Threat Assessment Project

The purpose of this project is to prevent and reduce school violence by designing and implementing a threat assessment case management tool and marketing threat assessment as a preventative, not punitive measure. With the support of the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) information technology staff and the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA), the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety (VCSCS) is proposing a project that will support the development and procurement of a tool for all 131 school divisions, and the full piloting in six Virginia school divisions. Threat assessments have increased 21.3% since the 2018-2019 school year with 21,063 threat assessments being completed in the 2021-2022 school year. The increase in threat assessment cases highlight the need for a case management tool that is compatible with all student record management systems in Virginia.

The primary activities of this project include developing and coordinating with an advisory committee, collaborating with vendors to procure a case management tool and produce public service announcements, piloting the tool, training threat assessment teams on the use of the tool and collecting data on threat assessments. It is expected that implementing a threat assessment case management tool will allow public schools to track all incidents of threat across their school and division, share threat assessment cases within school divisions and externally when applicable, identify and provide earlier intervention to individuals on the pathway to violence, and synchronize the threat assessment reporting process across the Commonwealth of Virginia. The pilot portion of the project will impact 194 schools and just over 160,000 students within one year of implementation. After the tool is fully implemented it will impact 2,015 schools and over 1.2 million students in Virginia over six years.

Through the proposed grant period DCJS-VCSCS will build upon foundational work already completed to procure and implement a case management tool that has the capacity to process at least 30,000 threat assessment cases annually. Once the grant period has ended and the data and information from pilot school divisions is compiled, VCSCS will then proceed to roll out the case management tool to the remaining school divisions. Funding for the remaining divisions is proposed to come from a general assembly budget amendment and existing agency funds.