After the Virginia tech shooting in 2007, Virginia became the first state to require universities to conduct threat assessmentsand then demanded that K-12 schools do the same.
Threat assessment is a method adapted from the Secret Service for schools to determine which student threats portend violence. By following these methods, a team trained in the model will work to discern the extent to which a threat made by a student is truly threatening. Once a threat is presented, a team of school administrators, mental health professionals, and law enforcement officers will investigate: gathering facts, interviewing witnesses, and determining their threat level.
It has become ubiquitous. These days, together with Virginia, eight states It also requires schools to have threat assessment teams, including Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Sixty-four percent of public schools have a threat assessment team, according to a Report from the Institute of Education Sciences using data from the 2019-2020 school year.
But there has been a problem: What exactly schools mean by “threat assessment” varies and is not always based on evidence, according to Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia, who developed one of the most widely used methods. used. cited from these protocols.
Proponents argue that threat assessment has been given a bad name. In a culture of fear and anxiety about school violence, schools can overreact, one researcher maintains, mislabeling poor disciplinary practices.
Will a new set of guidelines from the National Center for School Safety help?
Controversial practices?
Mixing law enforcement and education is not universally popular.
Proponents argue that threat assessments decrease a school's suspensions and also reduce reliance on “zero tolerance” threat policies. These harsh policies that suspend or expel students for infractions, regardless of the context, are known to disproportionately affect punish black and Hispanic students.
Still, the threat assessment process has been criticized for also disproportionately targeting some groups of students, particularly students in special education. Critics allege that these assessments lead to students being labeled as aggressive, making them you will be denied the necessary support. These critics tend to favor greater investments in mental health services, rather than police presence, which they claim can Strengthen the connection between school and prison..
For Cornell, this is a confusion that arises in part because what constitutes a threat assessment is not standardized.
Cornell says there is a “reasonable consensus” in the field about what constitutes evidence-based practices. That includes a process that emphasizes facts in the evaluation, a multidisciplinary evaluation team, an effort to distinguish the level or severity of the threat, and a commitment to trying to resolve the threat and help the student, Cornell says.
But too often, schools attach the label “threat assessment” to any disciplinary regime they have, even if it is “antithetical to threat assessment,” he adds. Cornell points to zero-tolerance frameworks, arguing that they are the “antithesis” of threat assessment approaches, which seek to place threats in context. “I think there's a perception that I've found among some critics who think that when schools overreact to threats from students, it's because they have a threat assessment program, and I think it's more common that they don't have a threat assessment program. of threats. program,” she states.
He hopes the new guidelines will help.
Recently, Cornell co-authored a Toolbox for the National Center for School Safety, based on interviews with about 200 experts. The guidelines instruct schools on how to recruit and train evaluation teams, as well as how to maintain records, evaluate programs, and prevent disparities from worsening.
The authors hope it will guide schools toward what they say is a more evidence-based approach, preventing schools from exacerbating disparities by using threat assessments.
Stop tragedy or control anxiety?
While reducing suspensions is desirable, many schools and legislators adopt these policies in response to school shootings.
The rise in threat assessments comes as schools are desperate for respond to violence and student misbehaviorto inject millions of dollars into the ai-revolution?ecid=ACsprvuoIOQCwSHx2LnXevWTHRAoxb6nNUQZY6-jMmylMT9dUpRhBLSMBPY1UJTXhD8rehYHiebN” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>unproven weapons detection industry to the nervous return of school suspensions as a disciplinary practice.
But there is also no way to conclusively prove threat assessments. stop school shootings.
According to Cornell, that's because of how statistically rare school shootings are. Since proving that these assessments stop school shootings is not possible using rigorous criteria, she suggests. Instead, Cornell research has shown that screening correlates with less bullying and fewer fights, she says.
It's enough? The focus on these techniques may suggest that they are only useful in preventing these extraordinarily rare school shootings, Cornell says. Anxiety about shootings provides the impetus, but threat assessment really helps triage student assaults and choose an appropriate response in an era of fear, she adds.
