Keeping Schools Safe Through Threat Assessment
A pioneering system in Oregon’s Willamette Valley mobilizes school and community resources
Eddie was the kind of kid who others picked on. He’d only been at the high school for two months and had a prior history of abuse, delinquency, and treatment for self-injury. When another student on the bus told him that he looked like someone who could bring a gun to school and shoot people, Eddie replied he was. And, he said that boy would be number one on his hit list. At school the next day, Eddie threatened other students who were harassing him. When confronted by a school administrator, Eddie admitted making threats but said he wouldn’t actually hurt anyone.
When faced with a student like Eddie, what’s a school to do? How do administrators know when to worry, when not to worry, and how to intervene? In Eddie’s real-life case, the school had a systematic, formalized response at its fingertips, thanks to the Mid-Valley Student Threat Assessment (or STAT) program.
Developed in early 2000, STAT is a regional system that draws together resources from schools, mental health agencies, law enforcement bureaus, and other youth-serving organizations in the Salem-Keizer and rural Willamette Valley area about 45 miles south of Portland, Oregon. The system cuts across boundaries, providing support for 19 school districts serving 80,000 students in three counties. It’s designed to address two common types of violence: targeted violence that’s planned and aimed at specific individuals and reactive violence that’s an immediate, emotional response to provocation or a perceived threat.
Under the STAT process, a violent incident—or the threat of one—triggers a Level I screening that’s immediately conducted by a trained on-site team. Typically the team is made up of an administrator, counselor, school resource officer (SRO), and someone—like a teacher or special education case manager—who knows the student. If possible, a parent (or case manager if the child is a ward of the court) may be present. The screening takes less than an hour and documents concerns as well as management strategies. It also helps determine if the situation warrants a more extensive Level II assessment, which is conducted by representatives from the school district or education service district (ESD), mental health agencies, and law enforcement.
Eddie was suspended in-school pending a Level I screening that took place that afternoon. After conducting the screening, the Level I team concluded that a formal assessment was needed and called for a Level II assessment, which was carried out the next day.
During that meeting, the team looked at agitators or factors that would increase the likelihood of Eddie committing violence: harassment by peers; unstructured time and space; large classes with a lot of book work; and being challenged directly by a staff member. The team also identified inhibitors that would help decrease the risk of violence: providing Eddie with opportunities to be physically active; increasing his time in the resource room; and allowing him the chance to do chores to earn money.
Based on those findings, the team concluded that the risk of targeted violence was low at that time, but there was a moderate risk of reactive violence if Eddie’s situation was allowed to fester. The team recommended that Eddie’s parents remove weapons from the home; take Eddie to a doctor to review his current medications; and talk to their son positively about the school’s intervention plan. The team recommended that the school require a “no-threat no-harm” contract as part of Eddie’s return to classes; provide a mentor who could meet with him daily; seat Eddie near the driver on his bus rides to and from school; arrange a paid school job where he could interact positively with peers; and appoint a school staff person to intervene with students who target Eddie.
As it turned out, Eddie was a success story. He worked in the cafeteria, developed a couple of friendships, passed all his classes, and wasn’t involved in any new incidents the rest of the year.
Michael Cunningham, who manages the STAT program at the Willamette ESD, likes to use Eddie as an example of the benefits of a collaborative approach. “Here’s a highly reactive kid, but as you read about him, you understand this is a kid in pain who we can intervene with,” notes Cunningham. “If we make the right moves, we know with some confidence that this kid can stay in school.”
A multi-agency approach
Keeping kids in school, where their behavior can be monitored and their problems addressed, is one of the aims of the program. It’s also what distinguishes STAT from responses based on zero-tolerance policies that call for the immediate expulsion of violent or threatening students.
STAT organizers maintain that zero tolerance may be effective as a discipline tool, but not necessarily as a risk management strategy. Mike McFetridge, the STAT team’s mental health specialist, explains, “In our kind of response, we try not to put the kid or the incident to the side, but to bring all of our resources to bear and shower the situation with whatever services are needed—counseling, mentoring, medication, things like that. There’s always the decision about how can we respond in a way that will help the child but, even more important, make the situation safer and better for the school. So, there’s a mature awareness that our safety depends on taking care of those situations—not simply punishing the child or putting him out of our sight.”
As a clinical supervisor for the county’s psychiatric crisis center, McFetridge brings to the team the ability to spot potential mental health issues and assess family dynamics. He knows what intervention strategies are appropriate, what help is available in the community, and how to get services—like hospitalization—immediately. The other two supports of the team—the educator and the law enforcement officer—bring their own perspectives. Willamette ESD’s Michael Cunningham points out that the education professional can share a background in special education processes and a realistic sense of what works in a school setting.
“You’d get good recommendations from mental health and law enforcement on the team, but they may not have the nitty-gritty knowledge of schools to suggest things that are pretty practical—simple things like let’s change the passing time for an individual who’s volatile in that situation,” says Cunningham. “They may not know that most schools can provide some form of school job for a kid and how that might work positively, as it did for Eddie. Working in the cafeteria was a thing of beauty [for Eddie]. There were other kids he could form a relationship with and he had more interaction with a staff member who was a positive force.”
The team’s law enforcement officer can help determine if a crime has been committed and if the student can be arrested or detained. This team member also has access to privileged information and can broaden the scope of the investigation through search warrants and interviewing community members.
All three areas of expertise come together during the assessment and in weekly meetings where the Level II team is joined by about two dozen other professionals: representatives of the juvenile justice system, youth authority, community mental health, school districts, and sheriff and police departments. Every Thursday during the school year the larger group gathers to discuss general safety issues and to review Level II assessments. In the seven years since the system started, they’ve examined almost 550 cases in both Salem-Keizer and the rural counties served by Willamette ESD.
Breaking new ground
The Mid-Valley Student Threat Assessment system is recognized nationally as a pioneer—one of the first such programs in the United States. It was born in response to the twin tragedies of Columbine in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 and Thurston in Springfield, Oregon, in 1998. In the wake of the shootings, Oregon lawmakers passed a bill requiring school administrators to do two things: notify parents of students who are threatened or are on a targeted list, and consider seeking a mental health evaluation for students who threaten or menace others.
The Salem-Keizer School District, a stone’s throw from Thurston, handed school psychologist John Van Dreal the challenge of developing protocols to comply with the new law. At first, he shied away from the assignment but agreed to work on a solution for six months. “When I started the project, my hope was to invite the community of youth service providers to join me in building and maintaining a threat assessment system, and they quickly stepped up and owned the responsibility along with the school district,” Van Dreal recalls. “The process allowed us to use our creativity as we combined best-practice research, our own experience and professional expertise, and the ideas of our regional experts in a system that’s preventative and supportive of schools, youth, and the community.”
Van Dreal adapted a threat assessment process already at work in the community to address violence by adults. About a year after he launched the Salem-Keizer School District program, Willamette ESD and a multi-agency task force spearheaded an expansion that brought 18 rural school districts into the fold and doubled the number of students served. The work of the partnership was informed by two key documents on school safety and threat assessment that were issued by the Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education in 2002.
With 40,000 students and the resources of a large district, Salem-Keizer is able to support its own full-time operation that runs in parallel to the one serving the rest of the mid-Willamette Valley. Van Dreal is responsible for training all new Salem-Keizer administrators, counselors, and SROs in threat assessment expectations and processes. He does continuing professional development for all of the district’s personnel and is increasingly called on to train staff members in other schools around the country.
Exporting the system
Both Cunningham and Van Dreal have presented the threat assessment system to national audiences and have trained numerous teams in Washington and Oregon, including ones in nearby Newberg, McMinnville, Corvallis, Albany, and Lane County. They maintain that even resource-poor school districts can implement their own version of the student threat assessment system. For instance, this summer Van Dreal worked on adapting the protocols to the 13,000-student North Thurston School District in Lacey, Washington. According to Maddy de Give, North Thurston’s director for student support, the district already had partnerships with mental health and juvenile justice. Each school also had a student study team to deal with suicidal students and other problems.
“But,” she says, “we didn’t know what to do with those kids who present a threat, who we’re afraid of, who we don’t know what will happen if we keep them in school.” She goes on to say, “We tended to do emergency expulsions for kids who made threats, but there’s a difference between making a threat and posing a threat.”
Working with Van Dreal, North Thurston developed a system where the school team will conduct the Level I assessment and then call de Give, who will ask a series of “filter questions” to determine if a Level II assessment team needs to be convened. “We’re much smaller than Salem-Keizer, and we don’t have the capacity to have a full-time person assigned to this,” comments de Give. “So, we took the kernel and adapted their protocol. You don’t have to have a lot of resources to do this, but you do need established partnerships because you can’t do threat assessments without those entities at the table.” She adds that the district expects to handle eight to 10 Level II assessments this school year. If the pilot project is successful, it will be expanded to other districts in the area.
One piece of the puzzle
A survey of Mid-Valley administrators shows the student threat assessment system is working in their schools. Ninety-four percent said STAT “effectively identified potentially dangerous students” and “had positive effects on school safety.” Yet, Cunningham, McFetridge, and Van Dreal will readily admit that it’s only part of the solution.
“One of the things we’ve learned as a result of this project is talking about an issue and raising it to the level of a meeting is absolutely critical to resolving dangerous situations before they get very far,” says McFetridge. “It’s a climate where everyone—teachers and students—is encouraged to speak up and report things that don’t seem quite right, even if they’re minor.”
“You’ve got to have good emergency plans, response plans, safety curricula, and a variety of other things,” adds Cunningham. “For me, the most important thing is a positive school culture where kids bring forward information about dangerous situations. If I had to choose between having threat assessment in a school with a negative climate or not having a threat assessment system in a school with a really positive climate, I’d choose the latter. But, having both elements—threat assessment and a positive climate— working together is fabulous. It’s the ideal we want for all of our schools.” 
10 Steps to Implementing a Threat Assessment System
Willamette ESD’s Michael Cunningham suggests the following process for establishing a school-based system:
- Decide, internally, if you both need and want a threat assessment system for your district. Note that it takes administrative approval to commit the time, energy, and resources to get a system off the ground.
- Determine whether you should partner with an ESD or other school districts in implementing a system. Consider factors like district resources and the number of threatening situations that are occurring in your district’s schools.
- Form a working group of educators and professionals from community agencies such as law enforcement, the public mental health system, and youth-serving organizations. Try to recruit “boundary spanners”: people who aren’t overly territorial and who are opinion leaders in their own organizations.
- Study the federal guide Threat Assessment in Schools; examine existing models; discuss your local resources and limitations; and then map out a proposed system, relying on in-kind efforts where possible to reduce costs.
- Subject your proposed system to close scrutiny and then refine it.
- Establish an implementation time line with adequate time for agency approvals, memos of understanding, training of key staff, and orientation.
- Present your proposed system to school and agency decisionmakers to get approval to proceed.
- Seek grant money to reduce start-up costs, but don’t depend on such revenue to implement your system.
- Train key personnel: first the Level II assessment team members and then school administrators and counselors who will participate in Level I screenings.
- Orient all staff members and get going!