Local officials proactive in preventing school violence

A school-violence scare grazed the Mount Pleasant community last week when a 13-year-old student made an alleged verbal threat to kill a middle-school principal.
Another 13-year-old allegedly made threats against the school population and had also stored an unloaded gun owned by the other student's mother.
Both students are in parental custody, unable to attend school until the investigation is complete. The gun is in police custody and the Isabella County Prosecutor's Office is still reviewing the case.
"I wish these types of things didn't have to happen in our community, but they do," said Bill Yeagley, director of the Mount Pleasant Department of Public Safety.
The situation may have been worse, he said, had it not been for the partnerships between the local schools, students, parents, overall community and police.
"These relationships made it possible that the student didn't get the gun to the school. The partnerships are a wonderful example of intervention, and of how we prevented this.
"If you leave anyone out of the formula, you leave the possibility for the student to get the gun into the school. It didn't happen, and that's a very positive thing."
Before police do anything, a complete investigation must be completed, he said. But long before the local scare of school violence occurred, Yeagley and other community leaders were thinking of how Mount Pleasant can prevent the tragedies that so many other towns in America have experienced.
Towns like Moses Lake, Wash.; Pearl, Miss.; West Peducah, Ky.; Littleton, Colo.; and Mount Morris Township, Mich., are just some of the several areas where violence has entered schools.
Yeagley said the heads of Isabella County police agencies gather every Monday morning to discuss essential issues. One Monday last summer, someone brought up school violence.
And the brainstorming began.
A selection committee was formed last August and chose various community members for a school-violence research team. The police group was the catalyst for the team, which aims to bring helpful information from other communities back to Isabella County, Yeagley said.
Yeagley is the project supervisor for the research team, consisting of clergy, mental-health officials, educators, law enforcement and media members. The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe has contributed approximately $53,000 for the research group through 2-percent tribal allocations.
Yeagley said the group takes a proactive approach of interacting with members of other communities.
"If you look someone in the eye and talk with them, it's much better than reading an article about the incident," he said.
The research team hopes to learn from other communities that have endured school violence, identify students at risk and learn intervening measures.
"If we do have an incident, we have to have a police response. And we need to know how to stop this incident from actually happening in the first place," Yeagley said.
"We can gain this knowledge by talking to people who experienced these incidents, and share things that they did and might have done differently, so we don't have to experience the same things."
If an incident occurs, the whole community suffers for a long period of time afterward, he said.
"We have to have a plan. What can we do to heal the wounds?"
The research team met Wednesday morning and scheduled its first site visit. Six members of the team will visit Pearl, Miss., on April 17, 18 and 19, said Walt Lesiak, project consultant for the team and CMU psychology professor.
On Oct. 1, 1997, a 16-year-old boy in Pearl was accused of killing his mother, and then going to Pearl High School and shooting nine students. Two of them died, including the boy's ex-girlfriend. He is now serving three life sentences.
Team members visiting Pearl include: Lesiak; Mount Pleasant Police Sgt. Doug LaLone; Kim Rogers, limited license psychologist and unit supervisor for Central Michigan Mental Health Clinic, 301 S. Crapo St.; Kim Stegman, probation officer for Isabella County Probate Court, 200 N. Main St.; Roger Gilbert, principal at Rosebush Elementary School, 3771 N. Mission St.; and Pat Housley, director of community relations and recruitment manager at Central Michigan Community Hospital, 1221 South Drive.
In Pearl, Lesiak said the team will meet with police and mental-health and school officials to gain insight and knowledge about what the community endured.
Rogers said she'll talk with community mental-health providers and school counselors during the visits.
"Hindsight is 20/20," she said. "But we want to find out what they would have done differently as well as what worked."
Finding out what kind of after-care is available for those who lived through the violence is another component of Rogers' role on the team.
The team is currently working on arranging other sites to visit this year as well, Lesiak said.
Rogers said Littleton may be the last site visited, in September. Littleton is home to Columbine High School, where two students shot and killed 12 classmates, a teacher and themselves last April.
Rena Richtig, CMU assistant professor of educational administration and community leadership, is another member of the team. She said the team will probably not visit Mount Morris Township in the near future.
On Feb. 29, a 6-year-old boy took a gun to his Mount Morris Township school and shot a 6-year-old classmate, who died a short time later while hospitalized.
Richtig said the team won't go to Mount Morris Township anytime soon because "some time is needed for people there to be able to talk objectively about it."
Yeagley also said visits are largely based on when a community can work with the team, and that the team does not consider one community more important than another.
A report on the research team's findings is planned after the visits are completed.