is actually increased and heightened the students' anxiety and concern. Listen to what the kids are asking and make sure that we're responding as clearly and honestly as we can. Kids are asking a lot of repetitive questions right now about the pandemic and some that don't make sense. But again as long as we can attempt to be direct and calm that is going to lower any level of anxiety they're feeling. Again, it's important that we give kids the facts in a developmentally appropriate way. If we don't give them the facts they're starting to imagine something on their own that may be far worse than what we're currently dealing with in this pandemic. I'd like to hear repeatedly to young people the statement of the likelihood of one of us getting sick from this pandemic is not high. But if we do, doctors will take care of us. So starting to think about those statements that we can reinforce with our students at this time.

We know next to families. We know school connectedness is the most important protective factor in a young person's life. And that's why again I come back to it is a time for us to be doubling down on these connections. One of the things that we've seen very clearly is some cries for help from our students that are being displayed on various social media platforms. It's that something they'll share it a couple of examples for.

Once again around our connections the age emotional maturity the student and your relational history with those students are really going to determine the direction of the conversation. Of course, the biggest question that we're hearing teachers are experiencing in the remote learning environment. Is when can we come back to school? So it's important that we remind our staff that they should only be communicating what has been publicly shared by the district leadership team. Should not be responding well, if we come back it's when we come back. So again being mindful, remindful of the subtlety of the importance of the language that our staff is currently using I just want to provide this other QR code and this is what's going to take you to our COVID-19 toolkit that has been designed for school administrators in schools and educators. You're also going to find it a parent resource guide. Please feel free to share this parent resource guide with as many parents as you possibly can. Everything I've been referring to and everything that I will continue to be referring to you will find in this COVID toolkit. I don't have time to go over everything today. But the majority of what I just reference you will find the more comprehensive documents in that particular tool kit.

So as I mentioned these kids are high risk and vulnerable youth if the very start of our trauma-informed returning to school plan is getting a radar in this together of these high risk and vulnerable youth. Well, that's a really good place to start if you haven't started with that yet.

One of the other documents that you're going to find there as well as the ethical considerations for remote counseling. This is also been a big challenge for the last six weeks. We have had many counselors share with us that they did not feel that they needed to provide counseling services during this pandemic because they just didn't know how to do it in the virtual environment. They were concerned about the lack of clarity around consent. Sharing information with parents so you will find the comprehensive guide if that too has been a question for you and your districts. You will find this very comprehensive guide on our website. It was helpful to see this statement put out from the American School Counselor Association. There's no question. We're seeing some ethical challenges right now, but I think it does warrant point out this does come back to as a counselor, what were your established values principles and personal moral qualities provide you had had those provide useful points of reference for thinking through the issues involved. So now is not the right time to say I'm not doing it. Let's try and find a way to continue to provide that support.

So when we talk about other connections outside of the classroom, we're talking about synchronous connections and asynchronous connections. And again, we will have the complete document on our website, but just to point out a few of them. It's important to just think about the structure of how we're currently structuring those connections. Again, just the learning pieces engaging our kids and asking the questions of what have they been observing over these times, what have their concerns been, what joys are they experiencing? What we take a look at our synchronous connections, these two are also important. It'll buy a staff also are very comfortable to reach note via phone call with our kids, but that also remembers that you can use WhatsApp and Google calls without disclosing your personal phone number to your students. We can still use video conference calls. We've been recommending some engagement and some gaming in that safe gaming not the violent video games platforms like trickster where we've had folks set up round-robin engagement activities for students. We've also used some of you are familiar with Bamboozle again integrating some games into your video conference. And this makes a really big difference in the level of calmness that it brings for our students when we're able to do that.

I just want to talk a little bit to the district's maybe that has taken a no camera approach in the remote learning environment. I know it's been very difficult coming into this remote learning environment. I know that there are issues people were not ready for the level of privacy and security and the settings they needed to have rolled into the education environment, but we can help with that. I should also point out on our website. You'll find two video documents and the password is sst-zoomsafe. Once again sst-zoomsafe all lowercase. Right now, more than ever before our kids and our teachers and our staff need to see each other. The overall level of anxiety right now in the calmness that it brings to that interaction has just been absolutely amazing. So when I continue to hear from staff and counselors about their district's decision, I've just encouraged them to reach out to us to share with us what your concerns are if we're if it's we're talking about managing one student in particular behavior we can deal with that. We can give best practice on how to deal with that. But we really want to do whatever we can to be lowering the anxiety right now.

And then of course we talked about our asynchronous connections. This is where we're reaching out to some kids who might be our radar lists or high-risk vulnerable youth where we're connecting with them through Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat. And these should be set up as a staff or school account not a personal account. I will show you before we're done today how we utilize Instagram without having an Instagram ourselves. Again if we want to make those connections, through texting you can use text plus to send free text to your students without disclosing your personal phone number. We've also set up some other really fun activities in Tick-Tock, which our kids love and Tick-Tock can be a great platform as long as it's used safely and all privacy and security settings are set on both our end and their end. But there's a whole host of ideas are that you can see. And again a lot more in the document so you can access on our website.

This is a really important time when we think about trauma and pre-existing trauma prior to the pandemic and those kids that were already struggling with pre-existing trauma. They need to be on our radar list. We need to be getting in touch with them. We need to be asking those kids directly what we can possibly do to positively interact with them right now. We have to understand with a lot of those students that physically coming into our schools was really the only safe part of their day. We need to try and set a specific time period during the day but have set times for these particular students to connect with us. That way they know going through the week that they actually have a set time for somebody to talk to. Make sure when we're engaged in these conversations, let's model again calmness and openness. Consider even engaging his or her small peer group in a positive dialogue. It's important right now for these students to have settings for positive interactions with their peers. So once again have we started our trauma-informed return to school plan because all of these elements that I'm speaking to all need to be part of those plans.

Now would be a really good time for folks to get reacquainted with the psychological first aid for schools. And even if you haven't seen it before it's still a good time to become reacquainted with the guide. Recently in the last couple of weeks, my colleague. Dr. Marlene Wong who formerly worked for LA Unified School Division then went to USC is also now working with my colleague Kevin Cameron over at the Northern American Center for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response has recently adapted these guidelines to now include during the worldwide pandemic. It has been suggested that 75 to 85 percent of our students are going to be able to adapt to new challenges if they have early support from important adults, which means we still as part of our trauma-informed return to school. We need to take into consideration the other 25% that'll be returning to the classroom. Psychological first aid has been referred to is an LPC model and teach. A five-step program that has provided our educators' guidelines on how to speak with students who have experienced an emergency event or disaster that has disrupted the learning environment. It is within that context that Dr. Wong created sample questions for each of those steps, which is to listen, protect, connect, model, and teach during this worldwide pandemic.

Listen, what are some of the best ways for us to be posing some of our questions to our young people? Let's find out about their routine. What other pro-social activities are they doing? And making sure that we're going to be ready to listen when they're able to share.

When we're talking about protect, we're trying to get an insight and understanding of how they're feeling about their own safety or maybe the most significant concern about safety is of somebody else who might that be? Let's find out who they are most worried about and what they are most worried about.

This morning, we've been talking a lot about our connection to our radar group and to our high risk and vulnerable youth. Part of the connect and psychological first aid is working with them and making sure they have a connection strategy. What are some other ways that they could be connecting with other family members? How could they be connecting with their friends? And what has been helpful to them previously if they faced a crisis or challenging times.

Most importantly model. Again modeling calmness reminding them and thanking kids when they talk to us thanking them over and over again for sharing their concerns with us. Talk about them sharing the courage that they have shown and let's work with them on coming up with other ways of coping.

We always have multiple teaching languages to be able to show. Once again reiterating the importance of every conversation with our kids right now. We know the biggest challenge is routine. Talking to our kids but routine talking about yes, it's going to take some extra effort and extra self-discipline, but overall it would pay off and relieving any of the current stress that they may be feeling. Again routine, I think it's important that we strongly encourage our young people to try and refrain from their social media platforms while they're engaged in their remote learning sessions. We know that some of our kids have become overwhelmed with the schedule of online classes and homework. So starting to work with them about building a nutrition break is also very helpful.

And like always in psychological first aid, we've just got to remind people to let our young people know there are people that care about them and there are people that want to help and then we will support any time they want to talk or connect whatever that connection baseline is that we've created. If you haven't already make sure that schools are providing information around their services. And if you have started any school official accounts provide that information to them, there are many schools that have set up Instagram accounts and others in order to maintain that connection with their students. If you have then make sure your other students are made aware that it exists. Once again and notice the language. I really look forward to the time when we all return to school not if and just went on its own again language matters with everything that we do.

So what are some ways that we can start checking in on individuals that should be on our radar list that aren't showing up for their classes? One of the wonderful things that we have the option to do which we didn't necessarily have 8, 10, 12 years ago is of course our kids are on social media. So how do we now take advantage of that information that they're posting on their social media platforms and have that help us determine the digital behavioral baseline of our radar students? So we're going to talk a little bit more about digital baseline, how our analyst and when we train digital threat assessment how we share with folks how to find those social media accounts, how we then look to establish the students' digital baseline, why that is so important, and how the digital baseline also plays a role in us making an accurate determination of the level of risk of low, medium, or high risk.

So when we talk about a digital behavioral baseline we talked about what was this student's pre-pandemic digital baseline like? What were the posts like for the student pre-pandemic? So one of the things we're doing is we're finding social media accounts of our students that are on our high risk and vulnerable lists. I show the Taylor Swift page here because this could be Taylor Swift. This could be NBA it could be whomever you want it to be as long as they have a public Instagram account. I searched Instagram without having an Instagram account. I can search for user names in our threat assessments. I can search for hashtags that have come up. I can search for schools and any geotagged information to schools in that particular search bar. So your starting place can be through Instagram. And all you have to do is go instagram.com/taylorswift and at the very top of her page you folks are going to see a search box that's there and in that search box, you can search a username, you can search a first name or a last name. Again, we're seeing a lot of hashtags as it relates to mental health. You can search that hashtag. If you don't know what it means. You can search the hashtag there that will take you to all the other relevant accounts that have been tagged to that hashtag. So when we're off this call today, that would be one of the places I would tell you to start. Starting with Instagram whenever you're dealing with usernames or first and last names of a student of concern.

And while we're looking at doing some other searching, I just want to talk about incognito browsing if some of you are not familiar with that. Basically incognito browsing is just adding an extra layer of safety whenever we are looking at different pages. That way that search history won't appear in your browser history or your search history. They also won't leave traces like cookies on your computer, but even if you do go incognito websites may still collect or share information about you. Like they already do when you're already using your search features for personal or professional means.

So again, depending on what you use this particular case, we have Explorer, Firefox, and chrome. In your settings, you'll see that within two of those there. We have it says new in-private window, new private window, or new incognito window and chrome that is basically setting your computer to go incognito as we begin to search for any other information.

Always a good place to start when you're first getting familiar with searching on social media is starting to play around with yourself. Start with your first name and last name. One of the other things I would also say today is to become really best friend of Google. We can do a lot of amazing things on Google and I'm going to show you in a walkthrough video at the end of our presentation today, how we did that from kind of start to finish on a case that we were involved in. But in Google there is what's referred to is a boolean search operator. That's B O O L E A N and really all it is a fancy reference to taking a first name and a last name and put it into quotations into Google because it will narrow down your searches. So if I was to take my first and last name and put my first last name in quotations, and we know that I work with Safer Schools Together. I would put Teresa Campbell in quotations then put Safer Schools Together after my name. It is going to narrow the searches to ensure that you're getting the right Theresa Campbell. We use Google and quotations in the head said Boolean search, if we have a user name that comes up on a Snapchat threat. I'm going to take that username. I'm going to search it on Instagram, and I'm also going to search it in Google as a Boolean search which just means quotations. It's kind of weird doing this through webinar format because you can't see me doing air quotes in the air. So again, we start with Taylor Swift again. As I mentioned why I use Taylor Swift because she has all her platforms. There are no privacy settings so I can get to the search features on those platforms. But again the primary tool that we use besides Google. It's definitely Instagram because you don't need an account to be searching your school username or another name. And we can look for a self-based on location.

I just wanted to see what information is tagged to a certain city. You can search your school just to see who and what students have actually tagged images. This I would suggest that you continue doing this even after we returned to school because there's going to be a lot of information that you're going to have available to you about how the kids are feeling and I was hoping to share with you a sampling of all the different platforms where kids are talking about COVID and the pandemic and their depression and being suicidal. There's so much information out there because there are so many cries for help. It's just so important that there's more of us trying to look for this information. Our analyst as I said are working 24/7 and helping districts identify kids of concern to make sure we can start to align that trauma-informed return to school. Again, if I just wanted to look at a certain school, I could just type the name of the school into the Instagram search box. And now with this one here, it's showing Beaumont High School as you guys know, we have schools more than one school with a name. So I would be able to scroll down on the right where it says Beaumont High School and scroll down and click on the school that is in fact, my school's address. To make sure that I'm picking up content that has been tagged to my school. So you just have to cross-reference that with your address. And again, it's automatically going to take me to all of the images that have been tagged to the school. And in this particular high school there were multiple images and I could bring these images up if there's an image of concern. I could bring it up to its largest possible size and engage in some other search abilities if, in fact, we had any concerns about that image, so it's always good for right now something that schools can do just checking on the tags of your actual school and what's being tagged there and who’s tagging it.

And again, even though this is an image that was taken at home. It's still being they've tagged it to the school because it's the school they attend. I want to talk about this cute little guy for a moment. I know for many of you Snapchat has been a pain in your back. I know that based on the number of threats that we've been involved in. School shooting threats the most predominant platform for those threats has been Snapchat, but I do want to make sure that for right now while we're experiencing such a rapid increase of runaways that I want to make sure people today have enough knowledge around Snap Map how we've been using it for good. We used it just on Monday of this week when a young female had run away and one of the things that I said to the officer who asked if our threat analyst could help was that if he'd had any contact with her best friends yet. And he said he hadn't so I had suggested that he go and he make a connection with her best friend find out if she has her on Snap Map which most of our kids today to have each other on Snap. Map and as soon as she pulled up her map it showed exactly what town the runaway was in it showed exactly what residents she was in and it actually showed which part of the house she was in actually showed that she was in the rear of the residence and you could tell she was on the upper floor. So again, how do we use these apps that have been a pain in our side for a long time?

At Safer Schools Together, we've embraced technology because of the work I have done in the behavioral threat assessment for years. I've become really excited around technology because we're getting much better data now when we are conducting our threat assessments. You've heard from the US Secret Service recently, they have now stated very publicly, you just can't do a threat assessment without examining the social networking pages of the young person. For us, we call that digital threat assessment. It's really important because if somebody has made a threat where else can we look for any other behaviors consistent with that threat because we have many kids that are making threats but not every kid is engaged in documented behaviors consistent with the threat. So technology has been significant the cries for help. As I said, we're monitoring the cries for help that we're seeing right now during this pandemic. So as much as technology has been a challenge, I think it's been the best thing that has ever come to us in the early intervention side in a data-driven response side in our threat assessments.

So let's just talk a little bit about what that looks like. We're trying to establish a student's digital behavioral baseline. What are we looking for? So, you know, we're glad to see some of our students and we happen to find somebody that we might be concerned about. So we're taking a look at some images might be some images that were concerned about firearms, references to suicide, depression. I will take a close look at the bio of the individual. You can see up here. We've got her Snapchat account, which is good. She's got a blocked VSCO account. If you're not familiar with that, VSCO is actually a platform that students cannot make anything private. So when they have a VSCO account that's actually good news for our analysts that are trying to pull together a behavioral baseline because, in their VSCO account, they have posted images and videos that might help tell us a story about what else might be going on for this young person.

Again identifiers to make sure that we've got the right student easier for you folks to do when you're looking at your own students. But when our threat analysts are helping out from our offices again, you folks know your students. We don't so they have to be really confident that they're identifying the right individual of concern. So again pay attention to the bio some of our statuses right now is we're seeing many kids hashtag depressed, hashtag suicidal, hashtag. f*** the pandemic is very common. I can't take this anymore. So again a lot of cries for help not even in their posts or actually placing it right in their bio. So obviously this is still concerning and if we're thinking about this individual returning to your school, would you be concerned if she has escalated significantly since the pandemic so when we're talking about the baseline of the student, has the baseline shifted? Because if it has, we should be concerned about this particular student. Her baselines shifted significantly, but one week prior to the pandemic. So that is a significant concern because we have two other years of a documented behavioral digital baseline were in fact, she was never engaging in any of the behaviors that you're seeing here. So when we see a spike in that behavioral baseline that is a cause of concern for us and now we want to focus what else is happening what significantly happened when we saw that spike and change in baseline. You guys can hopefully see on your screens, this was kind of the first kind of worrisome date which I believe is March the 9th. Then this one here is one week and four weeks ago. So again, we're paying attention to the frequency and intensity of the posts, and if somebody has gone from just talking about their dogs and working on the weekend to these types of posts. We should be incredibly concerned and making sure that we're reaching out.

Our team's when you're looking at digital baseline reports, you have to become really good at hypothesizing what else could be going on that has caused this shift in the baseline. Maybe you folks would know what's happening in the family dynamics as well which contributes greatly to the overall level of risk of our students. So you might already have that information. We still have to look at some of these cases right now if this student is an immediate threat to themselves or someone else. Those situations were immediately contacting law enforcement for mental health and safety checks. The other thing that we've been seeing a lot of during the pandemic a lot more than normal we were seeing the before the pandemic but we are seeing a lot of accounts that school districts are reaching out for to have them taken down. We have an account we're dealing with today that has gone viral and it is a go kill yourself. Posted images on how to kill yourself and it's important that everybody understands how to report an account because we need to do it immediately. The impact of some of these viral accounts right now on our youth is significant and I don't think any of us are surprised by this. Our kids were exposed to this prior to this pandemic, but they have now seen that multiply and I think right now I'd have to save just through my lens, I don't know how my threat analyst would feel, I think it's intensified four or five times fold. The go kill yourself pages that we're seeing are of significant concern because as many of you know, if we have young people that already have pre-existing symptomatology for suicidal ideation, and we now have pages of 1500 people jumping on their telling her or him how ugly they are, go do it. We should all be very concerned about that. Instagram has not made it easy for us. But at least they are now responding to our takedown requests. So I just want to show you briefly how you or with your parents or your students. If they come to you with any of these accounts how you can guide them to get that account taken out.

On this Instagram remote page you can see here these three dots. And basically this is going to pop up. So we want to circle report user. Now it's going to ask us why we're reporting this account. They don't make it easy. We're going to go through a couple of steps here. It's inappropriate. Why are you reporting this account? Again reporting account. Again, why are you reporting this account? It's a posting that shouldn't be on Instagram. Here are their reasons why so again, you'll see the suicide, self-injury, or eating disorders. That one right now is probably the most significant request that we have been making since the pandemic started. But in this case, because it's a targeted harassment account. We're going to select bullying or harassment. Who is being bullied or harassed? Someone I know and now I get my response from Instagram and it says down below block Amanda sucks is now gone into their queue. So, please share that with everybody including your students. Ask them if they know how to report because our kids are being inundated with a lot of hate and harmful accounts.

Okay, one of the last activities I wanted to walk you through even though we are now in a remote learning world. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that pictures of guns being sent to teachers are not still happening. It is. So again, not the school shooting threats, but our teachers have been receiving them. Basically, the last one I dealt with was a picture of guns and saying you better mark my test now kind of thing. So we still want to follow our best practice of principles and just because the student has sent this image of these firearms, we don't want to overreact and assume that he or she may have them. And in a case like this. I'm just going to walk through video so I can just talk you through this here.

This is very concerning. Absolutely and again with threat assessment, we would be assessing the language of the threat. Is there a specific reference to a specific target? Are they providing justification as to why they're implying a threat towards this target? So what‘s being provided there? So one of the things I want to do is immediately take a screenshot of that picture in its entirety. So you don't know how to take a screenshot. You should learn how to take a screenshot. So now that I have a screenshot of the entire picture, I'm now going to go to a website called TinEye.com. Because I've saved a photo, I'm going to upload that photo to TinEye and I'm going to ask it “is this a unique or stock image?” Zero results. So that's quite concerning. That means it's quite likely a unique image. Meaning that he quite likely in possession of those weapons. To cross-reference my findings, I'm going to go to Google image search. Just in this Google image search bar. When you click on that camera, it's going to give us the option to upload the same image. So I'm cross-referencing my work between Google images and TinEye. It tells us there are no other sizes found, maybe two images. And the two images are not exact. So that told us in this particular case, this is an older case that we dealt with, this told us in that particular case he had access to all those firearms. Now what we were able to do because we've confirmed that it was a unique image and you can see I've just Googled his name now in the search bar, but the quotations to see what other social media accounts he has I'd have to scroll until I make sure that I have the right one. But because we did that reverse image search on the weapons that now allows law enforcement to inquire a search warrant to get a search warrant to remove those weapons and that search warrant templates are in the first resource area that I gave you at the start of this session.

So you'll notice when we searched his name and quotations it gave us a number of his different accounts. This is his account here. And this is a staff account that we are using to log in. Again, I want everyone to keep in mind everything that we are identifying is publicly available open-source social media. So we're not doing kind of like the big brother thing. We're using it when we responding the school safety-related issues. We’re using data and information that everybody else could access as well. So again, the baseline is always helpful. We've had a lot of cases where some very alarming content has been found by a school administrator, which is definitely concerning. Don't get me wrong. But from a threat assessment team approach when our analysts find that there's been an established behavioral baseline for a period of time, that's actually the good news. It can be extremely alarming but when we demonstrate that this individual student is have been engaging in similar behaviors over the last two, three, four year period that initial immediate level of risk is reduced. Now, don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean that we're not still wanting to do some work around gathering information, looking into intervention plans for this individual, but that immediacy of the risk of concern has been reduced because we're establishing a baseline of the concerning behavior.

Okay, and the last thing I just want to make people aware of if there are any youth right now that you're just from this presentation. We could really use some help. You're definitely more than welcome to reach out to our team at intake at safer schools together.com and ask them for the high risk and vulnerable youth digital check-in and we will do our best to assist you. In putting that digital baseline report together for you. Again, based on the nature of the size of this pandemic, we're not turning anybody down. Obviously, it's based on numbers. But we will do our best for you as we're already doing this for many of our school district clients, but I also if there are people out there right now that you're really concerned about by all means please reach out to us. And again, like I mentioned before I knew I was giving you a lot of information today and that information is still there, take some time on the website take some time exploring and greater details the COVID toolkit that is there for you and again the videos which the other password was sst-zoomsafe. Again, there's other information there around student engagement in a remote learning environment. There is other information on if you're using Google Classroom and Teams and all of those other elements. And please whenever you can try and share that parent resource because this was already a struggle beforehand to try and get our parents more educated around kids and these digital platforms in once again, that's greater than it's ever been before. We also currently have on our website. I think one of the sessions is occurring, right. We are hosting a few free complimentary student and parent sessions. We have a couple of special sessions coming up just for school administrators as well. But I just want to thank all of you for being here today. I applaud you for all the work that you do and once again just like to thank CrisisGo for hosting this session today. Thank you very much.

Thank you Teresa. What a powerful presentation just full of valuable information and just judging from the questions and a lot of the comments and compliments that are coming in right now. You can tell that this information is absolutely right on target in and really needed right now. By way of introduction. I'm Chris Buecksler the Vice President of Marketing for CrisisGo. I just want to take this opportunity to thank both Teresa and Jeff for presenting today and for sharing such valuable and timely information. I also want to thank each of you for attending this webinar and for everything that you are doing as educators and mental health professionals during this really unprecedented time. As Jeff detailed at the start of the webinar, we all are going to continue to face uncertainty when it comes to finishing this academic year. One day potentially, reopening our schools in some capacity and in really starting to turn the corner and recover to a more accustomed teaching and learning environment.

Many of CrisisGo’s customers have told us that some of the issues school district leaders across the country are looking to address include assessing the physical health of students' families and staff to minimize the risk of infection or reinfection and really helping to continue to control the spread of the disease. Another issue obviously is around facility sanitation and cleaning and just ongoing maintenance and making sure that those facilities remain clean and sanitized. Obvious challenges with distance learning both from the preparation management and certainly from a measurement standpoint. But most importantly is Teresa really out and did an amazing job outlining today. How do they evaluate and how do we continue to evaluate the mental wellness of both students and staff as they continue to adjust to their remote environments and certainly as Teresa kind of concluded with how do we deal with students of concern?

In order to help district leaders and school operations team CrisisGo has taken steps to help districts and schools address some of these unprecedented challenges. We've produced a series of webinars like this one today to continue to share valuable information from subject matter experts like Teresa and Jeff obviously to help inform your response and recovery plans. CrisisGo also launched a free microsite that's filled with valuable information and helpful resources, specific to some of these current situations that we're facing. We continue with a crowdsourcing project to collect and share best practices from school district leaders around the country on how they've been addressing some of the unique challenges COVID-19 has posed. We strongly encourage you to sign up and participate in this really vital project. CrisisGo has also developed an easy to deploy technology tool to help gather real-time local data that uses an intelligence survey platform this tool collects health logistics safety information that can help leaders make more informed decisions with actionable data. It can also provide logistics management or facility audit reports for some of the really daunting projects that honestly guys, they're not that far off things like ensuring buildings are clean and safe to reopen, taking inventory of vital personal protection equipment or PPE s throughout a district and community. Best of all this tool qualifies for COVID recovery funds that are now becoming more available to schools. To ensure that this tool can be in place at your district to help with the next wave of these new challenges, CrisisGo has a special introductory offer on this tool. You'll receive some information about this exclusive offer in the follow-up information along with the slides the recording to this webinar all the passwords that Teresa shared. I encourage you to contact CrisisGo if you want to schedule a consultation before that, but all of the information will be in the follow-up materials. Lastly, I just want to say, you know, our current situation really reinforces that we have to expect the unexpected whether it's another pandemic or a second wave of this one, whether its natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes. Schools are going to face sudden disruptions. We just we've come to know that. We're reminded by this and continue to be reinforced, we need to be prepared and we need to have continuity of operations plans in place. With that I'm going to turn it over to Greg for our Q&A.

Thank you, Chris. And thanks again, Jeff and Teresa for your presentations. Let's move right along to the Q&A. And just a reminder if anyone has any questions they haven't asked yet, you can still submit those through the questions panel. And to reiterate what Chris said all the conference materials will be included in an email after the event. So our first question is what are your recommendations for contacting students or families that are not responding to any calls or emails?

Well, one of my recommendations would be if it is all possible to be able to work with a community partner for somebody to try and do safely while practicing physical distancing, just a knock and talk to check-in.

And then the next question is how do you access Snapchat to do a digital threat assessment?

Yeah. So Snapchats a little more difficult when you're involved in any type of a threat assessment because we're somewhat reliant on a peer or friend of our threat maker that has them on Snapchat because much like a lot of people think it disappears. It doesn't. So many times that threat or the content is in that person's Snapchat story which we have access to for 24 hours. So if it is something of significance the only real way to access it would be through a friend's device or somebody associated to the threat maker or the target and have them replay the Snapchat threat for us while we record with a secondary device because we don't want to have that student record because that sends that person a message that they've just recorded that Snapchat. So using a secondary device to record.

The next question is are you familiar with safe voice or safe to tell platforms in which concerns, as you're presenting, can be reported to schools and districts.

Yeah, absolutely as a matter of fact, when I first created our tool psst promoting safer schools together that was right about the time the very first platform of safe to tell was evolving. I work very closely with Susan who took the lead on the development, Susan Paine on the development of safe to tell and so yeah, very familiar with those platforms.

Then another question is I would love some ideas for how to check in with elementary high-risk students who are not likely to have any social media accounts.

Okay. Well first let's just say that we are finding that elementary-age kids have quite a few accounts. So I would probably suggest first and foremost taking some of the steps that I've talked about today. And then if not, if we have those phone numbers using whether as I said earlier the call whether we're using Google call or Whatsapp or a text message if they have phones or encourage the parent to have them contact us is also can be done as a secondary response.

And someone asked about free sessions for school administrators if you had more information on that?

Yeah, if they go to our website. I know the parents and student ones are complementary. There might be a nominal fee for the administrator one, but it's definitely it'll be quite nominal. It won't be anywhere near what we typically charge for the in-school session.

All right, and it looks like our last question here is how this type of work factor into rule area with much lesser resources. More limited resources. Sorry.

Yeah, and we appreciated that can be a little more challenging and you know those individuals from those areas, by all means, reach out to me individually and we can strategize.

Wonderful. Well, I think that is the last question that we had today. We really appreciate Jeff and Teresa collaborating and helping us out here presenting their knowledge with us. If you have any additional questions, you can always email marketin@crisisgo.com and we'll get with Jeff and Theresa and get the answers that you need. We'll also be sending out the webinar related materials, the recording of this webinar, the slides, and everything used in the coming days. So please lookout for that. Thanks again for joining us. Stay safe.

Thanks, everyone.