Kansas City, Mo. ? New training and better technological aides are planned for staffers at a suburban Kansas City mental health facility still grieving from last month’s violent death of an employee who was a Kansas University graduate student.

Administrators at the Johnson County (Kan.) Mental Health Center have been grappling with the Aug. 17 stabbing death of Teri Zenner, 26, who died while making a routine visit to a 17-year-old client.

“We need to do some other things that are more preventive in nature,” said David Wiebe, executive director of the Mission, Kan.-based center.

Case workers at the facility had not classified the client charged with Zenner’s slaying — 17-year-old Andrew Ellmaker — as potentially violent.

Still, the center is reviewing all of its patient files and will more clearly flag those of patients who could pose a risk to employees.

Wiebe also plans to hire a consultant to help expand the scope of safety training. He’s even considering putting social workers through self-defense classes.

This week, two of the mental health center’s roughly 15 teams of employees started using global positioning system-enabled phones with one-button access to the main office. A satisfactory trial run would lead to use among all of the about 150 social workers at the center.

All of these changes were pushed by Zenner’s husband, Matt, who had been married just three months when his wife died.

“It’s a sad situation that somebody trying to help people is going to get hurt,” said Matt Zenner, a 27-year-old railroad worker. “We need to do whatever we can to protect them.”

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Zenner has devoted himself to influencing the development of new safeguards for social workers nationwide. But even with such standards in place, Wiebe said, he doesn’t believe Teri Zenner would have survived.

“We have no information that anything would have been done differently,” Wiebe said. “That’s the difficult part of this.”

Zenner isn’t the first social worker to be killed on the job, but observers said her death was helping build awareness of dangers faced by the country’s 320,000 licensed social workers.

“Action’s being taken but it’s not coordinated enough nationally,” said Christina Newhill, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work. “There’s just so much denial.”

Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan., who sits on the Congressional Mental Health Caucus, has met with Matt Zenner and representatives of the Johnson County facility. A spokeswoman said Moore, a former Johnson County District Attorney, hopes to brief Congress on the issue of social worker safety next year.

Making changes is an expensive proposition for already cash-strapped mental health centers. Wiebe projects the phones alone, when given to all social workers, will cost his center about $50,000 annually. Such a price could scare off many facilities.

“I don’t think mental health agencies would be unwilling to do this,” said Virginia Yribia, the director of field programs at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work. “However, whether they’d have the money to do that is another question.”

Even when centers are willing to commit financially, there’s only so far they’re willing to go. Ellmaker had a prior conviction for carrying a concealed knife, a charge officials at the Johnson County Mental Health Center were unaware of. The facility does not routinely access patients’ criminal records, nor do they plan to start.

“What we do not want to do is to criminalize the people that come here,” Wiebe said.

Wiebe said the greatest challenge is accurately predicting a patient’s potential for violence.

“I’m not sure we’ll ever have a good answer for that,” he said. “And I’m not sure we can ever completely protect against the possibility of anything happening.”