Threat Assessment in Schools

“A Safe School and Threat Assessment Experience: Scenarios Exploring the Findings of the Safe School Initiative,” produced by Stonehouse Media under contract from the United States Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, directly addressed the critical issue of violence in schools through scenario-based training for school personnel on how to identify and respond to students who exhibited threatening behaviors. The interactive experience was designed to extend the findings of the Safe School Initiative, which looked at school shooting incidents over the last 30 years and created a series of recommendations for a school-based threat assessment process to identify persons who are on a path toward violence and steer them off that path before a violent incident occurs. The companion interactive experience included a Teaching Scenario that places the findings of the Safe School Initiative in the context of a real-life case where the user is asked to perform a threat assessment, a Skills-Building Scenario where the user can practice the application of the Safe School Initiative’s findings in a training environment, and a spotlight on the New Bedford case study where the findings of the Safe School Initiative were used to thwart a planned school shooting.