Field Notes

concept

Behavioral threat assessment in schools

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Behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) is the violence-prevention approach that the United States school safety evidence base currently supports, in contrast to the physical hardening measures evaluated in Clear backpacks are school security theater. A BTAM program assembles a multidisciplinary team — typically an administrator, a school counselor or psychologist, and a school resource officer or other public-safety member — to identify students whose behavior suggests a risk of targeted violence, assess that risk, and intervene with appropriate supports before behavior escalates. It is investigative and supportive rather than punitive, and it operates upstream of the moment a weapon reaches a doorway.

The approach was pioneered for protectee threat assessment by the United States Secret Service and adapted for schools after Columbine High School massacre in partnership with the Department of Education. The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center produced the 2018 operational guide and the 2020 study of 41 incidents that ground the model.1 As of 2024, 85 percent of United States public schools reported having a threat assessment team, and 45 states had established some form of BTAM policy by 2025.

The leading models

Three named models dominate state policy and district practice:

  • The federal NTAC model emphasizes building a safe and connected school climate to break down the “code of silence” that keeps students from seeking help for themselves or peers, with a low threshold for intervention.
  • The Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG), developed by Dewey Cornell, is the most studied model. It uses a flexible, nonpunitive approach that discourages zero-tolerance policies and profiling, and integrates mental health supports to resolve threatening behavior.
  • The Salem-Keizer model initiates assessment with an administrator and a counselor or SRO and extends to a broader community team when needed.

Evidence of effect

CSTAG is the model with causal evaluation. Two causal studies found that CSTAG schools had lower exclusionary disciplinary actions and lower bullying infraction rates than control schools, increased counseling support, and no disparities in who was referred for threat assessment or who received disciplinary action.2 CSTAG schools with higher fidelity to the model showed the greatest reductions in long-term suspensions and the greatest increases in counseling. A multistate examination of 2,349 case records from 166 schools found that 10 percent of cases led to an attack and 0.3 percent to serious injury, with serious threats roughly 20 times more likely than nonserious threats to result in an attack — a discrimination the model is designed to support by escalating intervention with threat severity.

A 2025 RAND survey of a nationally representative sample of school leaders found widespread BTAM adoption, principals reporting net-positive safety effects, and a stated commitment to supportive measures addressing root causes over exclusionary discipline or law-enforcement referral as the predominant intervention style.3

Boundary and risk

BTAM is not a panacea and its implementation quality varies. The Learning Policy Institute cautions that BTAM can reinforce exclusionary practices when embedded in school systems that already rely on them, and that the appropriate role of school resource officers or law enforcement in early-stage assessment needs clearer guidance and training.2 The disproportionate-impact concern that animates School surveillance and the school-to-prison pipeline also applies to BTAM if its teams reproduce the bias patterns of surrounding disciplinary systems. The CSTAG evidence on no referral disparities is therefore a feature of the model to preserve under fidelity, not an invariant of any threat-assessment program.

A structural boundary exists when the warning signs reach a parent rather than the school. The Apalachee High School shooting illustrates the gap: the shooter’s notebook and online threats were known to his father, who also controlled access to the firearm, and the school-based BTAM mechanism had no reach into that relationship. Parental criminal liability for school shootings is one response to this gap, though it is reactive rather than preventive.

Evidence scope

BTAM is the supported violence-prevention approach in the literature, whereas the physical-hardening alternatives lack evidence and carry documented harms. The weapon-carriage outcome specifically remains under-evidenced: What interventions reduce school weapon carriage records the thinness of that evidence base.

  1. Secret Service NTAC Protecting America’s Schools (United States Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, Protecting America’s Schools: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence, November 2019); saved PDF. The model’s own methodological reference, built from 41 incidents at K-12 schools between 2008 and 2017. ↩

  2. Jennifer DePaoli and Stacy Loewe, Keeping Schools Safe? The Research on Behavioral Threat Assessments, Learning Policy Institute, October 2025. A research synthesis, not new fieldwork. ↩↩

  3. Melissa Kay Diliberti, Pauline Moore, Brian A. Jackson, and colleagues, The State of Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management in K–12 Public Schools: Findings from a 2025 American School Leader Panel Survey, RAND, 12 November 2025. A survey of what districts report doing, so it measures adoption rather than effect. ↩

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