What should a school do with a problem kid who’s a threat to everyone around him? It’s complicated. One problem is that the officials making that decision—the teacher, the school’s administration and staff, the local school district—all may have different opinions. Some may incline towards leniency and second chances, others towards maximum punishment, depending on the severity of the offense.
Since our schools, like military organizations, are top-down hierarchies, in general the teacher himself has almost no say in the matter. Instead, schools formulate general policies that others lower on the administrative pecking order have to follow. These policies are informed by a few central imperatives: (1) the school seeks to protect itself against lawsuits. (2) the school wants to do what “is best for the child,” whatever that is. And (3) the school seeks the sanction of “experts” who supposedly know more about these things than anyone else.
With respect to (3) the “experts” in American education in this area are BTAM personnel. BTAM stands for “behavioral threat assessment and management” and informs how school psychologists and administrators deal with the problem of dangerous or violent students. Many if not most school psychologists are trained in BTAM techniques, and school administrators and school board officials tend to give them a great deal of deference in such matters.
A recent article in Communiqué, the magazine of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP--not available online), dealt with “reintegrating students into school after a threat.” A student who, for example, brought a gun to school, or expressed a desire to shoot the place up, might have been temporarily expelled, suspended or even hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. But in most cases that student will eventually return to the school; the challenge then, according to NASP, is that “excluded students may experience isolation, stress, feelings of failure, and even increased motivation to engage in future threatening behaviors.” NASP doesn’t want these excluded students to have their self-esteem undermined, or their privacy and civil rights limited, or for them to be “unnecessarily referred to the juvenile justice system.” Accordingly, “data to inform [administrative decisions] must be determined to plot a course of action.” And that data, of course, will be provided by “a thorough BTAM process.”
Often, BTAM experts may be hired by the School District to act as consultants—that is, if the District does not already have a “well-trained, multidisciplinary school or district-level BTAM team” consisting of “an administrator, at least one school mental health officer, and a school resource officer/law enforcement officer.” Such BTAM experts don’t make a great deal of money—their average salary in California is only $70,000—although in private industry it can be much higher. Kaiser Permanente currently is seeking to hire a Behavioral Threat Management Security Consultant for between $88,000-$114,000, while Indeed, the job-placement service, lists an opening for a “Senior Threat Assessment Manager” for $120,000-$130,000 a year. There are even consulting services school districts can hire if they don’t have their own BTAM experts; one of these, Equus Leadership Solutions, touts its program as a “commitment to equity,” which puts BTAM in the orbit of social justice efforts. Clearly, the professional field for threat assessment specialists is growing.
In my humble opinion, the best person to make decisions about what to do with these violent students is the teacher. He or she knows the student, knows the circumstances, knows the impact on his classroom of the student’s bad behavior. What does a remote bureaucrat with a B.A. in psychology know about the situation? It’s pure theory, and like most psychology and social science courses now taught in American universities, has been exploited by woke academics interested in advancing their personal progressive goals of social justice.
There’s one word that seldom arises in these conversations: Parents. What is their role with these unruly students? What are their rights, and what are their responsibilities? I have to admit that a strong part of me thinks that kids who are violent are not being properly reared. A child growing up in a stable household, who is being instilled with proper values, generally doesn’t bring weapons to school, or fantasize about killing others. I’m not sure what the psychologists at NASP say about parenting, but it’s really the 800-pound elephant in the room whenever we’re talking about youth violence. It would be nice if we could license adults to have and raise children, and subject them to occasional fitness exams, the way we do with people who wish to drive cars. That’s not going to happen, of course. While I don’t know what the answer to feral children is, I do believe we have to start talking about parenting—including failed parenting—because it’s a real problem and if we can’t even admit it, it will only get worse.
Steve Heimoff