Report page 74

The interventions and supports assigned by BTAM teams in response to concerning behavior should be tailored to the specific needs of a student identified by a team as posing a risk of harm to self or others.

BTAM is a proactive approach to identifying, assessing, and providing appropriate interventions and supports for students who display a behavior that elicits concerns about their own safety or the safety of others.

we analyzed principals’ reports about the types of issues their BTAM teams are involved in, how teams assess risk, and the types of interventions they use to respond to incidents.

Before principals answered any detailed questions about their BTAM team and program, we presented them with a series of scenarios describing distinct school safety incidents and then asked three questions about how they would respond to each specific incident.

our survey sought to understand whether BTAM is working as intended at schools around the country

Through these scenario-based questions, we sought to elicit information that was as close to practice as possible about situations that principals may have encountered and had to address in their own schools.

All principals received three different scenarios: (1) one scenario capturing a low-level behavioral incident that would typically fall outside the scope of a BTAM team, (2) one scenario capturing a high-risk incident that would fall within the scope of a BTAM team, and (3) one medium-level scenario falling somewhere in between.

For the medium-level scenarios, we expected more variation in principals’ responses about whether they would refer such incidents to their school’s BTAM team and the types of interventions that might be implemented in response to the student’s behavior.

These scenario-based questions allowed us to examine in more depth how schools are determining the boundaries and criteria for their BTAM programs.

We administered a total of 16 different scenarios, eight of which focused on situations occurring in elementary schools and eight on incidents more relevant to secondary schools.

Principals were randomly assigned scenarios conditional on their school grade level.

We purposely included a higher number of medium-level scenarios.

In Appendix B, Table B.1, we provide the full wording for all 16 scenarios presented to respondents.

Note that this chapter also only presents results for schools that had official BTAM teams.

Schools that had other school-based BTAM-like behavior teams or no BTAM teams also answered questions about these scenarios, as described in Appendix B.

These schools are omitted from our analyses here.

Previous chapters have presented data that frame how BTAM teams and programs function at schools across the country.

This chapter also includes boxes with scenario descriptions where specific scenarios appear in the text.