In this chapter, we provide an overview of the BTAM landscape in K–12 public schools across the country using data from the 1,746 principals who completed our survey on behalf of their schools.
We first use our survey results to investigate how many schools nationally had BTAM programs in place as of the 2024–2025 school year
We then examine what types of schools are likely to have BTAM programs and to what extent the prevalence of BTAM programs today is at all related to what the policy context looked like in 2019.
Specifically, we explore any potential differences in schools’ implementation of BTAM today based on whether their states required, encouraged, or did not address BTAM in the 2019 policy.
Figure 2.1 displays the national landscape of BTAM programs in K–12 schools, using 100 boxes to represent the population of U.S. public schools.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
As shown and according to the principals who took our survey, virtually all public schools (97 percent) engaged in BTAM in some capacity during the 2024–2025 school year.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Eighty-two percent of public schools have a team that they explicitly call a BTAM team (for which we use the term official BTAM team).
This translates to more than 70,000 schools across the United States with BTAM teams.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
This includes 25 percent of schools that have an official BTAM team housed at the school level, 13 percent of schools that only have a school district–level BTAM team, and 43 percent of schools that have both school- and district-level teams.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Another 14 percent of schools have a team that was not formally identified as a BTAM team but was functionally similar to such teams in that it “makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns” (those are represented by the light purple boxes in Figure 2.1).
These are typically school-based teams that make decisions in cases of serious student behavioral concerns; they could be a team associated with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) or positive behavioral intervention system (PBIS) or some other team referred to by another name.
were also served by BTAM teams that were managed by organizations or government entities external to the school or district.
For example, in some areas, teams managed by a local community or health care organization carry out BTAM for youth and adults referred to them through different pathways.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
Nine percent of schools reported working with an
Why inferred The sentence crosses a page break: this quote is the page 26 part and the sentence continues on page 27. Full sentence (pages 26–27): “Nine percent of schools reported working with an external BTAM team, as represented by the superimposed orange box in Figure 2.1.”
Some schools maintain programs that are not explicitly called BTAM but are functionally similar BTAM programs.
We initially present data that cover both types of programs but will later narrow to discuss only those programs that our respondents specifically identified as BTAM.
We define BTAM-like team as a school-based team that makes decisions regarding serious student behavioral concerns but is not formally referred to as a BTAM team.
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