Lessons From the Colorado School Safety Summit

I have been involved with school safety for over 25 years. Not as a school employee or a police officer, but as a parent. It is a very important topic to me, and still occupies a great deal of my life. So I made sure to attend the Colorado School Safety Summit on October 23.

The first speaker was incredible. Dorothy Espelage, professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hil., explained the danger to teachers in schools. Her research is funded by grants and the Colorado Department of Corrections; she estimated that funding at $20 million.

According to her studies, 80 percent of teachers have experienced violence or bullying, and 20 percent of children report bullying. Parents are more aggressive. Social media posts are vicious. Fifty percent of teachers want to quit. And the highest threat to administrative staff comes from parents.

There were no strategies for threat assessment in the schools, Espelage said. They do not even have a behavioral model to work from.Her research found that adult intervention made a big difference in suicide prevention and violence in the schools.

The presentation was amazingly honest and very upsetting: Espelage told the truth about what her studies found.

The next speaker was Gina Ligon, director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha; she was so informative that I was sorry no recording was allowed.

She detailed the threats generated from the internet, offering information on 764, the Com and Violent Nihilistic Extremism, terms new to most people.

In fact, 764 is a terrorist group that has been around for years; the Com and the Order-of-nine angels are offshoots of 764. Ligon explained that these groups use chat rooms and internet connections to recruit and slowly brainwash your children. These bad actors on the internet use Roblox and Mineshaft gaming chat rooms to start communicating with children. Over time, they create angry children who carry out acts of violence. The danger to children is coming in on the internet, under the noses of unsuspecting parents.

She has a seventeen-year-old son and he is at risk, she told the audience. There is no incentive for social media to protect our kids from these submersives.

With a little research on the internet, I discovered that anyone can find these sites. According to a recent Wired article, “There are dark corners of the internet, and then there’s 764.” It is found on Discord, Roblox, Minecraft and Telegram. Com is found on Instagram, Soundcloud and Roblox. Medium.com lists these as dangerous websites: 764, H3LL, Harm Nation, NLM, Leak Nation,evlt, Volvo, Egirlparadise, slit bunnies and Chillzone. I would suggest that you delete all of these.

Gnet Research.org lists the following sites: O9A, 764, the Com. They are found on Youtube, Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, X, Twitter, Telegram, Twitch, TikTok, Steam, Mega and Roblox. Global Network cites Boogaloo Bois as a site that uses threats, attempted murder and building bombs. It is found on Reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, discord, Youtube, Pinterest, Gab and Telegram; there are 87 public pages on youtube and 4.3 million interactions.

In addition, there is active pornography on Reddit and actual sites that shows videos of people being killed in the most gruesome ways, with such horrific videos that I am still saddened by the ones I have seen. Horrific and difficult to forget.

The internet is a dangerous place for children and young adults.

Then Ligon covered something that every parent should know about: TakeitDown. This is a new service offered at TakeitDown.ncmec.org. Save that address: It will save someone you know a lot of pain, and possibly save lives.

When children are persuaded to send a naked photo to someone, they are blackmailed and threatened with the public release of that photo. This causes suicides and more. If you go to the site, you can report this misuse of errant photos, and they may take it down, off the internet. The term is CSAM, which stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material; this site can remove it from the internet. This can prevent abuse, rape, molestation and suicides. It gives the child hope that their mistake can be corrected. This is one of the most amazing developments in the use of the internet — in the misuse of the internet.

The next presentation involved Safe2Tell, which started in Colorado 25 years ago after the Columbine shootings under the Office of the Attorney General. It is a great program that allows children and adults to report bullying, threats and concerns anonymously by calling 1-877-542-7233 or texting S2TCO to 738477. Anyone can report a school threat to the police, and the school is notified. Safe2Tell received 31,177 reports last year; 96 percent were valid and action was taken. That is not a typo: 31,177 reports of danger to our schools in one year.

I made 25 pages of notes during the summit, which showed that experts are working hard, studying and researching the issue. But there is a problem: They spend millions of dollars and they have thousands of statistics, but they have very few answers. They have very few solutions. Even the most effective one, Safe2Tell, addresses the received threats, but very little more. It responds well, but does little to prevent threats.

Why is this?

They are all part of the government.

They do not address the main problem except in vague descriptive terms like “good school climate.”

To them, “good school climate” apparently means no bullying and no humiliation. At least, I surmise that — since the words “bullying” and “humiliation” were not used during the day, or at least I never heard them, and I don’t find them in my notes.

I have found that the main cause of school shootings is three things: bullying, humiliation and toxic schools. Any of the three create a need for revenge, and can lead to violence. How do you stop them? You stop bullying. You stop humiliation. You fix a toxic school and make it a welcome place for all children.

The proof of this solution is so obvious and so blatant that it saddens me to even have to point it out. Safe2Tell had 31,177 reports in Colorado in one year. One year. That is 31,177 students reporting bullying and humiliation and harassment. If that does not show us that there are toxic schools in Colorado, nothing ever will. Please understand that simple point.

Look for the dangerous players on your children’s video-game chats. If you can’t do that, find an expert who can, or take the games away from your children. Monitor the use of the computer for sites that encourage violence, cult behavior, murder and suicide.

Fix the bullying and humiliation and fix your toxic schools, or take your children out of them.

Remember the guidance given by Lonnie Athens, an incredible criminologist and author: Humiliation creates violence. That needs to be the first focus of the schools. The parents can monitor the internet and control that source of violence.

As a team, we can stop school shootings by taking away the cause.

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