Report page 75

The box below (“Identifying Behavior Elements in Scenarios”) also uses Scenario E as an illustrative example of how we collapsed the scenarios down to the key behavioral elements they contained.

We completed this process for all 16 scenarios.

Note that these fictitious incidents are not meant to be an exhaustive representation of the types of safety-related incidents occurring in schools but rather an illustration of what schools are likely addressing.

We also note that some of these categorizations may be ambiguous or open to interpretation, which we believe also accurately reflects the experiences of today’s schools.

we also include a shortened description of these key details in parentheses as a reminder for the reader.

We first use principals’ responses to scenarios to discern what sorts of incidents involve school BTAM teams and how they are involved.

We also consider when the BTAM team is identified as most likely to make the initial decision about how to respond to a student’s behavior in response to an incident and, if not the BTAM team, who else in the school makes initial decisions about how to respond to that type of incident.

After presenting each behavioral scenario, we asked respondents who would make the initial decision about how to respond to the behavior.

Given different circumstances across the schools in our sample, we expected that the person or group making that initial decision could differ from scenario to scenario and school to school.

Therefore, we listed up to 12 options, including the BTAM team and a teacher or school administrator (e.g., principal or assistant principal); a counselor, nurse, social worker, or psychologist; an SRO (or other school-based law enforcement officer), non-school-based law enforcement officer, security officer or guard;

Scenario E: In a drawing assignment that asked students to visualize different ways to solve problems, a student draws a graphic picture of someone shooting at a group of people, including details like bleeding and other physical injuries.

The teacher mentions previous unsuccessful attempts to contact the student’s family about their academic progress, and that the student had recently appeared withdrawn and sad in class.

fixation on violence (graphic picture of someone shooting at a group of people)

concerning home context (previous unsuccessful attempts to contact the student’s family)

history of academic issues (academic progress)

withdrawal or depression (appeared withdrawn and sad in class).

Table 11.1 also shows the total number of respondents who answered questions about each scenario during the survey (denoted by n).

Note that existing guidance around BTAM, including NTAC guidance, does not expect BTAM teams to be the first line of response for all incidents.

However, guidance does expect these teams to be notified of and to assess situations that present a higher risk of harm.