the desire to keep students in school means that there are appropriate reasons to limit the use of exclusionary discipline, unless removing a student from school is necessary to ensure the near-term safety, functioning, or well-being of the school community.
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Temporary school suspensions, longer-term separations from school, and even expulsions are all tools available to and used by schools, although shorter suspensions are more frequently used compared with these other longer-term exclusionary actions.
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the possibility that BTAM could increase the use of either exclusionary discipline or criminal justice approaches in responding to student behavior has been a concern for civil society groups and a focus of policy debate around BTAM as a school safety practice.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
However, BTAM is not synonymous with discipline, and concerns about misuse are often more about implementation fidelity than about BTAM as a violence prevention approach more generally.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
To probe these issues, we specifically examined the frequency with which principals reported using restrictive interventions across the different scenarios.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
at least some schools said they would likely take or recommend these types of actions in response to examples of student behavior included in the scenarios.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
Principals’ likelihood of indicating they would consider exclusionary discipline tended to increase along with incident severity level, though there were exceptions.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
very few schools responded they would temporarily or permanently remove a student from school or refer them to law enforcement in response to the least severe scenarios.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
Sample (N = 1419) · Scenario observations, high severity: actions taken or recommended (p082, p087, p090, p092)
For the most severe scenarios, around 70 percent of schools said they would likely suspend the involved student, and between one in five and one in six said they would permanently remove the student from school.
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Sample (N = 1419) · Scenario observations, high severity: actions taken or recommended (Figure 11.7 note, p090)
Approximately half of respondents noted they would refer the student to law enforcement for the most severe scenarios.
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
Importantly, schools in a smaller subset indicated that they would suspend students in response to behavior depicted in middle-level scenarios
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
this is somewhat in line with findings from previous studies of behavioral threat management in schools, which suggest that many schools implement short-term suspensions as an immediate response to some student behavior to give their BTAM team time to complete a behavioral threat assessment and decide on appropriate longer-term interventions, including support-focused interventions (Jackson et al., 2025).
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Short-term suspensions may also help ensure the immediate safety of the individual student and broader school community.
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A surprising number of principals also responded that they might refer students involved in middle-level scenarios to law enforcement, in particular for Scenarios J (history of misbehavior, history of academic issues, suspected substance use) and L (use or access to a weapon) in secondary schools.
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Sample (no n: a percentage change, not a share of a sample) · a percentage that is not a share of a sample (e.g. a percentage-point change or a weighted estimate of the population)
Although other studies show that most K–12 principals do not believe that exclusionary discipline measures teach students valuable lessons and help avoid future behavior incidents, 12 percent nationally still do believe that suspensions and expulsions give students the opportunity to learn from their behavior (Perera and Diliberti, 2023).
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In our survey, schools also appeared more likely to use these types of measures at the secondary level, compared with the elementary level.
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Policy debate around BTAM generally focuses on whether the approach increases the likelihood of students being removed from school or arrested and prosecuted, because the debate is framed around potential threats posed by students, because law enforcement can be involved in assessing and framing responses to student behavior, or for other reasons.
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The response to these critiques is that such outcomes are counter to what
cite page 89 Ch 11: How Are Schools Using BTAM to Respond to Student Behavior?
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