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- Fed's 'Mosaic 2000' Program To
Spot
Potentially Violent Students
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- The federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is
assisting in the development of a
computer program to help school administrators
spot troubled students
who might be near the brink of violence, the NEW
YORK TIMES is
reporting in Sunday editions.
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- The computer program, known as Mosaic-2000, begins
testing
at more than 20 schools in December -- and the new system will
vet and
rate potentially violent students on a scale of 1 to
10!
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- Francis X. Clines reports in the TIMES:
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- "The Mosaic school program
promises to provide questions
carefully crafted from case histories by
200 experts in law enforcement,
psychiatry and other areas. A variety
of concerns beyond alarming talk
or behavior will be included, from the
availability of guns to a youngster's
abuse of dogs and
cats."
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- The program, still being formulated, will be tested in
grades
one through 12.
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- The software will not be connected to any central data
program,
the B.A.T.F. promises.
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- "I think it's a wonderful tool that has a great
deal of potential...," Andrew Vita, associate director for field
operations
of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, tells the
TIMES.
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- "It's easy to pick out the gang members with tattoos,"
adds Vita. "It's these other people that kind of surprise
administrators,
and these are the ones they really need to
identify."
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- _______________
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- Another story on the FBI's new Mosaic 2000
program...
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- The Violent-Kid Profile
A
Controversial New Technique for Beating Violence
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- By Mary Lord
U.S. News Online Science & Ideas
http://www.usnews.c
om/usnews/issue/991011/profile.htm
- 10/11/99
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- The slackening rain of a major
storm smacked the windows
as several dozen Dallastown, Pa., teachers
and principals gathered in an
elementary school cafeteria for a
workshop on emergency management. Their
focus wasn't on natural
disasters like the weather outside, however. Instead,
they were getting
a cram course from former police detective Peter Blauvelt,
head of the
National Alliance for Safe Schools, on how to handle violence
from
within. His top tactic: Identify alienated, troubled students - the
"nonsqueaky wheels" - before they snap.
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- "We don't know much about
what tips a person to
the level of rage where they can take someone
else's life," Blauvelt
cautioned. But he ticked off 17 warning
signs, from social withdrawal to
violent writings to angry outbursts
and even poor grades.
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- Law enforcers have long used psychological
"profiling"
to nab serial killers and terrorists. Now, school
districts are embracing
the concept as a way to attack violence at its
roots. By training their
radar on potential signs of violence,
educators hope to pinpoint troubled
students before they pull the
trigger, then intervene with counseling.
Prevention is "the
critical thing," explains Dallastown's superintendent,
Bill
Thompson.
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- In the process, however, schools are dramatically recasting
the
rules of acceptable behavior. Since last April's shootings at Columbine
High School, students as young as third graders have been reprimanded,
suspended, and even arrested for things they say in class, post on the
Internet, or wear to school. Civil-liberties advocates call it the biggest
crackdown on student rights in recent memory.
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- "Early warnings." So
far, metal detectors vastly
outnumber "mental" detectors. But
with the U.S. Education Department
handing out an "early
warning" violence-prevention guide to every
superintendent in the
country, that may change. The report details 16 indicators
of potential
danger, including chronic bullying and drug use, with caveats
on
checklist interpretations. Groups like the National School Safety Center
in Westlake Village, Calif., as well as the fbi Academy's behavioral
sciences
unit, offer more abbreviated profiles; risk factors run from
low self-esteem
to cruelty to animals.
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- Some districts are already
leaping at the opportunity.
In Granite City, Ill., a student who writes
about "the dark side of
life" and has access to guns can face
required counseling - or expulsion
- under a new school-safety policy
that includes a 20-point behavioral
checklist for gauging the risk of
violence. The district also intends to
keep computerized behavioral
files on every pupil from kindergarten on
up, noting such incidents as
bullying or a sibling's bringing a gun to
school.
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- The Dighton-Rehoboth school
district in southeastern
Massachusetts plans to watch for such
indicators as isolation, slipping
grades, and unusual garb. And next
month, 20 elementary, middle, and high
schools nationwide will test a
new version of Mosaic-2000, a computer-assisted
system that has been
helping government agencies size up threatening people
and situations
for years. Even the fbi has gotten involved, hosting a violence-prevention
conference for educators that included behavioral profiling.
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- But some profiles can
seem vague enough to include any
kid suffering from teenage angst, says
Kevin Dwyer, president of the National
Association of School
Psychologists and coauthor of the Education Department's
early-warning
guide. "Listens to songs that promote violence ... Appears
to be
an average student ... Isolated ... Dresses sloppily," he says,
reeling off points from an fbi article on school violence. "I mean,
excuse me. This is another definition of adolescence!" He and others
worry that profiling's mental-health component will fall by the wayside,
leaving little more than a bias-filled checklist. "I know of no
evaluation
tool that will identify a mass murderer," he says.
"The problem
with this whole [profiling] thing is that if you're
dealing with a serial
killer and have 25 suspects and you can see a
pattern, that might be something
useful. But when you're talking about
53 million children and putting this
in the hands of people who don't
understand the material ... you're going
to do irreparable
harm."
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- Many educators think such fears are overblown. "When
it
comes to protecting health and safety, I'd rather err on the side of
safety," says Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National
Association
of Secondary School Principals. And school officials report
strong community
support for profiling and other safety initiatives.
After Granite City's
school board recently banned vivid hair dye, for
example, parents called
to express their gratitude.
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- Rights,
responsibilities. Student-rights advocates worry
that profiling will
only exacerbate the free-speech and privacy violations
that erupted
post-Columbine. "There should not have to be a trade-off
between
security and safety on the one hand and students' rights on the
other," says aclu President Nadine Strossen. "It's really
important
that we don't overreact."
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- Yet overreact is what some
schools seem to do. Consider
the case of 14-year-old Graham Gardner, a
ninth grader at Grace E. Metz
Junior High in Manassas, Va., who was
read his Miranda rights by a uniformed
police officer and suspended for
10 days. His crime? Writing a response
to an English-class assignment
to finish the following sentence: "If
I could do anything to this
school, I would . . ."
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- "Blow it up" was how Gardner started his
essay.
But he went on to discuss how he would rebuild the school with
first-rate
labs and top science teachersa fact that, along with a clean
discipline
record and aclu assistance, prompted the school board to
absolve him. Though
he didn't miss a day of school, Gardner says the
incident "changed
the way I think about certain words and how I
use them." He avoids
writing essays and speaks less often in class
because "it seems like
[teachers] are trying to catch people on
everything."
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- Identifying troubled youths often proves easier than
getting
them the help they need. Fewer than 10 percent of schools offer
comprehensive mental-health care, notes Mark Weist, director of the Center
for School Mental Health Assistance at the University of Maryland medical
school. And while studies indicate that 1 student in 4 would benefit from
mental-health services at some point in his school years, only a third
of those who need treatment ever get any.
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- Sometimes, however, even
hair-trigger safety policies
can have unforeseen positive effects.
Graham Gardner says he is now being
"as nice as possible to
people" he once made fun of, lest he
invite being branded a bully.
His new attitude not only has served to keep
him out of trouble; it has
earned him a lot of new friends.
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- ____________
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- Comment
-
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- Violence, gangs,
rape, metal detectors, ID badges, profiling,
drugs (mostly Prozac &
Ritalin), controlled access, uniforms, and now
mental
evaluations...
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- So, which will be the better analogy for schools in the
next
millenium: prisons or psychiatric wards?
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- In my humble opinion, it's the
parents that subject their
kids to this garbage who need to have their
heads examined.
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- But then, do you suppose any parent who refuses to have
their
child evaluated under "Mosaic-2000" will get a
"profile"
of their own logged into some FBI database
somewhere?
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- Figure it out: This is a federally-funded program. Its
"success" or failure will be based upon the number of cases
processed.
Guess what? If Moasic-2000 doesn't ferret out sufficient
numbers of "problem"
cases the funding goes away and federal
employees lose their job. I'll
bet Mosaic-2000's a resounding
success!
-
- Scott
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