“I’m scared he is going to be the next school shooter.”
Nearly every U.S. security professional who works in a K-12 setting – whether they are a law enforcement school resource officer, an in-house security officer, a private security contractor, or an administrator tasked with safety and security – has heard this about at least one student within the community they protect. While still extraordinarily rare, mass casualty events in schools are events of profound criticality and far-reaching impact. In addition, gun violence in U.S. schools has also risen dramatically over the past decades, in what is a uniquely American phenomenon. As a result, when a student behaves in a way that is disruptive, the possibility of that disruption being linked to potential school violence is often at the forefront of parent and teacher concerns.
Unfortunately, those concerns can often be rooted in cultural biases or the privilege of neurotypicality, leading to disproportionate focus on, and punishment of, minority and neurodiverse students. In addition, as Dr. Dewey Cornell’s work (summarized in the International Handbook of Threat Assessment, 2ed) indicates, due to their developmental immaturity, K-12 students “engage in a high rate of aggressive behavior” leading to 12% of high school students reporting receiving threats of violence, but with only 9% of those threats being carried out.
Those directly communicated threats cannot go unevaluated and, since a person does not need to make a threat to pose a threat, other violence risk indicators must also be evaluated even when no threat has been made. The question is: How?
The answer, first codified in the groundbreaking work of the Safe School Initiative published jointly in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service, is an evidence-based threat assessment process, focused on behaviors. To quote that study: “Instead of basing judgments of risk on student traits or whether that student made specific threatening statements, the threat assessment process focuses upon evaluating that student’s behaviors and communications and determining whether those behaviors and communications suggest that the student has the intent and capacity to carry out a school attack.”
In the quarter of a century since that pioneering work, a large body of literature – drawing from social science studies as well as crime prevention research from the public and private sector – has been published on which behaviors correlate to increased risk of targeted violence, and how to manage those behaviors. As a result, the standard of care in K-12 settings in the United States now requires that behaviors of concern – whether or not a direct threat has been made – be evaluated by an appropriately trained behavioral threat assessment team.
Many school administrators understand this in theory, but operationalizing that expectation can be a challenge, especially if they have not yet been able to take advantage of the range of training opportunities available in behavioral threat assessment and management (“BTAM”). This is exactly the gap that the ASIS International School Security Standard (2025) is designed to fill. Created by seasoned practitioners, the Standard offers practical guidance in creating, training, and operating behavioral threat assessment teams, including guidance for conducting BTAM investigations, monitoring outcomes, and documenting cases.
While collecting this information into a single resource designed for security practitioners is new, the body of research the Standard relies on is not. Some of that research, however, can be unfamiliar to security professionals who were trained on a disciplinary model of student behavior management. The BTAM process, however, should be completely separate from the disciplinary process. In fact, punitive approaches to threat management, especially (as noted above) zero-tolerance policies, can actually work against the goals of evidence-based threat management. Those policies can foster a sense of grievance and can often remove students from the peer connections and adult support of their school communities, further isolating them from the very resources most likely to mitigate their risk of violence.
Mitigating that risk, rather than punishing antisocial behaviors, is the primary focus of the management component of BTAM. For each evaluated student, this requires first identifying the behaviors linked to violence risk in an objective manner, one based on peer-reviewed research and practices and not on assumptions about immutable characteristics and/or mental health diagnoses.
Once the behaviors indicative of potential violence risk have been identified by the BTAM team, the team can then tailor a management strategy specifically designed to address those risks. A student with poor anger management skills might be paired with a mentor who can help teach them pro-social strategies. A student with a strong sense of grievance about perceived injustices might be enrolled in a restorative justice program. A student experiencing wrestling with grief and loss might be connected to supportive resources.
The strategies are as varied and unique as the school populations they are intended to protect. The Standard is intentionally not prescriptive on which strategies a school BTAM team should implement. Its focus, instead, is on ensuring that the process by which the team identifies behaviors of concern and then manages them is conducted fairly, impartially, and in accordance with the standard of care established in the decades since the work of the Safe School Initiative.
In its simplest form, the logic of behavioral threat assessment is that: People who are connected to their communities are less likely to harm their communities. The ASIS School Security Standard supports that understanding by offering practical ways to identify those students who are potentially on a pathway to violence because they lack that connection, as well as ways to work to reduce that violence risk without exacerbating it.
C. Joshua Villines, MA, CTM, CPP, PCI, PSP, is the Executive Director of the Human Intelligence Group in Atlanta, GA (USA). He currently serves as an at-large member of the ASIS International Board of Directors and led the technical committee that produced the behavioral threat assessment annex for the ASIS International School Security Standard.
