After Virginia Tech Boulder works to avoid incidence
Though Boulder-area schools have largely avoided the recent rash of school threats in the Denver area, law enforcement and school administrators are focusing on the mental health of students in order to prevent violence in Boulder schools.
The recent rash of threats in Denver-area schools has come in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings and the eight-year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy.
“We keep track of students with mental health issues through what we call a ‘mental health hold,'” said CU Police Department spokesman Brad Wiesley. “These are situations where we ‘tag’ individuals as either extremely dangerous to others or to themselves.”
Wiesley said the Boulder County Mental Health Center then reviews the police hold and sends the case to the Boulder courts system, where a judge either removes the hold or orders its continuation.
“It’s got to be very serious for us to issue a hold,” Wiesley said. “These would be instances of threats of suicide, or very dangerous behavior toward others.”
Wiesley said these cases are rare.
“We’ve experienced 15 mental health holds since the beginning of the school year, which is exactly the same amount we had the year before,” Wiesley said.
The low number of mental health issues may explain why CU has had very few threats of violence on campus.
After a Virginia Tech student who was ordered by a Virginia judge to seek mental health treatment shot and killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself on April 16, many Denver-area schools saw increased threats of violence. During that same time, CU experienced just two real scares.
On April 18, CU police arrested Max Karson, a junior psychology student, after he allegedly said there were aspects of CU that “made him angry enough to kill people.” He was booked on misdemeanor charges of interference with faculty, staff and students of an education institution.
The next day CU police arrested freshman Matthew Furnish following a police seizure of two guns and a knife from his Kittredge West dorm room. Furnish was formally charged April 25 with three felonies and a misdemeanor.
“Since Jan.1, 2006, we’ve had a couple of dozen ‘threat’ calls but those are almost all along the lines of one person threatening another with physical assault,” Wiesley said. “As far as weapons go, we had about 20 calls with the word ‘weapon’ in them.”
Wiesley also said that the overall incidence of weapons threats is infrequent, and most turn out to be fairly mild.
Other Boulder schools have also seen few threats of violence.
“Our numbers appear to be no different from last year, with the exception of maybe one or two more threats total,” said Briggs Gamblin, communications director for the Boulder Valley School District.
According to Gamblin, the overwhelming majority of Boulder schools receive no threats during the average school year.
Gamblin said that during the 2006-2007 school year, only five Boulder-area schools received threats. Monarch, Fairview and Boulder high schools all received serious threats, along with Manhattan and Southern Hills middle schools.
“All the threats we dealt with came within a week to 10 days after the Platte Canyon High School and Amish school shootings in the fall, and then around the Friday before spring break,” Gamblin said. “These all appear to be tense times throughout schools.”
Gamblin said the majority of what he would call ‘threats’ seem to be pranks which students don’t intend to carry out.
Boulder police spokeswoman Julie Brooks said that Boulder schools have their own procedures with threats of violence, and they are not obligated to report all threats to the police department.
“On any threat we receive, information has to be assessed as to how legitimate the threat is based on the source, history and background information,” Brooks said.
Part of that background information may include the mental health history of the student or students making the threats.
According to Dr. Anne Cowardin-Bach, director of psychological health and psychiatry at CU’s Wardenburg Health Center, there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the rise in mental health issues on college campuses in the last decade parallels the increase in on-campus violence.
“In my experience, students as a whole are more violent today than ever before,” Cowardin-Bach said. “Students appear to be less prepared for the stresses of college life, and they are less skilled in ways of dealing with pressure.”
Cowardin-Bach also said that her department has recently seen more acute and intense types of mental health diagnoses, such as depression, bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia, and that historically these are the people most at risk for cases of violent behavior.
“The seriousness of diagnoses has also increased, and there are more students nowadays coming to campus already on medication,” Cowardin-Bach said. “Nowadays, certain medications can keep some students stable enough to have a college experience they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have.”
But Cowardin-Bach also said that except in specific diagnoses, these students are not necessarily more prone to violent behavior, at least in her experience.
They are, rather, part of an increasing trend in mental health awareness on college campuses.
“We’ve just gotten better at identifying students with mental health issues,” Cowardin-Bach said. “And students have become more open to therapy, also.”
The tragedy at Virginia Tech has alerted schools on how to respond to students who may have mental health issues.
The gunman in the Virginia Tech shootings, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, exhibited classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, according to some medical health professionals.
The Virginia Tech shootings still raise the question of whether or not there is a true parallel between mental instability and in-school violence.
“We just don’t know yet if there’s a connection,” Gamblin said. “It would be complete guess work.”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Tim McAvoy at tim.mcavoy@thecampuspress.com.
