Board of Education to formally hear from experts January 21, 2016

The Littleton Public Schools Board of Education entered into an arbitration agreement with the Davis Family on April 2, 2015 in part to better understand the events that led up to the shooting on December 13, 2013 at Arapahoe High School and the LPS response to those events. This process was the next of many steps previously taken by LPS to examine and improve many of the district’s internal and external processes and procedures.

Prior to the arbitration agreement, in the weeks following the release of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s report in October 2014, Littleton Public Schools asked several national safety and mental health experts to review district protocols and procedures in the areas of safety and mental health. These experts shared their preliminary findings and general knowledge with the district’s newly formed Safety and Mental Health Advisory Committee in January 2015 to inform the committee’s work moving forward.  In conjunction with the arbitration agreement, Littleton Public Schools asked these same independent experts to conduct more in-depth, independent reviews of LPS safety and mental health protocols and procedures prior to December 13, 2013, on December 13, 2013, and since that day.

As stipulated by the arbitration agreement, all reports and documents related to the arbitration process are being made available beginning today, January 18, 2016 at 9 a.m. Links to the reports are on this page to the right:

• Littleton Public Schools Superintendent Brian Ewert has prepared a report to the Littleton Public Schools Board of Education to provide an overview of the district’s response related to safety, mental health and communications and to answer questions the community has asked.  His report also introduces two, more in-depth expert reports.
• Dr. Linda Kanan is an expert in adolescent mental health as it relates to school violence.  She is currently an adjunct faculty member for the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver.  She has an extensive background working as a school psychologist in high schools and was the first director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center.  She consults with school districts in Colorado and across the country and is widely respected for her work in the field of school safety.
• Dr. John Nicoletti of Nicoletti-Flater Associates, who collaborated on sections of the Kanan Report, is a national expert in policy, psychology, violence risk assessment, workplace and school violence prevention, as well as an expert in crisis intervention and trauma recovery. He is widely respected for his training with school districts around Colorado and his assessment and consulting on cases of school threat assessment around the country.  Two other individuals from Nicoletti-Flater Associates also contributed to the Kanan Report.
• Michael Dorn, the executive director of Safe Havens International (SHI), is an international expert on campus safety and the author of 27 books on the topic. SHI is the world’s largest school safety center. In this pro-bono project, he leads a team of 11 K-12 school safety experts from multiple disciplines who have worked in almost every state and two dozen countries.  This team conducted the SHI review of this incident.

“LPS looks forward to reviewing and learning from all of the reports prepared by experts in school safety and mental health as a result of this arbitration agreement,” said Ewert.  “We are always looking for ways to improve our processes and procedures in all areas of our organization.”

“The Board will have an opportunity to hear directly from the safety and mental health experts whom Mr. Ewert asked to review our processes, and we look forward to that opportunity,” said LPS Board of Education President Jack Reutzel.