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ABSTRACT:
Threat assessment has been widely recommended as a violence prevention approach for schools, but there are few reports of its implementation. Memphis City Schools adapted the Virginia threat assessment guidelines (Cornell & Sheras, 2006) for use by a centralized team serving 194 schools and a student population of 118,000. This article describes 209 student threats referred for assessment during a single school year and the resulting educational placements and disciplinary consequences. There were no reports of students carrying out any of the violent threats. These results support further examination of student threat assessment as a promising approach to dealing with student threats.
Since the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, school administrators have been under pressure to assure the public that schools are safe and secure (Cornell, 2006). The shootings in 2005 at Red Lake High School in Minnesota, in 2006 at the Amish school in Pennsylvania, and in 2007 at Virginia Tech received worldwide attention and have kept the issue of school safety in the foreground of national concerns. The purpose of this study is to report on the implementation of a student threat assessment program designed to prevent acts of violence in Memphis city schools.
Both the FBI (O'Toole, 2000) and the Secret Service (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002) studies remarked on the diverse backgrounds and circumstances of students who engaged in acts of targeted violence but identified some general characteristics seen in many, but not all, of the student perpetrators. Many of the students were victims of bullying who had become angry and depressed, had family relationship problems, and were negatively influenced by peers. More than half displayed a preoccupation with violence through movies or video games. Unfortunately, both law enforcement agencies concluded that, because these characteristics can be found in so many students, it is not possible to develop a profile or checklist that could be used to pinpoint the small number of truly violent students among them. Any checklist of warning signs would falsely identify many students who were not dangerous.
Nevertheless, the FBI and Secret Service emphasized that almost all of these students communicated their intentions to attack through threats and warnings. In most cases, the threats were not communicated directly to the intended victims...