School threat prevention training all about keeping kids safe

Tino Bovenzi
·2 min read

NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio (WJW) – Preventing school threats are a top priority for police departments and school resource officers all over the country but doing so is a 24/7 job that requires monitoring concerns on school premises and online.

To give school resource officers an advantage in prevention and response to threats, the Ohio School Safety Center (OSSC) hosted a training conference at North Olmsted High School on Friday.

More than 300 law enforcement agencies from around the state participated.

“Trainings like this provide both first responders in our schools tools to either find prevention methods that work for their schools, hearing best practices from across the US, as well as in Ohio, but also how can I intervene if I see something wrong,” OSSC Executive Director Emily Torok said.

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Torok said school safety is a complex, ever-changing landscape that has evolved with social media apps. Five training seminar sessions covered a range of topics but included social media threats.

“Getting to know what the new tools are, getting to know what the latest trends are, and safety, what to look out for online, how to search for some of these online threats, how to find profiles, how to find IP addresses, different things like that, but also the networking at these events, getting to know the experts in your area,” Torok said.

North Olmsted School Resource Officer Jon Frantz knows getting multiple agencies on the same page is essential to saving lives.

“Safety of the kids is the number one priority, even before education,” Frantz said. “We wanna get them safe and then when they come here, they can get a good education, too.”

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Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office Special Assistant James Carbone says collaboration between departments at events like this is a great way to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to school safety.

“One city or one school might be seeing something that we haven’t seen yet,” Carbone said. “So that’s where the collaboration is really important. But this is also a brotherhood of sisterhood. We’re like a family and we know if something hits the fan in one of these communities, we’re all responding, and we have to be on the same page.”

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