285,000 safety incidents. That’s what a few hundred middle schools recorded in the first three months of a single school year, according to the National Threat Assessment Center. Every planned school attack in the study showed warning signs first.
“A threat is a red flag that someone is experiencing a problem,” said Dr. Dewey Cornell. “We want to be problem solvers.”
Dr. Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and the author of the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG) model, has studied threat assessment for over 25 years, since the FBI’s study of school shootings after Columbine.
In our recent webinar, Catch it at Concern, Not Crisis, he laid out what school violence prevention looks like in practice: how teams classify a threat, what the research shows, and how proper documentation through a system like Navigate360 Behavioral Case Manager can serve as the difference between a safety plan and a paper trail.
Overreaction, Underreaction, and the Pop-Tart Problem
Dr. Cornell discussed the spectrum between over- and underreacting, and how schools have been sued for both.
Overreacting means treating concerning behavior as dangerous without weighing the context. Without a formal process, schools may default to zero tolerance and proceed with expulsion or suspension of the student. For instance, one case spent six years in court after a school removed a student over a threat that turned out to be a prank invented by classmates, while another was pulled out for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.
“Removing a student from school doesn’t make the school safer,” Dr. Cornell shared. “What we want to do is supervise, teach, and support students.”
Underreacting means not taking concerning behavior seriously. For example, a student is making threats or drawing concerning pictures, yet there’s no investigation initiated.
Dr. Cornell highlighted the school shootings where threats were reported, but never acted on, including Parkland, where families reached a $127 million settlement, and a Virginia case in which a first grader shot a teacher after making repeated threats.
This is why having a formal threat assessment process in place matters. Dr. Cornell described threat assessment as a triage approach: most reports resolve quickly with minimal paperwork, which frees a team to spend real time on the few cases that need it.
Dr. Cornell said schools are increasingly held liable for failing to follow high standards of practice for school safety, and lawyers presenting at a recent conference described lawsuits reaching every part of the school community: school staff, law enforcement, and parents alike.
Dr. Cornell says it’s a process. CSTAG is built to help teams make reasonable, evidence-based decisions and keep good records of them.
“Whatever you do, whatever practice you might have, if you don’t have records of it, it becomes subject to criticism,” he said.
The balance is a recognized process, followed and documented, that works to prevent violence early.
What Over 23,000 Cases Revealed
In the 2021-2022 school year, Dr. Cornell and his team at the University of Virginia studied more than 22,000 threat assessment cases across Florida schools, all conducted by school-based teams.
The research was backed by a decade of funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, with findings published in peer-reviewed psychology, education, and criminal justice journals.
Of those cases, eleven percent were not a threat. Seventy-one percent were transient, and the rest were substantive. Threats showed up at every grade level, and from elementary to high school students.
Ninety-nine percent of cases resolved with no serious injuries, and none involved a shooting. Most students stayed in school, suspension rates fell, and six studies found disparities for Black and Hispanic students reduced or eliminated when a formal threat assessment was followed.
Following a formal threat assessment process is what makes those outcomes possible. Schools using CSTAG or similar models can properly and consistently triage threats and concerns while keeping most students in class, leading to fewer suspensions.
These are outcomes that Dr. Cornell’s team has also linked to less students reporting being bullied, and a more positive and safe school environment. Without a formal model, the same cases are handled inconsistently, and often inequitably, depending on who happens to be reviewing them.
Student Violence Prevention Requires Documentation
A crucial piece of the threat assessment process is documentation. Records are a matter of quality of care, Dr. Cornell said, not just liability. Most cases close fast, but every large school has a few students with ongoing concerns, whether that’s bullying, gang involvement, or special education needs, and those don’t resolve on their own.
Documentation shows what a team tried and when they needed to change course.
Dr. Cornell’s ask of the system: one secure place per case, visible only to authorized staff, where the whole team can monitor it. Navigate360 Behavioral Case Manager keeps case history with the students across buildings assigns tasks with owners and due dates, so interventions and supports get carried out, and tags cases to surface the school-wide patterns Dr. Cornell recommends reporting at year end.
“Prevention is kind of invisible,” he said. “You don’t get credit for prevention because nothing happens.”
Where to Start
“No one is expected to be perfect. No one is expected to prevent any kind of violence from ever occurring,” Dr. Cornell said.
To hear more from him on what 25+ years of threat assessment research means for your team and school culture, watch our recent webinar, Catch it at Concern, Not Crisis: Behavioral Threat Assessment That Holds Up.
