School Safety Part 5: Mental Health and Gun Control
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Part 5: Mental Health & Gun Control Many of the suspects in mass shootings over the years were revealed to have some form of mental health issue. According to a Dec. 14 Mother Jones article, at least 38 of the 62 mass shooters in the past three decades “displayed signs of possible mental health problems prior to the killings.” “Mental health is a big issue in this country,” Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department Captain Aaron Rovenstine said. “I think it was in the ’80s or so, they shut down a lot of state-ran facilities and we end up with them in jail, and we’re not trained to deal with mental people in jail. And we don’t help. We incarcerate them, and just let them out, and they come back.” He continued, “I do understand the mental health issue and I do think stronger background checks would be a step in the right direction. That’s not totally undoable or unrealistic. That’s only part of the problem. We do need more mental institutions. We have a lot of people, I know, in our jail that don’t belong there and we’re not trained to deal with.” Warsaw Community Schools has its own mental health specialists, but also has a very strong relationship with the Bowen Center, according to Chief Academics Officer David Hoffert. “Bowen Center provides a lot of assistance inside our school,” Hoffert said. “So again it’s really a two-front approach.” “It’s really a three-front if you count our employee assistance program as well,” Chief Technology Officer Brad Hagg offered. “I would say that we do have access to mental health counselors. I’d say we do have a lot of kids that we are giving assistance, pointing in the right direction if it’s beyond our ability to help,” said Jon Hutton, Tippecanoe Valley High School assistant principal. “We have Ed Mobley who’s a mental health therapist who is on staff here. He’s almost here every day meeting with kids and has taken kids onto his case load as the need has arisen or the situation presented itself.” Valley also has two “great” counselors on staff at the high school, Hutton said, but “you can never have too much. We’re always looking for people to help our kids, support our kids. Give them the strategies they need to be successful as they struggle with all the challenges of life.” Tippecanoe Valley Middle School Assistant Principal Scott Backus said, “You can add the relationship we have with Bowen Center. Counselors come in and work with our kids. “For the middle school, one of the really big positives for us this year, along the lines of mental health help, is the high school Peers group is coming down to our building once a week and meeting with some of our at-risk kids and providing some peer support for them,” he continued. Several items have come from those Peer students as red-flag concerns that were then addressed by adults. They were able to get those middle school kids some additional help who needed it. “So that’s been a huge, huge positive for us,” Backus said. Brett Boggs, Valley superintendent, said, “I think you’ll find, as you research the tragedies that occurred in schools, a lot of them have been students that have brought weapons to school. And I think one of the most important things that we can do is establish a culture in our schools where students are willing to, if they know something is going on, where someone has a weapon or someone has made a threat, to go to an adult and share that with them. ... If you can establish a culture in a school where kids care enough about each other, and are willing to do that, that’s absolutely the best thing you can have.” Could more gun control keep weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill or criminals? “I just don’t see anything they’re proposing that will have that much affect as far as gun control,” Rovenstine said. “There’s just too many weapons already in this country, and I’m a strong advocate of the Second Amendment anyway, and I just think they’re wasting a lot of time and energy on something that will have little effect. It’s almost like they’re just trying to do something political and not anything to look at the problem.”
