Florida and other states passed threat assessment mandates after the 2018 Parkland shooting
states, including Florida, passed mandates related to threat assessments in response to the 2018 Parkland shooting (Blad, 2023).
states, including Florida, passed mandates related to threat assessments in response to the 2018 Parkland shooting (Blad, 2023).
Despite clear growth in schools’ adoption of BTAM programs, more than 20 years after the publication of findings from the joint U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education report on the Safe School Initiative (Fein et al., 2002; Vossekuil et al., 2004), we still have little systematic data on what BTAM actually looks like in schools across the United States.
Although several studies have sought to understand the impact of threat assessment programs on various school-level outcomes, including violence prevention, these reports are (1) specific to a single threat assessment model, (2) confined to understanding trends in single states, or (3) based on interviews and surveys of small samples of individuals (see, e.g., Ross et al., 2022; Cornell et al., 2018; Crepeau-Hobson and Leech, 2022; Jackson and Viljoen, 2024).
Therefore, the primary goal of this report is to draw on a nationally representative sample of school administrators to understand how BTAM is being implemented and operationalized across the country.
More specifically, we aim to answer 12 questions about the state of BTAM in K–12 public schools as of the 2024–2025 school year:
What schools have implemented BTAM?
When did schools establish BTAM teams?
What is the scope of schools’ BTAM programs?
How are schools operationalizing BTAM?
Do schools use named BTAM models, to what extent do they modify them, or are they building their own models?
Why did schools adopt specific BTAM models (or develop their own), and how did they go about it?
How do BTAM teams assess level of risk for referred cases?
How do BTAM teams develop intervention plans for at-risk students, and what do these plans look like?
How do BTAM teams monitor intervention plans?
Is BTAM working as intended?
What do principals think are the effects of their BTAM programs?
What do principals think about sustaining and improving their BTAM programs over time?
To address these research questions, we relied on survey data collected from K–12 public school principals between February 5, 2025, and February 24, 2025.
The survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of principals who were members of RAND’s American School Leader Panel (ASLP).
Participating principals received detailed questions about their school’s BTAM program—ranging from which school and outside personnel are on their BTAM team, what specific BTAM models they are using, and the steps they took during the initial program implementation phase to perceptions of BTAM’s impact
Other states in this group include Maryland (2018), Texas (2019), Illinois (2019), and Kentucky (2019).
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