Violence by students at the K-12 level (up to age 14) is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent these incidents is increasingly important. Various disruptive behaviours or communications, including direct threats, may precede acts of violence.

These reflections are derived from research by several authors such as Brian A. Jackson, Pauline Moore, etc. also published in Rand.

While expulsion of all students exhibiting these behaviours may seem prudent, doing so may be counterproductive, limiting the effectiveness of safety efforts. With effective behavioural threat assessment and management (BTAM) systems in place, schools can assess and respond to behaviour of concern to protect the community and respond to the student whose behaviour has caused concern.

To do this, schools need the tools to respond. Tools may include restrictive measures or the involvement of law enforcement in more serious cases, but other options may be more effective. These additional options include different types of mental health intervention, counselling and other kinds of support. Teams with extensive tools available can better customise their interventions, increasing the likelihood of positive outcomes for all involved.

In this report, the authors draw on published literature and extensive interviews with education and public safety professionals to create an inventory of the many intervention options that are valuable to schools in the BTAM management phase. In addition, drawing on varied approaches from the fields of counselling, school discipline and behaviour management, and other professions that must tailor appropriate services to the needs of the youth in their care, the report discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement this critical part of efforts to prevent targeted violence and sustain school communities.

Several intervention options are available for K-12 BTAM efforts

Through the use of supportive counselling and other interventions, BTAM is expanding the options available to school leaders and staff to address problematic behaviour that has the potential to escalate into violence.

To be effective, school BTAM teams need a broad set of tools that include options tailored to:

• the specificities of a student’s problem behaviours,
• the unique community and school environment, and
• the needs and circumstances of the student(s) involved.

Insights from education, public safety, and other fields can be combined to support the matching of effective interventions to student needs.

Recommendations

To better inform intervention planning, intervention tools should be designed to prioritise the collection of data on factors that can be changed because pieces of information in BTAM, which may be a useful part of assessing the danger posed by an individual, may be useless for intervention planning.

The inventory of intervention options developed in this study could provide a starting point for schools to make conscious decisions as they

• review the options available for their teams and
• identify options that they may not have access to but that could become valuable near-term priorities for strengthening their school safety efforts.

_____

Aquest apunt en català / Esta entrada en español / Post en français