Case Management Solutions Are Redefining School Safety and Threat Assessment

Key points:

Students continue to face a variety of challenges in and out of school, especially at the K-12 level. Pressures can range from high expectations of achievement or bullying, to home-related insecurities and mental health concerns. These potential stressors can interfere with students' ability to learn and excel. Sometimes these students will act out or demonstrate early signs of inappropriate behavior.

As schools focus on empowering every student to succeed, they must identify signs of potential problems and intervene when necessary to provide appropriate support.

Fortunately, there are best practices available to guide educational leaders and teams. These principles for threat assessment, such as Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM), provide a systematic, fact-based process for identifying, evaluating, and addressing situations involving students. Using a systemic process reduces the risk of misprofiling or mislabeling a student at risk. These best practices help school leaders, counselors, and campus safety teams prioritize well-being by offering ways to support students in need. However, managing these programs manually can be challenging due to difficulty finding or sharing information across teams, districts, or counties.

To help determine which students need additional support and wellness resources, school security and threat assessment teams must migrate from physical records to a system that allows for effortless access, review, and sharing of information. Recognizing the critical need to support students and school staff, more states are providing funding to districts to redesign their early intervention and student mental health programs.

Redefining threat assessment technology

Before 1999, most safety measures in schools consisted of natural disaster drills. After an increase in deadly school incidents, the focus of security precautions turned to physical detection methods to identify potential weapons with cameras and metal detectors. However, the hardware approach typically offers only a reactive solution, once the student has already reached a point of distress. Identifying trends in student behavior before problems escalate into violence allows for a more proactive option that maintains school safety and prioritizes student well-being and success. This is where technology can help.

Case management solutions centralize knowledge, making it easier for authorized personnel to identify warning signs, create required documentation, and develop an action plan to intervene in a student's well-being before a threat escalates. However, because schools have disparate information and different staff members responsible for campus and student safety, challenges arise in ensuring that pertinent details are seen by the right people at the right time. With digital documents stored in a unified location, all incidents and levels of concern can be managed centrally, giving authorized personnel on threat assessment teams quick access to relevant data about a situation and a student.

Additionally, resources for integrated behavioral threat assessment best practices, such as BTAM, can be co-located to assist threat assessment teams. Once students have been assigned to a wellness plan, their progress can be assessed through a personalized dashboard to support each student's unique situation and recovery process.

A holistic approach to student well-being

Information kept in folders or separate locations, such as student records, makes it difficult for threat assessment teams to stay on top of rapidly changing situations and gain a comprehensive understanding of each student's case.

Case management solutions streamline information about each student in a centralized digital platform to support comprehensive assessments. These technologies adhere to local, state and national regulations. regulationssuch as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

These solutions enable school leaders and threat assessment teams to form a consistent methodology for accessing incident reports, low-level concerns, and student files, assessing each student's need for support, and prescribing wellness plans. These solutions help threat assessment teams identify students showing warning signs, develop threat assessment guidelines, and document all risk incidents. When school staff work together, they create a proactive support system for students, guiding and nurturing them on the path to academic success and personal well-being.

The changing dynamics of school safety underscore an increased focus on the well-being of students, staff, and even their communities. In response, educational institutions and states are adopting more inclusive prevention, intervention, and support approaches. Innovative, unified case management solutions transform threat assessment workflows and streamline the collection of key information. These digital tools not only accelerate collaboration between diverse authorized stakeholders, but also cultivate a deeper understanding of potential threats, elevating the effectiveness of response strategies. The importance of this technology lies in its ability to guide teams in adhering to best practices in threat assessment and case information management, fostering a safer educational environment.