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A Software Solution? Bend psychologist
creates a high-tech tool for spotting troubled kids
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Written by H. Bruce Miller, The Source, Bend Oregon |
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Reproduced under the Fair Use
exception of
17
USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. |
The reason school
shootings keep happening, says Bend psychologist Michael Conner, isn’t
that people don’t know enough – it’s that they don’t know what to do
with what they know.
“Everybody now is doing what they’ve always done when something like
this happens,” Conner said. “They go about trying to examine why it
happened and how it could have been prevented and what we should do to
prevent it in the future. …
“Then everybody says, How can we print out more handouts and hire more
people to do screening and provide services to prevent this?’ That’s
never gonna work either, because the problem is too big and there is not
enough money to solve the problem that way.”
People – parents,
teachers, fellow students – typically are aware of many signs that
someone like Seung-Hui Cho is a ticking time bomb, Conner says, but they
aren’t able to connect the dots. And they don’t know what to do or where
to go if they can connect them.
“There’s always people who
knew enough to prevent [a school shooting],” he said. “There’s always
people who knew enough, but they didn’t say anything, because they
didn’t know what to do, or they knew enough but they didn’t know it was
all important.”
Conner has developed a
high-tech approach for helping people connect the dots – a Web-based
system tentatively called “Sentinel.”
The way it works, he
explained, is that someone – a fellow student, say – who’s concerned
about someone he knows logs on to the Sentinel website and anonymously
answers a series of questions. The answers prompt Sentinel to ask more
questions aimed at assessing the degree of risk the subject poses.
Sentinel then offers the user guidance and information about where to go
for help.
The advantages of
Sentinel, Conner said, are that it’s available 24/7, it’s anonymous, it
lets students communicate their concerns without confronting an adult,
and it taps into the Internet, the global community that today’s young
people often feel most comfortable in.
“Kids actually go to the Internet for information now far more often
than they go to adults,” Conner said. “If you took the registered users
of MySpace, it would be the 11th largest country in the world. You can
empower kids by meeting them where they live.
“We need to empower people
who are close to the situation to do something about it, not hire more
counselors to sit there waiting for the phone to ring and passing out
checklists whenever there’s a problem.”
Contact Kevin Rea: 541 390-9848
For more information and photos go to:
www.InCrisis.Org/pr
Mentor Research Institute
818 NW 17th Ave. Suite 2
Portland, OR 97209-2327
503 227-2027
501 c 3 Non-Profit
Tax Id# 91-1777183
www.InCrisis.Org
www.MentorResearch.Org
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