Student threat assessment as a standard school safety practice: Results from a statewide implementation study.

Abstract

Threat assessment has been widely endorsed as a school safety practice, but there is little research on its implementation. In 2013, Virginia became the first state to mandate student threat assessment in its public schools. The purpose of this study was to examine the statewide implementation of threat assessment and to identify how threat assessment teams distinguish serious from nonserious threats. The sample consisted of 1,865 threat assessment cases reported by 785 elementary, middle, and high schools. Students ranged from pre-K to Grade 12, including 74.4% male, 34.6% receiving special education services, 51.2% White, 30.2% Black, 6.8% Hispanic, and 2.7% Asian. Survey data were collected from school-based teams to measure student demographics, threat characteristics, and assessment results. Logistic regression indicated that threat assessment teams were more likely to identify a threat as serious if it was made by a student above the elementary grades (odds ratio 0.57; 95% lower and upper bound 0.42-0.78), a student receiving special education services (1.27; 1.00-1.60), involved battery (1.61; 1.20-2.15), homicide (1.40; 1.07-1.82), or weapon possession (4.41; 2.80-6.96), or targeted an administrator (3.55; 1.73-7.30). Student race and gender were not significantly associated with a serious threat determination. The odds ratio that a student would attempt to carry out a threat classified as serious was 12.48 (5.15-30.22). These results provide new information on the nature and prevalence of threats in schools using threat assessment that can guide further work to develop this emerging school safety practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cultural‐competence considerations for contemporary school‐based threat assessment

“…Threat‐assessment procedures show promise for reducing racial inequities in the judgment of threat severity and for reducing racial disparities in punitive and exclusionary school discipline outcomes (Cornell et al, , ); however, the degree to which cognitive biases impact the way threats are perceived by children and adults is not well explored. The possibility exists that threat assessment may reduce punitive adjudications of discipline referrals while ignoring individual and systemic biases that contribute to the disproportionate referral of YPOC and CLD students in the first place.…”

“…• Refer to all guidance in Step 3 • To address distrust of school personnel, clarify roles and responsibilities in the threat-assessment process and provide guidance to students and their families about their educational rights and related grievance processes • Consider historical experiences with and learned distrust of community-and school-based law enforcement (Continues) Threat-assessment procedures show promise for reducing racial inequities in the judgment of threat severity and for reducing racial disparities in punitive and exclusionary school discipline outcomes (Cornell et al, 2009(Cornell et al, , 2017; however, the degree to which cognitive biases impact the way threats are perceived by children and adults is not well explored. The possibility exists that threat assessment may reduce punitive adjudications of discipline referrals while ignoring individual and systemic biases that contribute to the disproportionate referral of YPOC and CLD students in the first place.…”

“…School‐based threat assessment is designed to be a systematic process for adjudicating perceived or real threats that accounts for variations across individuals and contexts, thereby reducing disparities in school suspension and expulsion for YPOC (Cornell & Lovegrove, ). Using retrospective survey research methods, Cornell et al () found that the prevalence rate for threat‐related referrals for Black youth was higher than for their White counterparts, but that among Virginia educator teams using threat assessment procedures, the adjudication of serious threats did not vary based on student race. This recent contribution to the literature suggests that using threat assessment procedures may help restore equity after a YPOC is referred, yet the root cause for the disparate number of referrals by school personnel and peers for perceived and real threats remains unexplained.…”

Violence among Senior High School Students in the City of Abepura

“…In this decade, violence is a rife phenomenon in all levels of education, from elementary school [1], middle [2], high school [3,4], or three all together [5] to college [6,7]. Violence also spread in the family of human being [8,9].…”

“…Violence is not only happening among adolescent in the western countries like United States [2], but also in Asian countries like Bangladesh in collective violence [11] or eastern countries like China [1,12] and among Asian American women with psychological violence and sexual violence [13]. Usually women got more attention, especially in intimate partner violence (IPV).…”