American students are now being given threat assessments

Schools and police are using V-STAG to assess a students threat level:

"The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (V-STAG) is a school-based manualized process designed to help school administrators, mental health staff, and law enforcement officers assess and respond to threat incidents involving students in kindergarten through 12th grade and prevent student violence."

The war on terror is out of control! Watch out that kindergarten kid could be a threat!

Did you know, police are giving American addresses color coded threat ratings?  And our govt. has also assigned you a threat assessment while travelling inside the U.S.

V-STAG was developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Department of Education.

"Although both the FBI and Secret Service reports made a compelling case for student threat assessment, schools had no experience with this approach and there were many questions concerning the practical procedures that should be followed. In response, researchers at the University of Virginia developed a set of guidelines for school administrators to use in responding to a reported student threat of violence."

The Secret Service has the audacity to call threat assessing of kindergarten students a safety concern."The Final Report And Findings Of The Safe School Initiative."

"The Safe School Initiative" was implemented through the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and the Department of Education’s Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program.

Every student is being PROFILED and given a risk assessment rating, according to the Secret Services article titled "Evaluating Risk For Targeted Violence In Schools: Comparing Risk Assessment, Threat Assessment and Other Approaches."

"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."

"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..."

V-STAG is also designed to provide students involved in threat incidents with appropriate mental health counseling services, with parental involvement, and reduce the numbers of long-term school suspensions or expulsions and alternative school setting placements.

What's really being said is police and school administrators can put your kid(s) into mental health counseling which will follow them throughout their adult lives! Oddly there isn't any mention of the school-to-prison pipeline!

The V-STAG, threat assessment team will be used even if a student is alleged to have committed a crime and can't be identified:

"Through V-STAG, the threat assessment team aims to prevent student violence by (1) taking immediate protective action in the most serious substantive cases (i.e., instances when there is a genuine intent to cause bodily harm or when the intent of the student making the threat cannot be clearly identified and resolved)"

"Any threat that cannot be clearly identified and resolved as transient is treated as a substantive threat.Substantive threats always require protective action to prevent the threat from being carried out. The remaining four steps guide the team through more extensive assessment and response based on the seriousness of the threat. In the most serious cases, the team conducts a safety evaluation that includes both a law enforcement investigation and a mental health assessment of the student."

Many schools also use the "Student Threat Assessment Program" to look for disruptive students.

Did you know there's anAssociation of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) who ironically, will be holding their conference at theDisneyland Hotel in California. How many troubling, disruptive, threatening kids will be in Disneyland?

In the conference brochure the LAPD'sThreat Management (Assessment) Unit is listed prominently because they founded the ATAP!  If you guessed the ATAP has close ties to DHS give yourself a gold star, click here & here to read more.

"The ATAP is a diverse association comprised of professionals such as law enforcement officers, prosecutors, mental health professionals, and corporate security experts."

Is that supposed to be a joke? The people making threat assessments all stand to gain financially:

"... the increase of workplace violence incidents and terrorism has created a need to combine forces with the private sector."

There's also a "National Behavioral Intervention Team Association" (NaBITA) dedicated to giving  students threat assessments. It has more than 800 active members from colleges, universities, schools and workplaces.  If you guessed the NaBITA has close ties to DHS give yourself another gold star, click here & here to read more.

Threat assessments are also being given to college students, they're just using a different name calling them 'Campus Safety Teams.'

"While the prevention of campus violence may have been the catalyst for improving coordination and communication across campus departments with the creation of Campus Teams.” 

"The creation of Campus Teams that identify and monitor students whose behaviors may be troubling is an opportunity to engage them sooner rather than later, so that they can receive needed referrals or other appropriate assistance and treatment."

To find out more about 'Campus Teams' read "Balancing Safety On Campus: A Guide For Campus Safety Teams." Some colleges like Youngstown State University have created a "Student Threat Assessment Team (STAT). "

The NaBITA has created a "Threat Assessment Tool" with NINE levels of Aggression.

The 'MILD' levels allege students might be emotionally troubled if the school considers his or her debating harmful!

Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy knowing a team of school administrators and police are profiling every student!

In general, the mission and purpose of 'Campus Teams' encompasses:

• Gathering information about students of concern. This may specifically focus on threats with thepotential to become violent (as is the case with threat assessment teams) or a broader range of behaviors. As noted below, this may also expand to include behaviors by others on or off campus, besides students.

• Assessing the information about each case in a systematic way to determine the most effectiveresponse for that particular person and situation.

• Defining the plan/response to address the needs of both the student and the safety of the community. The plan should consider specifics about who, when, where, and how the response will occur.

• Implementing the response in a way that de-escalates a potential crisis, reduces or removes threats, and attends to the needs of the individual who is demonstrating disturbed and/or disturbing behavior. Note that for many campus teams, the actual implementation of a response may be carried out by other individuals or departments; the team itself often acts in an advisory and coordinating role.

• Monitoring the disposition of the case to gauge whether any additional follow-up is needed, whether the response was effective, and what lessons may be learned for future cases, especially in terms of implications for school policies and procedures.

The dual purpose of housing these functions under one team’s purview is:

• to prevent any particular instance of disturbed or disturbing behavior from falling through theorganizational cracks; and

• to connect disparate (and therefore seemingly innocuous or less troubling) pieces of information that may indicate a more serious or acute problem, in the hope of preventing a dangerous or critical outcome or event.

Colleges nationwide are using 'Campus Teams' to give their students sexual threat assessments, there is a "Legal Compliance and Sexual Violence Prevention Training" being held in Boston this July 27, 28th.

"This training will address the critical intersection between compliance with federal laws to address sexual and intimate partner violence, and the role that threat assessment can play in effectively addressing these issues."

Colleges are also using, "The Structured Interview For Violence Risk Assessment (SIVRA-35)" by Brian Van Brunt, Ed.D.,

Our government has been using rare on campus shootings as a justification for schools and colleges to give students risk assessments.

"After the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, there was a natural inclination to form Campus Teams with a specific focus on threat assessment and management."

"Campus Teams can facilitate the flow, processing, and synthesis of safety related information, which in turn helps decision-makers identify foreseeable risks and construct and implement reasonable responses."

Our government want us to believe that EVERY student is a potential threat and we need threat assessments to stop them.

The fact is student homicides are RARE:

With nearly 106,000 public and private schools in the U.S., there were shootings at only 0.009% of schools since December 2012. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2013 “Indicators of School Crime and Safety” report, from the 1992-93 school year until the 2010-11 school year, there were between 11 and 34 homicides of youths ages 5-18 at schools each year (including attacks with weapons other than firearms), with an average of about 23 homicides per year.

Compare that to NCES’s enrollment statistics, about 0.000044% of public and private K-12 students were killed at school per year between 1992-93 and 2010-11. That’s about one out of every 2,273,000 students per year. By contrast, the odds of being hit by lightning in a given year is one out of 700,000 according to National Geographic. For more information read the "Youth Violence Fact Sheet"

To find out more about how the Secret Service and the FBI are using threat assessments, read the following articles:

"Threat Assessment: An Approach to Prevent Targeted Violence"."Threat Assessment: Defining an Approach for Evaluating Risk of Targeted Violence"Threat Assessment In Schools: A Guide To Managing Threating Situations And To Creating Safe School Climate"