The Promise and Peril of How K-12 Schools Approach Behavioral Threat Assessments
A new research report found that nearly every public K-12 school in the United States used a behavioral threat assessment management (BTAM) team, or something similar, in the 2024-2025 school year. However, the report calls out plenty of areas that can be improved.
The research was performed by the RAND Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center and the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC). Researchers surveyed RAND’s American School Leader Panel, gathering responses from 1,746 school principals.
They found that 97 percent of schools used a team with BTAM responsibilities, according to the following breakdown:
- 43 percent had a specific BTAM team in the school and a BTAM team at the district level.
- 25 percent had a specific BTAM team in the school only.
- 14 percent had a specific BTAM team at the district level only.
- 15 percent had a team either at the school or district level that were functionally similar to BTAM teams.
ASIS International’s School Security Standard (ASIS SSEC-2025) says schools should “establish, implement, and maintain a BTAM program to evaluate reports of behaviors of concern, identify patterns of behavior consistent with an elevated risk of violence, and manage those risks associated with the presence of identified behaviors.” The standard has a 12-page annex describing the BTAM program in detail.
Drew Neckar, CPP, principal consultant at COSECURE Enterprise Risk Solutions and co-chair of the technical committee that produced the standard, notes that while the BTAM numbers in the RAND research are encouraging, the research only covers public schools. In fall 2021 (the most recent year that official data is available), 4.7 million students attended private K-12 schools, approximately 9 percent of all students.
“In my experience the prevalence of threat assessment teams is significantly lower in nonpublic schools,” Neckar says, “due in large part to the grant funding and other state resources that are available to public schools but not to the same extent for private schools.”
The RAND report documented how BTAM team use has risen over time in public schools. In 2016, only 42 percent of schools used BTAM teams, rising to 64 percent in 2020 and 85 percent in 2024 (this omits the 15 percent with functionally similar teams). While the trend is undeniably positive, the report identifies several areas of concern.
Perhaps the chief concern is that only 53 percent of schools had written policy documents that explicitly established and defined the scope of the BTAM program, and only 49 percent had written standard operating procedures for BTAM teams.
The ASIS standard is explicit: “Each school, either individually or at the system/district level, shall establish and maintain documented policies and procedures for the operation of the BTAM program.”
“Policy documents serve a number of roles,” says C. Joshua Villines, CPP, PCI, PSP, executive director of The Human Intelligence Group. He was the group leader of the ASIS School Security Standard technical committee members who developed the BTAM Annex. “Perhaps the most important is that they significantly increase the likelihood that a BTAM team will apply a consistent process to the assessment and management of each case—and that consistency is a necessary component in reducing the likelihood of bias intruding into that process. In addition, policy documents provide a common vocabulary for the team in the nature and practice of the team's work.”
As the School Security Standard directs, schools that have BTAM teams in place but currently do not have supporting written materials should develop policies and procedures documents. But Villines says schools need not “reinvent the wheel” here.
“There is abundant guidance—including the free documents produced by NTAC, the ANSI Standard created by ASIS International, and other sources like the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals—that can support the work of creating BTAM policies,” he says. “Reviewing consensus-based and peer-reviewed materials like those is essential in ensuring that policies conform to the standard of care. In addition, when working with BTAM teams, I recommend interviewing team members and other stakeholders (e.g. school teachers and administrators) to determine what is working well in current practices and where there might be gaps to improve.”
Dewey Cornell, Ph.D., is an education profession at the University of Virginia, founder of School Threat Assessment Consultants LLC, and also helped develop the ASIS standard’s BTAM annex. He emphasizes that there is not one-size-fits-all when it comes to policy documentation—some are comprehensive documents, others are “brief and simple.” State and local laws can impact what goes into the policies, and each district and school likely has unique issues to address.
“What is more important, in my view, is that there is administrative support for the school team to implement the program,” Cornell says. “School staff are hesitant to undertake something new without administrative support. Too many districts will check the box that they have designated a BTAM team, and maybe send them for training, but then not support the next step of implementation.”
Another area of potential concern is that only 23 percent of principals who utilize BTAM teams said that the program had dedicated funding at either the school or district level. “Whether a program has stable funding is often a driver for whether it can be sustained over time,” the RAND report noted.
Neckar describes the fundamental issue: Schools are often underfunded in general, so funding for things like BTAM programs either come from state or federal grants, or they take funding away from schools’ core mission of educating students.
“Luckily, implementation and maintenance of a BTAM program is one of the least capital-intensive and most effective elements of a school’s security program,” he says.
Funding is needed primarily for initial and ongoing training of BTAM team members. In addition, “funds spent on case management software and OSINT collection and analysis can be force multipliers for overworked BTAM teams,” Villines says.
Whether it is explicitly part of funding or an element of time management allocations, Cornell says BTAM team members must be given the time to do BTAM program work. “Too often BTAM involvement is an add-on to the existing job on top of all other responsibilities,” he says.
All the experts interviewed for this article say BTAM training is critical, and Neckar in particular notes the troubling finding from the RAND research that 16 percent of schools said their BTAM team members received training when they started on the team and never again, and another 13 percent reported there was no specific BTAM training.
One positive finding in the study is the role of law enforcement on BTAM programs. The report notes that a common issue that has traditionally given school and community leaders pause when it comes to involving law enforcement in BTAM teams is the idea that law enforcement “involvement will increase the chance that students will end up in the justice system,” the report describes. The subset of principals who said their BTAM teams included a representative from law enforcement reported that the involvement was primarily an advisory role.
“There is no single answer for how sworn law enforcement officers should participate in school BTAM teams, since every team has different needs and responsibilities,” Villines says. “There are, however, some general principles that are universal.
“First, as with all team members, sworn members should bring the full breadth of their expertise to the team,” he continues. “For a law enforcement officer, that means their training and experience, as well as any relevant intelligence information they have, or should have, through their department or agency. This can include advising on the security posture at the school, including identifying observed vulnerabilities, as well as identifying patterns or areas of concern from arrest records, calls for service, OSINT analysis, or other sources.
“In addition, the BTAM process is neither punitive nor disciplinary, and [law enforcement officers] who participate on BTAM teams should recognize that their role should be advising on likely violence risk and possible management strategies based on evidence-based practice.”
Finally, the report noted that there is a wide array of approaches to BTAM in schools, and while each school is unique, the fractious approach “creates inconsistencies and challenges in measuring effectiveness.” It advises “greater coherence and guidance… to ensure fidelity to evidence-based frameworks while allowing for local adaptation.”
Applying that logic to school security in its entirety, not just BTAM, is precisely why ASIS began developing the ASIS School Security Standard more than two years ago.
“This standard represents thousands of hours of dedicated volunteer work by a passionate cross-disciplinary team of professionals united in their commitment to improving school security,” Neckar’s co-chair, Jeffrey Slotnick, CPP, PSP, said in the press release announcing the standard.
“The standard was designed from the ground up to provide consistency in essential practices, but flexibility to adapt those practices to a wide range of settings: from massive, public school systems with a hundred thousand students to small, private schools with only a few hundred meeting in a single building,” says Villines. “Our goal was to save busy administrators time, by summarizing both the extant research and the collective, real-world experience of our diverse technical committee members. I think the final result offers clear guidance on the elements that simply must be present for effective behavioral threat assessment and management, as well as a range of options to tailor that guidance to the specific needs of a school or school system.”
