requests for psychologists, educators, and law enforcement professionals to assist in preventing
future school violence incidents.We attempt to lay a foundation for developing effective assessment
and prevention approaches by first distinguishing planned school-based attacks from other
forms of school and youth violence. We then review the three assessment approaches that have
been advocated and used in some jurisdictions (profiling, guided professional judgment, automated
decision-making) and demonstrate why they are inappropriate—and potentially harmful—in
preventing planned school-based attacks.We then describe the contours of the threat assessment
approach, developed by the U.S. Secret Service to prevent assassinations, and examine its utility
for responding to communications or behaviors of concern that students may present in school
settings. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The recent school shootings that have occurred in the past few years in several communities
across the country, including Pearl, Mississippi, West Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas,
and Jefferson County, Colorado, have raised safety concerns and fears among students, parents,and school administrators nationwide. These rare but highly salient incidents, such as the one atColumbine High School, have garnered considerable attention from the national media (Arnette &Walsleben, 1998; Brooks, Schiraldi, & Ziedenberg, 2000; Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998; Lawrence, 2000), and appear to be largely responsible for the surge of public concern (Stossel, 1999). In the wake of these infrequent but highly publicized events, school administrators, mental health professionals, law enforcement professionals, and policymakers have come under increasing pressure to take steps to prevent school shootings in their communities (Brooks et al., 2000;
Lawrence, 2000; Sugai, Sprague, Horner, & Walker, 2000). In their quest to avoid becoming the
next statistic or headline, those with the responsibility to prevent school shootings have focused
preventive resources primarily on increasing physical security (e.g., installing cameras and metal
detectors), hiring school security officers, developing tactical plans for responding once a shooting
has occurred, and implementing a range of programs such as legal education and conflict resolution.
Unfortunately, these responses are not likely to be effective in preventing planned schoolbased
attacks.
In this article, we focus specifically on approaches for preventing planned school-based attacks,
rather than on other more common and recurring forms of school violence. ....
In this article, we attempt to lay a foundation for developing an effective assessment approach
to evaluate the risk of targeted violence in schools by addressing four issues. First, we
delineate the contours of the problem of targeted violence by distinguishing the fear of this
violence from its actual probability and by distinguishing targeted violence from other forms of
aggression in youth. Second, we examine and critique three assessment approaches—profiling,
guided professional judgment, and automated decision making—that have been advocated and
used in some schools to identify students at risk for violence, giving particular consideration to
the potential for harm inherent in these current approaches. Finally, we describe and explore the
utility of a threat assessment approach (Borum et al., 1999; Fein & Vossekuil, 1998; Fein et al.,
1995) to identify and assess risk posed by a potential student perpetrator for targeted violence in
school.
