Comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan

Keeping our school children safe requires the shared commitment from states, school boards, and communities with the ability to dedicate resources to this critical issue.

In the wake of these tragedies, the U.S. Secret Service has launched an initiative to provide updated research and guidance to school personnel, law enforcement, and other public safety partners on the prevention of school-based violence. I am pleased to release this operational guide, Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model, as the first phase of this initiative.

With the creation and distribution of this operational guide, the U.S. Secret Service sets a path forward for sustainable practices to keep our children safe, extending our expertise in the field of threat assessments to provide school officials, law enforcement personnel, and other public safety professionals with guidance on “how to” create a Targeted Violence Prevention Plan.

This guide will serve as an important contribution to our partners on the Federal Commission on School Safety - the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of the Attorney General.

The information gleaned from these studies underscores the importance of establishing a threat assessment process in schools to enhance proactive targeted violence prevention efforts.

The goal of a threat assessment is to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence or other harmful activities, and identify intervention strategies to manage that risk.

This guide provides actionable steps that schools can take to develop a comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan and create processes and procedures for conducting threat assessments on their campus.

These steps serve as minimum guidelines and may need to be adapted for a particular school or district’s unique resources and challenges.

For institutions that already have prevention plans or threat assessment capabilities in place, these guidelines may provide additional information to update existing protocols, or to formalize the structures of reporting, gathering information, and managing risk.

Rather than focusing solely on a student’s personality traits or school performance, we can learn much more about a student’s risk for violence by working through the threat assessment process, which is designed to gather the most relevant information about the student’s communications and behaviors, the negative or stressful events the student has experienced, and the resources the student possesses to overcome those setbacks and challenges.

Ensuring the safety of our schools involves multiple components, including physical security, emergency management, and violence prevention efforts in the form of a threat assessment process.

This process begins with establishing a comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan.

The plan includes forming a multidisciplinary threat assessment team, establishing central reporting mechanisms, identifying behaviors of concern, defining the threshold for law enforcement intervention, identifying risk management strategies, promoting safe school climates, and providing training to stakeholders.

It can also help schools mitigate threats from a variety of individuals, including students, employees, or parents.

This guide provides basic instructions for schools on creating a targeted violence prevention plan, the focus of which is to decrease the risk of students engaging in harm to themselves or the school community.

These recommendations serve as the starting point on a path to implementation that will need to be customized to the specific needs of your school, your student body, and your community.

When creating these plans, schools should consult with legal representatives to ensure that they comply with any applicable state and federal laws or regulations.

The first step in developing a comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan is to establish a multidisciplinary threat assessment team (hereafter referred to as the “Team”) of individuals who will direct, manage, and document the threat assessment process.

The threat assessment procedures detailed in this guide are an important component of school safety and security efforts and have been determined to be the best-practice in the prevention of targeted school violence.