Transcript

Host: Hello, and welcome to Prevention and Protection, the United Educators risk management podcast. Today’s podcast, Tips to Optimize Your Threat Assessment Team, is hosted by Hillary Pettegrew, Senior Risk Management Counsel at United Educators. Hillary is joined by Cathy Cocks, with D. Stafford & Associates. They’ll discuss ways for higher education institutions and K-12 schools to improve how their threat assessment teams operate.

A reminder to listeners that you can find other UE podcasts, as well as UE risk management resources, on our website, www.ue.org. Our podcasts are also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please note that this is a risk management podcast, and nothing in this podcast should be considered legal advice. Now, here’s Hillary.

Hillary Pettegrew: Hello, and thank you for joining us. I’m Hillary Pettegrew, Senior Risk Management Counsel at UE, and I’m happy to introduce my guest speaker, Cathy Cocks. She is the Director of Student Affairs, Behavioral Threat Assessment, and Independent Investigation Services, for D. Stafford & Associates.

Cathy has a master’s degree in higher education administration, and she’s worked in higher ed for more than 30 years — including 28 years at the University of Connecticut, where she led the student conduct process, and, among other duties, chaired the university’s student threat assessment team for more than half that time. Cathy was also on the writing team for the CAS Standards Cross-Functional Framework for Identifying and Responding to Behavioral Concerns, and she’s currently on the board for the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals’ (ATAP’s) New England Chapter.

Cathy, thanks for joining me today and sharing your expertise with the audience.

Catherine Cocks: Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Pettegrew: So am I. And a few housekeeping items before we begin.

First, we understand that schools use a variety of terms to describe their teams, such as care teams, behavioral intervention teams, or behavioral threat assessment and management teams. Educational institutions, of course, need to use terms that work for their particular culture. For convenience today, we’ll generally use the terms “threat assessment” and “threat assessment teams.”

And second, unless we specifically indicate otherwise, our discussion applies to both higher ed and K-12, and we may use the general term “schools” to apply to either.

So, Cathy, let’s start with something very basic, and define the purpose of a threat assessment team at a K-12 school, a college, or a university.

Cocks: The essential function of this team is to prevent acts of targeted violence, by focusing on a person’s patterns of thinking and disturbing behavior, using a systematic fact-based process. Targeted violence is premeditated, planned out, and it serves some kind of purpose for the person of concern.

I’m sure many people listening are familiar with a pathway to violence. Oftentimes, acts of targeted violence start with a grievance, and then the person decides that violence is an acceptable resolution to their grievance.

Once they make that decision, they move to planning. How would I do this, when, where, and then they prepare by buying weapons and practicing, for example.

The last two steps on the pathway are breach and attack, which are too late for threat assessment teams to act. We want to live in the grievance and ideation end, where we notice someone who is starting to exhibit concerning behaviors, and we can intervene before the person escalates.

Here’s one example. Many students might have financial aid problems, but the vast majority have a healthy way to cope with those issues. They don’t think about responding violently. However, someone may start to see violence as an acceptable way to solve their problem, and we will start to see an aggressiveness, a sense of being wronged, and that manifests itself in different ways. In this context, the warning signs could be in the form of texts, emails, or other verbal written messages to financial aid, or other officials making statements like, “You’ve ruined my life. This is your fault,” etc.

We want to understand and help people who are struggling. We are watching for behaviors that may indicate that someone is having difficulty and may be considering taking their grievance off a reasonable resolution path. Some people may be hesitant to report, because someone hasn’t made a direct threat. Threat assessment teams examine whether someone poses a threat.

You should encourage members of your campus community to share any behaviors or communications, verbal or written, from a person that raises a concern, even if they don’t contain explicit threats. I suggest making it easy to report, advising people that trust their instincts, and telling community members that, if in doubt, please report.

Pettegrew: Cathy, some schools have separate threat assessment teams for students and employees, while others combine those functions in a single team. Do you think one approach is preferable to the other?

Cocks: No. I think both can be effective. Which approach to take really depends on your own school’s needs, culture, history, etc., and I’ll touch a little more on this issue in a few moments.

Pettegrew: What is your first tip to help a school that wants to optimize its threat assessment team?

Cocks: When training or working with a school, I typically start by looking at three key areas: mission, scope, and membership. Whether you are creating a new team, or have an established one, these three areas must be continually evaluated and adjusted, based on your current needs. If you’re starting a team, the good news is that there are resources and models to help you develop these areas, but keep in mind that one size does not fit all. What works for one school may not work for you. You have to pay attention to your institutional culture, needs, and resources. If you have an established team, I recommend an annual checkup on these three areas to ensure that you have not gone off course, or if you have, you need to update your mission, scope, or membership.

Pettegrew: Well, let’s address each of those three key areas in turn. What do you mean by mission, in this context?

Cocks: Mission boils down to what’s your purpose. Generally, that means we are trying to prevent concerning behavior from going unnoticed, and connecting the dots to prevent a dangerous situation or event.

There are five common elements to mission:

First is collaboration and coordination to effectively intervene.

The second one is to promote the health and safety of the community and individuals.

Third is to help retain students and employees whose success is at risk.

The fourth one is to assist students and employees in building their capacity to identify problems and develop healthy solutions.

And finally, we want to use a multi-disciplinary approach to individuals who may pose a threat.

Pettegrew: Thanks. Now let’s discuss the second area you mentioned. What about scope?

Cocks: I see scope as both scope of persons, and scope of issues. First, it’s important to be clear about which individuals of concern the team will manage. Is it students? Is it employees? Does it include strangers or visitors to campus? We sometimes don’t think about this, but parents, families, neighbors, former students, and the greater community invest heavily in schools — some financially and some emotionally. Insiders aren’t the only ones who can develop a grievance with the school. A school also can be a guaranteed place to find a targeted individual, such as a partner or an ex-partner. So, who manages threat assessment for this group?

Now, the second scope is scope of issues. Does your team manage general concerns — for example, housing and food insecurity? Do they manage behavioral concerns, not policy violations, but behavior that is concerning or could become disruptive? And who conducts a threat assessment? Keep in mind, teams look at whether someone poses a threat, not whether they actually made a threat.

Depending on your school’s size, culture needs, etc., you could have one team that addresses all of these, or separate teams. As I said previously, either approach can work, as long as there is communication, collaboration, and coordination. I mentioned the one size doesn’t fit all before; the scope of your issues is going to be dependent on your resources and school context. A community college is very different from a large four-year university. One may see more issues with students who come and go for years, while other schools have on-campus housing. If you’re with a K-12 school, you rarely have the resources a college or a university has, so where are you getting your expertise? These things impact your scope.

Pettegrew: And turning to your third key area, membership?

Cocks: As the word indicates, this means the members of your threat assessment team. It’s important to distinguish here between regular members of the team and people who might periodically attend, depending on the specific cases you plan to discuss. In my experience, threat assessment teams tend to have too many participants. In the interest of covering every possible what-if, you can easily make the team too large and cumbersome to function well. You can also have too few members, with the result that you’re missing important expertise.

Again, the specifics may differ depending on your school, but in general, the core team at most schools should include campus police, campus safety, campus security, student counseling, student conduct, and student affairs, HR, if your team is addressing employee issues. Other team members could include an academic advising staff member, a guidance counselor, a health services rep, or a Dean of Students rep, if that’s not the same as your student conduct person. If you have on-campus housing, you may have a Residential Life person.

Whether to include student disability services as a regular member of the team is a bit of a hot-button issue, because should a representative from that function actually know everything they’re going to hear, if they serve on the team? Do they have a legitimate educational interest to learn about students who are not registered with them? I also have concerns about whether it should be known to other team members that a student is registered with disability services, unless there appears to be a connection to the concerning behavior. I worry about profiling and making assumptions about people. This is really important to talk about and determine if and when someone from disability services should be on your team. They are important partners and should be involved when appropriate.

Others who probably should not be regular team members, but attend only on as-needed basis, include legal counsel. Don’t forget, the purpose of this team is to mitigate harm, not avoid a lawsuit, and you’ll find many attorneys really don’t want to be on the team as regular members. It’s not the best use of their time.

If you have a Risk Manager, risk management is a much broader function than threat assessment, which aims to determine whether a specific person poses a risk of targeted violence. Generally, I’d say a Risk Manager should only attend if there’s a particular reason their input might be needed, but again, no one size fits all.

There’s also your Title IX Coordinator, or your VAWA compliance coordinator, and again, for appropriate cases, such as stalking or sexual violence, but do they need to be there the whole time? Local police and other external law enforcement authorities may be specific to your community. In the K-12 world, that might be your primary contact, and it makes sense for threat assessment issues. For colleges, you will likely go through your own campus safety department.

Pettegrew: Cathy, what are the most common mistakes you see schools making with regard to their threat assessment teams?

Cocks: I would say there are three.

First, I find that often schools don’t put their threat assessment procedures and protocols in writing. Here’s why I think it’s important to have written procedures and protocols: You want to identify the team members, and state plainly in writing how members of the campus community can bring issues of concern to the team. If there’s no clear process, individuals don’t know where or to whom to report, which leads to people of concern falling through the cracks.

In addition, the procedures and protocols should outline how your assessment process works and perhaps explain which team member typically handles certain duties, such as following up with the reporter for more information or speaking to a student of concern, potential witnesses, for example. You need to be clear about how you are going to do your job. Failing to put these things in writing hampers the ability to periodically evaluate the team members. You need clear expectations. If a team member is not doing what they need to do, you have to make a decision about their continuation on the team.

Lastly, and this is probably the most important, if it’s not in writing, it is too easy for people to not utilize your team. You have to be the experts at your school, and it needs to be clear what your role is.

Now, a second common mistake, in my opinion, is that schools may have a tendency to over-rely on one rubric or matrix to guide their threat assessment work. There are great resources out there and  different situations, warrant different tools. For example, I like, as a foundation, using Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates, and then also using WAVR-21, which is a structured professional judgment guide. If there are possible threatening communications, the CTAP is great as a tool, and I know many K-12 schools use the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines.

In general, I recommend against limiting yourself to any single tool of this kind. I often see people getting stuck on using a specific rubric, for example, and it can prevent them from learning and adopting new approaches as they go along. They may also not be using the right tool for the right occasion. Identities, issues like stalking and intimate partner violence may warrant a different tool. I recommend being open to using a variety of tools in your toolbox. Also, remember, if you say you are using a particular model or models, make sure you follow through.

Third, in my experience, team meetings are sometimes ineffective. This can be due to team members not doing the work between meetings. This is a daily responsibility. It can also be due to not having enough structure.

To help avoid that, I suggest have regularly scheduled meetings with a set agenda. Organize your list to discuss the priority cases first. As I mentioned, not all of the team’s work happens at meetings. At the meetings, you should discuss cases of concern and next steps. But in between the meetings, appropriate team members need to actively manage cases of concern, share information with other team members as appropriate, etc. If you have nothing specific to discuss at a scheduled meeting time, consider using it for something else like training. If possible, have redundancy in your membership. For example, if you have only one person from counseling attend, and that person is out, it impacts how effective you can be in the meeting. Having two people, ideally, creates a backup system. However, I know that is resource-specific, and it may not always be possible.

The last recommendation is to embrace the realization that you may close out a case, and the student will pop up again in a few months or a year. If the person, based on your professional judgment, no longer poses a threat or is at risk, close the case. You have some students who are doing fine, but every April, they pop back up, and that’s OK.

Pettegrew: Cathy, how should threat assessment teams handle reports that warrant immediate action?

Cocks: Well, as I said, this is a daily job. You can’t wait until a meeting to get a report, review it, and start your work. The team’s process kicks in as soon as you get a report. Someone needs to review it, and start the threat assessment process, which typically has four stages.

First, gathering information. What is the presenting issue? What do we know about the person of  concern? What is their background, their life information? What are any attack-related behaviors, grievances, risk factors, mitigating factors, etc.?

The second stage is assessing the information. What does this information tell us? This is where our models come into use.

Third is defining and implementing the plan or response. What do we do?

The fourth stage is monitoring the disposition. We need to follow through and monitor the situation. Those can’t all be done in a meeting. The process happens throughout the week.

I also want to stress that teams are not emergency units. 911 is for anyone who is made a threat, or is actively engaging in threatening behavior. For example, someone walks into school with a gun.

Pettegrew: How important is it for the threat assessment team to have the support of the school’s senior leadership?

Cocks: It’s very important. Your community needs to know that senior leadership supports your work. We are trying to build a culture of caring, where people notice others struggling, and we respond to help the person. These aren’t party committees. Senior leadership is critical in getting resources. For example, training money, or if you identify a need, maybe more counseling or outreach, they can approve that.

Some higher education presidents certainly make it a priority, but I’ve found others don’t truly understand threat assessment, and think, “Well, the police can manage any problems.” The police can help to manage if someone has made a threat, but again, a team looks at whether someone poses a threat. It’s an important distinction. Still others tend to rely on the unfortunate belief or hope that nothing bad will happen, and I’ve seen this happen more often with K-12 leaders.

Pettegrew: Do you have any suggestions for how to convince such leaders of the importance of a robust threat assessment team?

Cocks: Sure. First, data is your friend. What are your stats regarding reports and interventions? Also, look at the national data. The Violence Project has incredible data on their website. Also, in my view, senior leadership shouldn’t be trained on how to do a threat assessment, because that makes them dangerous. But I recommend having them attend a training that gives an overview of the issue, the research, and why teams exist.

Pettegrew: Before we conclude today, let’s discuss training a little bit. What type of training do you suggest for an effective threat assessment team, and with what frequency?

Cocks: Training can’t be one and done. The team needs to understand threat assessment, its origins, purpose, and research, then you need training on your strategy and approach. What models are you using? For example, D. Stafford & Associates offers a one-day chair training that covers all the issues a threat assessment team chair needs to manage, such as team structure.

We also offer a national class that covers targeted violence, threat assessment principles, reporting, creating a culture of caring, and using a strategy and approach. We also offer individual school training, where I come in and do a day, or two days, of those topics. Many schools add onto that training some tabletop exercises.

As I said, it can’t be one and done. I am a firm believer in ongoing training, whether it is keeping current issues, reading task force reports or books, having your institutional experts, such as disability services, come in and talk about their area. I also love a review of your past cases to see what went well and what you could do better. We learn from our past and the experiences of others.

Pettegrew: So, for the benefit of our audience, the D.Stafford & Associates training

that Cathy described is linked on the landing page for this episode. In addition, I want to note that UE offers multiple threat assessment resources, which are free to our K-12 and higher ed member institutions. Those are also linked on the landing page, and include our collections on campus violence and student mental health resources, as well as a specific checklist on implementing student threat assessment for K-12 schools, and another checklist focused on active shooters on higher ed campuses. Cathy also mentioned tabletop exercises, and we’ve linked to UE’s library of crisis response tabletop exercise scenarios, in case those are of interest.

Cathy, while we’re on the subject of training, do you recommend any training for the campus community generally on the existence and purpose of the threat assessment team, as well as how to report issues of concern?

Cocks: I recommend schools come up with a road show where they talk about a culture of caring, why the team exists, what to look for, and how to report. All your team members get invited to present on their areas. Do you have some slides or talking points for them to drop in about the team? You have to build connections, and this is a great way to start doing that.

Pettegrew: Now, do you have a final takeaway that you consider critical for threat assessment teams?

Cocks: This is hard work. You have to take care of yourself and your team. Talking about vicarious trauma is important. If this becomes routine work, and people get desensitized, it’s time for a break. Take time to talk with each other about how this is impacting all of you, and support each other.

Pettegrew: I think that’s an excellent note on which to end, so we’ll wrap things up for today. Again, check the podcast episode landing page for links to UE resources, and a link to the threat assessment team training offered by D. Stafford & Associates. Thank you again to everyone listening, and a very special thanks to Cathy for sharing her time and expertise today.

Host: From United Educators insurance, this is the Prevention and Protection Podcast. For additional episodes, and other risk management resources, please visit our website at www.ue.org.