EdLab Podcast: Keeping Schools Safer with Threat Assessment Teams

When Professor Dewey Cornell was first introduced to threat assessment while working in partnership with the FBI, most schools didn’t know what threat assessment was. 

But that has changed—and quickly. According to Cornell, a recent survey revealed nearly 85 percent of U.S. public schools now report having a school threat assessment team, a multi-disciplinary team that assesses and responds when a student engages in concerning behavior.

“We have a practice that has accelerated far quicker than I expected or would have anticipated,” Cornell said.

In this episode of EdLab, Cornell, who directs the UVA School of Education and Human Development's Youth Violence Project, reminds listeners that while schools are actually some of the safest places for children, any act of violence in schools is one too many. 

Cornell shares how he and his team are responding to the rapid growth of threat assessment in schools by turning their attention to improving the effectiveness of those teams, including by contributing to the recently published School Threat Assessment Toolkit.

You can listen to the conversation with Cornell wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, including Apple, Amazon, or Spotify.

EdLab

Transcript

Edited for clarity.

Audrey Breen, host: Welcome back to EdLab. In today's episode, we are tackling the question: What exactly are school threat assessment teams and how do they work to keep schools safer?

EdLab is a podcast of the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, where we talk to the people behind the school's transformative research, innovative teaching, and thriving partnerships. In each episode, we aim to help demystify some of the big questions being asked in education, policy, health and human services. I'm your host, Audrey Breen.

In today's episode, I am eager to introduce you to my longtime colleague, Professor Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist who has spent decades studying school safety, school violence prevention, and something called school threat assessment. Welcome, Dewey. I'm so glad you're here.

Dewey Cornell: Audrey, it's great to be here.

Breen: Thank you. Can you give us just an overview about what it is you do and kind of some of the big questions you're asking?

Cornell: Gosh, you know, I've been at the University of Virginia for 38 years, so that could be a very long answer. But I do study school safety: how to prevent violence, how to make schools more welcoming, safe, effective supportive environments. And there's a lot of concern about school shootings. And my team and I have developed a protocol to help schools when there are a concern that a student might be threatening or planning some type of act of violence.

Breen: Before we get into details about the protocol itself, could you just share a little bit about school violence? You know, you mentioned school shootings, like just put that into some context for us.

Cornell: Sure. Well, school violence has long been a concern in American education, but the primary concern was usually disruptive behavior, fighting and bullying. And we certainly have too much of that. And we have programs designed to prevent that. But in the 90s, we saw something that we had not really experienced or noticed before, which were school shootings. And these were extraordinarily shocking and tragic and horrific.

And they have continued and, we have school shootings every year, unfortunately. And they have created a perception--a misperception--that schools are unsafe places, that gun violence is rampant in schools or that children are at risk of being shot at school. 

And I certainly don't want to minimize how serious the problem is, because every school shooting is a terrible tragedy. And our program is designed to help prevent them.

But the vast majority of our schools are safe, will never have a school shooting or a homicide of any type. We have 130,000 schools in the United States. That's a huge number. And we have in the neighborhood of 20, 21, 22 schools that experience a fatality, someone is shot and killed each year. So, 22 that we had last year is 22 too many and terribly tragic. But 22 out of 130,000 means that the average school will have a fatal shooting about every 6000 years. 

So, we have to do everything we can to prevent them. But we have to keep in mind that schools in general are safe. And in fact, the larger problem is gun violence. But the vast majority of that gun violence is not in schools. It's in other places. Only 2% of all homicides of school age youth occur in a school. 

Schools are actually one of the safest places for our kids to be from gun violence.

Breen: That's helpful. Thank you. You mentioned having been at the University of Virginia for more than 30 years now. How did you choose this path?

Cornell: I worked as a forensic clinical psychologist, evaluating youngsters who had committed violent crimes and had been sent by the court for evaluation. And I tell you, each case was really tragic because, when you dig into the history and backgrounds of really just about any child who commits a violent crime, you find a lot of challenges: traumas, neglect, abuse, mental and emotional difficulties.

Every case is different. There are different stories. But when you look at it, you could see that this didn't have to happen. This could have been stopped. And sometimes you could see things that that day would have made a difference, somethings the previous week, somethings in the month, sometimes in a much broader framework.

In other words, when you look back at a tragic, violent event, you can see many ways it could have been prevented. So that work convinced me that I wanted to look at prevention strategies and so I began to do some research on violent youth. And then, of course, we had a problem with school violence and school shootings. That took me to the University of Virginia when I started to do research and move into academia. 

And then when I was at the University of Virginia, I work with the FBI and their national academy and the FBI said, you know, schools ought to use threat assessment. And so really, the FBI, introduced me to the concept of threat assessment back in 1999, right after the Columbine shooting. And that sparked my interest to sort of see, well, let's see if we could do this.

Breen: Can you tell us specifically what it is you have developed and some of the questions you are trying to answer with those kinds of tools?

Cornell: Sure. The full name is Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management, which is kind of a mouthful. And it's not very education friendly. We really talk about multidisciplinary support teams that use a school threat assessment approach. And, and what that means is that we don't take a zero-tolerance approach. We don't treat every student the same.

We don't automatically remove students from school when they say or do something that's inappropriate or concerning. We do an assessment, and we take a preventive approach. That is, we try to assess, okay, this student engaged in a behavior that's concerning to us,  maybe he threatened to shoot somebody or blow up the school or something like that. And we know from our research that the vast majority of time that student is blowing off steam. Maybe it's a bad attempt at a joke. Maybe they really are upset about something, and we want to look into it. But they don't really seriously intend to physically harm other people. And so that distinction is really important.

And schools struggle with that, because when a student has made a threat or is rumored to have made a threat, gosh, pretty soon the teachers are on edge. The parents are clamoring for the student to be removed from school. Law enforcement could be involved. So, we developed a protocol for multidisciplinary teams at schools to interview students, gather information from multiple sources, and follow some criteria to decide how serious the threat is and what should be done about it.

And as the threat is more serious, maybe they can't easily resolve it--Oh maybe there's something here, this child has acquired a weapon, or they've talked to other people about doing something like this--there are these rare cases where it is more serious, and, then we will continue to process and maybe take protective action and in some cases involve law enforcement.

But there's a continuum of actions that we have spelled out. And we actually developed this protocol 25 years ago working with local schools. We brought in some local school staff who were critically important in helping us develop something practical and efficient. And over this last 25 years, we have been field testing, doing controlled studies, developing a training program, making lots of refinements and improvements.

So, it's been a really long process, but one that has been, overall, I think, successful in developing a very useful tool and process for schools to follow.

Breen: So when you say you don't use a zero tolerance approach, can you clarify that a little? Yeah.

Cornell: So, zero tolerance is kind of a philosophy of school discipline that says not just that we aren't going to tolerate this. It goes beyond that. It's not only are we not going to allow this, but we're going to respond in a harsh, automatic way to every incidence, regardless of the seriousness. 

So, you've probably seen in the news the child who brings a water pistol to school and he's expelled from school. 

Breen: Got it.

Cornell: A child who has a little piece of plastic from his G.I. Joe action figure, and he's expelled for having a a gun at school. And those are the most egregious cases. But there's kind of a general permeation in school discipline of removing kids from school for infractions. 

And that's a larger problem of using school suspension or a school exclusion as a disciplinary strategy. It's a handy tool that we use a lot. But the research that we've done and that many others have done find that it doesn't actually work. It doesn't improve the students behavior. It doesn't make the school safer. It doesn't send a good message to other students that makes them improve their behavior. It really just seems to be, a harsh negative consequence that doesn't make things better and often makes things worse.

So, part of what we're trying to do is to help move American education away from not only zero tolerance, but the use of school exclusion as a routine disciplinary matter. 

Now, there are some times when a student can't function in school and needs a different setting, and sometimes for safety reasons for a student not to be in school. But the vast majority of times students are being removed for school simply because people are frustrated. They don't know what to do. The teacher doesn't have time, and the teacher sort of gets a break if the student is out of school for a couple days.

Breen: Right. And so what kind of tools does something like the behavioral threat assessment give educators, schools? School leaders.

Cornell: Yeah. So, schools, have a lot of different tools, depending on how well they're staffed. And there's a big need there for more counselors and psychologists and social workers in our schools. But there are many different tools that have been developed to help resolve conflicts, to deal with bullying, that teach kids pro-social skills, to teach them to be less impulsive and more mindful and planful in their actions, to be more respectful toward others.

So, part of the assessment in a threat assessment is to really understand and, are their needs here, what is the problem or conflict or issue that's going on? Which can range from a mental health crisis or a post-traumatic reaction to, you know, a disagreement or teasing that needs to be worked out in the counselor's office.

So, lots of different possibilities there. So, threat assessment doesn't provide all the tools, but it asks schools to use the tools that they have.

Breen: I'm wondering, since you have 25 years of data under your belt, what are some of the things that you are working on at the moment?

Cornell: Sure. So, threat assessment has grown at a very rapid pace in recent years. When we started out, schools didn't know what threat assessment was. In 2012, Virginia mandated threat assessment for its K-12 schools, the first state to do that. And I just saw a survey, a few months ago, a national survey: 85% of U.S. public schools report having a threat assessment team: 85%.

Breen: Wow. 

Cornell: Now, the question is, what are they doing? They say they have a team, but, how well are they trained? What model are they using? How effective are they? And lots of other questions that come up when you use threat assessment. Are you doing it in a fair and equitable manner. So, all of these are questions that we're focusing on now.

What kind of training is essential to be able to do this? What model or models are effective, evidence based, reliable? What is the impact of that on students, and on others in the school community, maybe the person who's been threatened or the teacher who's concerned about a student? And is it fair and equitable? That is, are we responding equitably to students of color, to students with disabilities, to students from lower income homes and so forth. 

So those are all big questions. They are questions that have come up as threat assessment has become more widely used. 

We've got a practice that has accelerated far quicker than I expected or would have anticipated. I was shocked to see that 85% figure. But I have to stop and say, well, what do they mean when they say they're doing threat assessment? And we're trying to develop some standards for practice and training and implementation and evaluation.

Breen: Great. What are, what do those standards look like?

Cornell: Well, we recently developed a toolkit with the National Center for School Safety that describes who ought to be on the team, what kind of training, what they ought to cover in their training and alerts them to some of the problems and issues with student rights and fairness. 

When a student has a disability, that's complicated because these students might have a disability or condition that is contributing to the situation that they're in. And we need to take that into account. And we may need to think about modifying their IEP, for example, or their 504 plan. So, there's lots of details to come up and procedural issues that come up that we need to work on.

Breen: I'm curious when, you know, you just mentioned the National Center for School Safety, and this comes up a lot. Can you speak to what it means for your work to engage with, who some of your partners are?

Cornell: Yeah. There must be scientists somewhere who work in a laboratory all by themselves and get good results and publish them. But, that certainly doesn't work in education. 

First of all, we had to start with working with practitioners, with educators in the field, to describe, in plain terms, what problems and concerns they have. And for us to be able to propose responses and solutions, and then they have to allow us to try them out. Boy, our whole project has depended upon the goodwill of some school administrators who said, okay, we're burdened, we're tired, we've got 100 other things to do. But we'll try to squeeze this in. And, sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't work so well. 

But we've been fortunate that we've had a lot of school systems that have allowed us to work with them. And that can be at the school level, at the district level. In a few cases, it's been at the level of the state Department of Education or maybe a regional service center.

And of course, we've had funding from the federal government, particularly from the US Department of Justice. They have been really a champion of work around school safety and violence prevention and delinquency prevention. And so, they have funded us. 

There's lots of professional organizations that we have to work with because threat assessment involves a multidisciplinary team. So, we've had to work with administrative organizations--school psychology, school counseling. All of these folks have an interest in this because it's drawing upon their staff, and we want them involved with their expertise. But we need to coordinate with them. So, what kind of training are they providing? 

So, we now have school psych programs that are starting to include threat assessment in the curriculum, so that when they get to school this is not sort of a new thing, but it's something that they know about. 

We've done a lot of work with law enforcement because, as you know, law enforcement is involved in most schools across the country, certainly in secondary schools. And, you know, we want them to be part of the team.

We don't want them to be "lone rangers" working by themselves, maybe out of coordination or out of sync with the school. Part of our multidisciplinary approach is to involve law enforcement. I've had the opportunity to speak to lots of law enforcement groups, the publishing criminal justice journals, but basically to try to find ways to bridge law enforcement, mental health, education and administration, all of those different domains.

Breen: You, I think, have answered this question. But we you've mentioned several times, multi-disciplinary teams. Can you speak to specific roles that might be at the high school level, might be at an elementary school level? Who would be on those teams?

Cornell: Yeah. So the team has to reflect the composition of the school. Some schools are small, some schools have more or less resources. But basically we want an administrator, particularly the administrator who's dealing with disciplinary decisions because ultimately this is going to come back to their lap. And so, we would like to have them as part of the team.

And at least be able to inform and advise them, in addition to administration, we want the school student support staff or mental health staff: so our psychologist or counselor, social worker. Not all schools have those roles, but, if they do, we would like them. If they have a law enforcement officer or security officer, we would like them to be on the team as well.

So, its administration, mental health and law enforcement are the main contributors. Now. We certainly want input from teachers and teachers might be on teams, but often teachers are in the classroom. So, that's not always as possible.

Breen: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned, being positively surprised by the 85% number. Cautiously optimistic, perhaps. When you think about what you are hopeful for--So let's imagine it's ten years from now--what are some of the things you hope we know the answers to?

Cornell: Yeah. So, you know, the National Academy of Sciences is doing a study of school threat assessment. And they're going to produce a document sort of identifying implementation fidelity, evaluation needs, next steps for the field. And I'm fortunate to be able to contribute to that study. So I'm hopeful that a lot of that will go on, not just from the National Academy of Sciences, but from other groups and organizations. That we start to develop some practice standards, so that, when schools say they're doing threat assessment, that means something fairly evidence based and specific and, that'll be some accountability that they're sort of doing it right and having good outcomes from it. 

So, that's a process of continuous improvement. 

It's one thing for a state legislature to say all schools will have a threat assessment team. And then they say, okay, we've got a team. You're on the team. You're on the team. That's team. But then we've got to say, how are you going to do it now?

Breen: Yeah. You mentioned positive outcomes. When you think of what those are, what comes to mind?

Cornell: Okay. Number one is safety. We don't want anyone to be physically injured. We've done research to show that very few of our threats are attempted or carried out. When they are carried out and, in less than 10% of the cases there's not a serious injury. In fact, a recent study we looked at about 20,000 cases in Florida and serious injury was a quarter of one precent.

Breen: Oh, wow. 

Cornell: So, even that we'd like it to be zero. We don't want anyone to be hurt. But it was very, very low that someone had a injury that would really require a hospital treatment or something like that. 

So safety certainly. But we want to go beyond that. 

We want to resolve the conflict or problem that's in the school. We found that schools using our model show a reduction in bullying because a lot of threats are linked to bullying. And when we start to investigate and try to deal with that, we can stop a larger problem of bullying. So, we want to look at the impact on the school climate, on the well-being of the student.

We've done some work looking at how our students with disability, how well they do academically. A couple of districts with large numbers of cases were able to demonstrate that their kids with disabilities who got a threat assessment graduated at a very high rate, just as high a rate as the students without disabilities, which, you know, we can't prove that it's caused by that threat assessment. But certainly we can say that assessment didn't stop that process because. 

You know, threat assessment is kind of a red flag that a student has a problem that they aren't able to resolve. Yeah. And we're problem solvers and we want to show that we're solving those problems, and the students are faring well as a result of it.

Breen: I think that's great. Well, it's been an incredible journey, and I'm very grateful for your work, and I'm very grateful for your time. Thank you for spending some time with us, and I hope you'll be back.

Cornell: Yes. Well, you know I appreciate your patience and interest.

Breen: We're very grateful. Thank you. Thank you.