Targeted school violence—a situation in which a school has purposefully been selected as the site of a violent, pre-planned attack—is rare. Nonetheless, an event of this nature affects every community in some way. It interrupts teaching and learning. It erodes confidence in public education. It creates fear in the hearts of students, staff, and community. For these reasons, it is important to be prepared—to develop a threat assessment process that involves the school community, as well as law enforcement, mental health providers, and other local stakeholders.

Since June of 1999, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service have been working as a team to try to better understand—and ultimately help prevent—school shootings in America. The Safe School Initiative has been a collaborative effort drawing from the Secret Service's experience in studying and preventing assassinations and other types of targeted violence, and the Department of Education's expertise in helping schools facilitate learning through the creation of safe environments for students, faculty, and staff.

The Safe School Initiative has included an extensive examination of 37 incidents of targeted school shootings and school attacks that have occurred in schools in the United States, beginning with the earliest identified incident in 1974 through June of 2000. The purpose of the study has been to examine the thinking, planning, and other behaviors of students who have carried out school attacks. Throughout the collaboration, the two agencies have focused on one common goal: to develop accurate and useful information about prior school attacks that could help prevent some future incidents.

In the summer of 2002, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service presented the findings of the Safe School Initiative at 12 daylong trainings in six cities nationwide (see Key Findings, left). They also distributed copies of their recent publication, Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates, to some 3,000 educators, law enforcement officials, and mental health providers gathered at the trainings. Distributing the Guide to local communities is essential, because one of its main purposes is to help "real people" with "real jobs"—that is, the Guide is intended to provide school and law enforcement officials practical guidance in preventing targeted school violence and in identifying, assessing, and managing students who may pose a risk for targeted violence in schools.

According to the Guide, effective threat assessment can only occur in the larger context of school safety—threat assessment must be linked to existing school safety plans, not seen as just "one more thing to do." Following are some key points of the guide.

Establishing an Integrated Approach

Threat assessment is a complex process that requires a team commitment, prior planning, and lots of practice. One person, or even one office, cannot do it alone. That is why an effective threat assessment is based on an integrated systems approach. In this approach, key stakeholders come together to establish protocols and procedures, and to identify existing and needed resources for both the students of concern* (see next page) and the whole school community. These key players discuss, plan, and agree on what should take place if and when a situation arises. This kind of planning is at the core of a successful threat assessment processÑensuring that decisions and plans are in place and that specific individuals have been delegated the authority to conduct assessments and share information if the need arises.

<continued on the next page: Creating a Climate of Safety>