The Child Trends and NASBE analysis (2021) divided states into three categories: (1) states that mandated behavioral threat assessment in K–12 schools through legislation or specific state policy in 2019; (2) states that encouraged the implementation of behavioral threat assessment in K–12 schools or addressed it via non-codified policy in 2019; and (3) states that made no mention of behavioral threat assessment in 2019.
We explored to what extent the current (as of this writing) BTAM landscape in schools differed across these three early state policy contexts.
Figure 2.2 displays the existing landscape of BTAM program adoption in schools based on our survey data, again using 100 boxes to represent the population of public schools in each state policy context.
The three breakdowns demonstrate that BTAM is very common in schools across all 2019 state policy contexts.
Very few schools in any state policy context do not engage in BTAM at all.
However, there are marginal differences in specific elements of BTAM adoption across these contexts, namely in the types of teams serving schools.
schools in these states are more likely than their counterparts in other policy contexts to use a BTAM-like team to perform threat assessment and management functions (e.g., an MTSS or PBIS team).
Sample (N = 423 | 481 | 842 by column) · State-policy groups in column order: other states, encouraged BTAM use only, early legislation states
More specifically, 90 percent of schools in early legislation states have an official BTAM team today, compared with 77 percent of schools in states that only encouraged the practice in 2019 and 73 percent of schools in states where there was no mention of BTAM in state policy in 2019.
Furthermore, schools in early legislation states are more likely today than those in states where BTAM was not addressed in 2019 to have teams at both the school and district levels.
We also investigated the prevalence of BTAM teams (including BTAM-like teams) across different school demographics, including school level, locale, poverty level, student racial/ethnic composition, and student enrollment size.
As shown in Figure 2.3, BTAM teams were common across all school types.
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School enrollment-size subgroups (small, large)
Principals of large schools (those serving 450 students or more) were slightly more likely than their counterparts in small schools to report having official BTAM teams (85 percent versus 79 percent, respectively).
Sample (column N undeterminable) · School-locale subgroups (urban, suburban, rural)
BTAM teams may also be slightly less common in rural settings: 78 percent of rural schools reported having official BTAM teams compared with 84 percent of suburban schools and 86 percent of urban schools.
The 2019 compilation of law and policy was the most up-to-date source of comprehensive information on BTAM requirements nationally at the time of survey sampling and planning
Note that the authors of this study were focused on threat assessment, which is a somewhat broader category than behavioral threat assessment and management as currently defined.
For example, a state might be categorized by these authors as having a law, regulation, or policy requiring threat assessment even if the requirement did not involve that threat assessment being done by a multidisciplinary team (which is core to virtually all framings of behavioral threat assessment).
Note that some of these states that had neither legislation nor encouraged BTAM as of 2019 have passed BTAM legislation as of this report’s publication.
Federal data on school safety measures from the 2021–2022 school year also show that schools located in rural locales were less likely to have threat assessment teams, compared with schools located in city, suburban, and town locales (Burr et al., 2024).
During that school year, schools located in urban areas were also most likely to have threat assessment teams.
However, we do note some minor differences.
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