The Horizon School Division is proud to be continuing it's commitment to safe and caring schools through violence threat risk assessment.

Kevin Garinger, Director of Education for the HZSD gave us the details on VTRA.

"Basically a component that relates directly to ensuring that if there's a situation that arises that involves threats to either self student and others, community those kind of things, then there is a protocol that is in place that our administrators in schools as well as our central office administrators follow to ensure that we look after the safety of all of those involved."

At the last session over 40 staff members received level two training, more sessions are scheduled in the spring.

Different communities within the HZSD have all been asked to become involved with violence risk threat assessment training programs.

It's very important to have a lot of staff members trained said Garinger, "if there was a threat from a student, let's say indicating that I'm going to do something terrible to somebody else then immediately we have to determine whether it's a level one or level two VTRA that's required and then we automatically go into our VTRA protocol around how we're going to deal with this."

After accessing the level of threat, police authorities are contacted if necessary.

Right now Garinger says they always need to be prepared, "often times we find that these threats have no substance and that's a great thing but at the end of the day, if we didn't take it seriously and something did happen, none of us would to live with ourselves so this is a critical process to have in a school division."

To date, there have been thirty VTRA's in the system this year alone.

More can be heard from Garinger in his interview with Bolt FM's Clark Stork below.