Introduction

When incidents of school violence occur, they leave a profound and lasting impact on the school, the community, and our nation as a whole.

Ensuring safe environments for elementary and secondary school students, educators, administrators, and others is essential.

This operational guide was developed to provide fundamental direction on how to prevent incidents of targeted school violence, that is, when a student specifically selects a school or a member of the school community for harm.

The content in this guide is based on information developed by the U.S. Secret Service, Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC).

Over the last 20 years, NTAC has conducted research, training, and consultation on threat assessment and the prevention of various forms of targeted violence.

Following the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999, the Secret Service partnered with the Department of Education on a study that examined 37 incidents of targeted violence that occurred at elementary and secondary schools (i.e., K-12).

The goal of that study, the Safe School Initiative (SSI), was to gather and analyze accurate and useful information about the thinking and behavior of students who commit these types of acts.

The findings of the SSI, and an accompanying guide, served as the impetus for establishing threat assessment programs in schools.

In 2008, the agencies collaborated again and released a report that further explored one of the key SSI findings, namely, that prior to most attacks, though other students had information about the attackers’ plans, most did not report their concerns to an adult.

The findings of this report, known as the Bystander Study, highlighted the importance of creating safe school climates to increase the likelihood that students will speak up in order to prevent an attack.

The information gleaned from these studies underscores the importance of establishing a threat assessment process in schools to enhance proactive targeted violence prevention efforts.

The goal of a threat assessment is to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence or other harmful activities, and identify intervention strategies to manage that risk.

This guide provides actionable steps that schools can take to develop a comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan and create processes and procedures for conducting threat assessments on their campus.

These steps serve as minimum guidelines and may need to be adapted for a particular school or district’s unique resources and challenges.

For institutions that already have prevention plans or threat assessment capabilities in place, these guidelines may provide additional information to update existing protocols, or to formalize the structures of reporting, gathering information, and managing risk.

When establishing threat assessment capabilities within K-12 schools, keep in mind that there is no profile of a student attacker.

There have been male and female attackers, high-achieving students with good grades as well as poor performers. These acts of violence were committed by students who were loners and socially isolated, and those who were well-liked and popular.

Rather than focusing solely on a student’s personality traits or school performance, we can learn much more about a student’s risk for violence by working through the threat assessment process, which is designed to gather the most relevant information about the student’s communications and behaviors, the negative or stressful events the student has experienced, and the resources the student possesses to overcome those setbacks and challenges.

All publications related to studies conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) are available from https://www.secretservice.gov/protection/ntac/.