When a case is referred to a BTAM team, the behavioral threat assessment component of BTAM involves gathering information to determine whether a student who engaged in concerning behavior may pose a risk of harm.
The assessment process can be divided into two main stages: (1) gathering information to understand the nature and severity of the concerning behavior or threat and (2) making a judgment about the risk of harm the individual poses to themself or others.
In this chapter, we analyze principals’ responses to questions about the assessment component of their BTAM programs (the management and support component is discussed in the next chapter).
We investigate what the process looks like at schools across the country, what data BTAM teams are using to make decisions about risk of harm, and the level of transparency schools are integrating into the behavioral threat assessment process.
Sample (N = 1746) · All principals who completed the survey and received a weight (weighted to national K-12 public school principals/schools)
In this chapter, we focus on the 82 percent of schools that told us they had an official BTAM team.
we hypothesized that BTAM teams could structure their processes and deliberations in four overarching ways when assessing the seriousness of a particular student’s behavior or the potential risk of harm they posed.
The options were meant to capture the degree of consistency or standardization that the BTAM team applied across cases—that is, whether these teams use a common structure and assessment process to consistently collect similar data across cases and a consistent method for deliberation across the set of cases referred to them.
Table 8.1 presents the four operational types included in a survey question focused on the assessment process and the percentage of principals who indicated that the option best described the structure and processes of their BTAM teams.
Drawing on the research literature on program implementation and quality improvement, operational types that are further down the table reflect modes of BTAM implementation that are more likely to produce consistent results case by case and maintain performance over time, thanks to their standardization (see, e.g., Bohanon, Caputo Love, and Morrissey, 2021).
As shown in Table 8.1, BTAM teams at schools across the country are spread across the four different operational types.
Sample (N = 1394) · Teams answering how the team assesses seriousness during meetings
Only 31 percent of teams are using what we labeled as highly standardized approaches—that is, applying common structures and processes in meetings and both collecting consistent data and using a standardized process for threat assessment across referred cases.
Sample (N = 1394) · Teams answering how the team assesses seriousness during meetings
However, 79 percent of teams are using a common meeting structure (the sum of the bottom three rows in Table 8.1)
NTAC guidance for effective BTAM implementation in K–12 schools emphasizes standardization across cases, through the establishment of “clearly defined processes and procedures to guide assessments” (NTAC, 2018, p. 7).
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