Making Colorado Schools Safer Through Partnerships and Collaboration

As the leader in our state’s school safety efforts, the Office of School Safety, a team within the Colorado Department of Public Safety, seeks to share our efforts and our role in partnering with communities, school districts, educators and adjacent partners all with the goal of making students across our state safer. 

In late October, our team hosted the Colorado School Safety Summit, our largest educational event of the year, featuring invaluable discussions and opportunities to collaborate to enhance the physical and psychological safety of Colorado’s K-12 students. The conversation enabled us to provide critical information and resources to school staff, mental health providers and emergency responders.

The Summit caters to a diverse audience, including school administrators, school-based mental health professionals and safety and security personnel. It features national plenary presentations that are often outside the budgets and capacity of Colorado school districts, and promotes collaborative presentations among state partners that address the needs of urban, suburban, and rural school districts, as well as charters and independent schools.

National speakers were tapped this year to present research on educator safety (Dr. Dorothy Espelage, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), nihilistic ideologies (Dr. Gina Ligon, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center [NCITE] at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, courtesy of the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab), and collaboration opportunities in a climate with no complaining (Will Bowen). Dr. Espelage specifically credited Colorado as being ahead of the national curve due to the work envisioned by our legislature and led by the Office of School Safety’s Educator Safety Task Force. That task force’s recommendations created a roadmap containing low and no-cost solutions to creating safer school communities across four sectors. 

Local partners presented across five key tracks:
 

• Engaging Schools and Communities: This track focuses on collaborative approaches to issues like threat assessment, suicide prevention and substance abuse.
• School Climate and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support: This track emphasizes evidence-based social-emotional learning, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and community collaborations.
• Information/Intelligence Gathering: This track addresses topics such as social media utilization, information sharing, threat assessment and data-driven discipline strategies.
• Emergency Management, Crisis Response and Recovery: This track covers trauma-informed drills, post-emergency recovery, and media relations.
• From Research/Theory to Practice: This track explores the application of research on brain development, violence prevention, and bullying interventions.

Both Safe2Tell and the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence were partners in the Safe Schools Summit. Both presented workshops on the tremendous impact their work has had on the safety of school communities in Colorado. Other partners were also present at the Summit, including the Colorado Department of Education, which has deepened its collaboration with the Office of School Safety significantly over the last several years. Its team presented on Returning from Removal: Strategies for Restoring Safety and Culture. 

Multiple nonprofits and school safety vendors provided resources to the administrators and school safety professionals at the event. Participants included the School Mental Health Support Program at CU Anschutz School of Medicine (Kempe Center), who is under contract with the Behavioral Health Administration to provide multi-tiered systems of support for rural and underrepresented schools; the CU Anschutz School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Colorado Educator Support Program; the Butler Institute for Families at the University of Denver; the University of Colorado Boulder Prevention Science Program; and a multitude of vendors providing security equipment and software for schools.

Creating opportunities for professionals across disciplines to connect and share expertise has been a success story in Colorado. Over the past 25 years, the OSS has collaborated with other state experts to create our Colorado Threat Assessment and Management Protocol, which has its roots in the research of the Secret Service and FBI. School staff are trained in using this protocol to assess the potential of a student moving along a pathway of violence and engaging resources to support that student in not reaching a point of violence. The CTAMP has undergone rigorous evaluation by the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence under three separate Department of Justice grants. The Office has trained its threat assessment protocol more than 1,100 times since its inception in 2008 — in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Missouri and Alabama. 

The Department of Public Safety houses the intake component of Safe2Tell, the state’s anonymous reporting platform. The Attorney General’s Office leads that work through the administrative team there. The impressive prevention work they completed in 2024-2025 is summarized in their Annual Report. The Office has expanded its reach in both geography and content. As a team, we continue to work toward making Colorado schools safer every single day. The twenty-member OSS team, which includes eight staff embedded in rural districts across the state, provide training, consultation, resources, crisis response and grant information to all Colorado schools, preK-12 and higher education institutions.

We invite readers to sign up for our monthly newsletter to learn about evidence-based and research-informed prevention strategies, training, and upcoming conferences. Please check out our website for more information.