Event Details

Dr. Justin Heinze (BA '03, MA '04) will discuss with the University of Michigan's partnership with the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation (SHP).

We are approaching the 10 year anniversary of the school shooting that occured at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Since then, family members whose loved ones were killed that day have been working through advocacy and education to prevent these school violence incidents from ever happening again, through the SHP.

With a mission to honor all victims of gun violence, the foundation has developed and disseminated a suite of violence prevention programs, Know the Signs, with the goal of protecting students and preventing loss of life. Know the Signs includes two programs: Say Something (SS) and Start with Hello (SWH). Say Something teaches youth to identify concerning behaviors among their peers (e.g., suicidality, violence, mental health concerns) and report them to a trusted adult. Start with Hello teaches youth to be more socially inclusive with their peers. In addition, the foundation recently developed an anonymous reporting system, Say Something ARS,  to provide a way to report warning signs. 

In 2015, the University of Michigan partnered with the SHP to build an evidence base for these programs. Led by Dr. Heinze, our research studies are evaluating SHP’s programs and their effects on individual-level outcomes like aggressive behavior and bullying victimization and school-level outcomes like culture and climate.

Dr. Heinze is currently an associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health and holds an appointment with the Combined Program in Education and Psychology.  He completed his PhD in education psychology from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2011.  He is the Director of the National Center for School Safety, the faculty lead for Public Health IDEAS for Preventing Firearm Injury, and principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Study.