Report page 108

To do so, we drew on data collected via a survey fielded to a nationally representative sample of school administrators in January 2025.

The survey sought to understand how BTAM is working on the ground at K–12 schools and revealed the following key bright spots:

Adoption of BTAM as part of school safety efforts—or the existence of an alternative BTAM-like team—has become a nearly ubiquitous practice across U.S. schools.

This is a significant shift relative to ten years ago, when fewer than half of schools had BTAM teams in place.

The rapid growth in schools’ use of BTAM and widespread adoption suggest that schools should shift their focus from BTAM adoption to implementation fidelity and refining practices to ensure consistent and effective implementation.

As schools move beyond establishing BTAM programs, ongoing support will be critical for institutionalizing best practices and building capacity for program sustainability.

Even for the few schools that have not yet adopted BTAM—or that might move from using an alternative team to a dedicated multidisciplinary BTAM team—our results indicate that the foremost challenge is not schools’ initial adoption of BTAM.

When we asked principals who had played a role in establishing their school’s BTAM program questions about the initial implementation phase, most indicated it was relatively smooth and that their program became an effective contributor to safety at their school relatively quickly.

As a result, new adopters of BTAM may need more help to support the continued function of their BTAM team and improve the program’s effectiveness and outcomes over time, as opposed to support from the local community to get a program off the ground.

State-level policies related to BTAM, whether through legislation or non-codified policy, are likely helping schools implement BTAM.

Our analyses show that schools in states that mandated or otherwise encouraged BTAM implementation at K–12 schools through non-codified policy in 2019 are ahead in terms of their BTAM implementation.

Today, schools in these states are more likely to have standardized meeting schedules for their BTAM teams, as well as written SOPs and defining policy documents for their BTAM programs.

This could be because schools in these states received earlier support in the form of training and/or funding for their BTAM programs.

Responses suggest that schools are appropriately scoping their BTAM programs to focus on the most severe and high-risk cases of student behavior.

One of the main concerns about BTAM is the possibility that schools may cast an overly wide net, such that their BTAM program addresses low-level behavioral incidents (e.g., talking back to a teacher or other disruptive classroom behavior) best suited for other school behavioral management and student support systems.

Reports from school principals largely suggest this concern has not played out.

Instead, our survey results suggest schools’ BTAM teams have maintained a focus on those incidents that align with their core mission of identifying and intervening in potentially serious school safety concerns.

We saw this both in descriptive survey results and in principals’ responses to scenario-based survey items, where principals identified that BTAM teams rarely made the initial decision in response to incidents.

In this report, we took an in-depth look at the state of BTAM in K–12 public schools across the country.