Evidence-based threat assessment practices are essential for distinguishing between minor behavioral issues and serious safety concerns. In this video, Dr. Jenn Maeng examines a study of 23,000 Florida cases to show how these protocols can reduce violence while keeping students in the classroom. Viewers will learn how formal models can help standardize responses and successfully connect at-risk students with mental health services. This data provides a roadmap for school safety professionals looking to implement more effective practices in their own districts.
Recommended Citation
Maeng, J. L., Kerere, J. & Cornell, D. G. (2023). Threat Assessment and Management Training in Florida Schools Technical Report. Charlottesville, VA: School of Human Development, University of Virginia.
Transcript
Jen Mang: My name is Jen Mang, and I’m a research associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. As the principal investigator for this project that we’re going to talk about today, the statewide implementation of school threat assessment in Florida, which was funded through the National Institute of Justice.
I’ve been working with the research team since about 2015. I’m a former high school teacher, and I am particularly interested in how we make school environments safer and how we can support more effective learning environments.
So this project was the large scale study of the statewide implementation of school threat assessment in Florida public schools. Most of our previous research team’s work has been in Virginia schools, and it’s important to show that the positive outcomes that were achieved in Virginia could be obtained on both a larger scale and in a different state.
In this report, we report on threat assessment outcomes for more than 23,000 cases involving about 3,400 schools across the state of Florida. This represents about 90% of the state, and it’s a large study, relatively speaking, for any kind of school safety program.
School teams were able to resolve about 82% of cases as not a threat or not serious, and therefore were able to focus more attention on the about 18% of cases that were serious. In more than 90% of cases, students were able to continue in their original school. In the other cases, students went to a different school or received some other form of instruction, and only 2% of students were expelled following a threat assessment. More than 73% of students in the sample were referred for some kind of service, so counseling, mental health services, parent conferences, special education program, restorative practices, things like that. And most school teams were able to resolve threats safely with few incidents of violence.
There was no physical attack in 94% of cases, and in 6% of cases, there was maybe a fight without serious injuries reported following the threat assessment. In less than a quarter of 1% of cases, schools reported a serious injury requiring hospitalization.
So we actually looked at disciplinary outcomes for students with disabilities and without disabilities, and we didn’t find a significant difference in disciplinary outcomes for out of school suspension or expulsion for those students. We did find some small differences in outcomes by student race. For example, 27% of black students received an out of school suspension compared to 25% of white students. But these differences are much smaller than what we typically see in school disciplines, so we’re pleased that those differences were so small.
We looked at whether students were arrested, charged with a crime, or placed in juvenile detention centers, and the rates for all of these outcomes were very low. For example, less than 1% of students receiving a threat assessment were arrested out of a sample, again, of 23,000 cases, and we found no disparities in law enforcement outcomes based on race or disability status.
Schools need to use an evidence-based approach to threat assessment. It’s important that schools don’t develop their own models without evidence that the model that they’re using works. Schools need high-quality training for every member of their multidisciplinary team. They need to provide time and support for the teams to do their work and to learn how to work effectively together.
And then finally, I would say teams need to maintain complete records of their work so that they can reflect back and look at how their team is implementing threat assessment in their schools.
We also have a new study that was funded by the National Institute of Justice that’s looking at districts across five states in the country that have very different contexts. And in that study, we’re looking very closely at the quality of implementation of threat assessment. And we’re actually looking at outcomes over a longer period of time, up to three years, so what happens to the student a year after they’ve received a threat assessment or two years after. And again, one focus of this study is looking at the fairness and equity of threat assessment outcomes across student groups.