Assessing Children’s and Adolescents’ Dangerousness in School Settings

Educators increasingly request that child mental health clinicians in outpatient and school settings provide guidance about how to assess children who may carry weapons to school or who may pose a potential threat to the school community. They may also request help in determining if a student’s aggression is exacerbated by an untreated psychiatric disorder.Many schools have to make critical judgments while relying on an inexact assessment despite the fact that there is an emerging descriptive knowledge base about students involved in school shootings (Twemlow et al., 2002). As Verlinden, Hersen, and Thomas (2000) point out in their comprehensive review, there are limits in the ability of clinicians to predict the potential for violence and there are no reliable screening instruments that identify students at risk for violent behavior and who will need intensive interventions. Assessments are extremely time sensitive and lack specificity (Verlinden et al., 2000). The focus of this chapter is to provide clinicians with relevant descriptive data about violence in schools, thorough examinations of case evaluations, and pertinent assessment guiding principles developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to educate schools about conducting threat assessments. Here, I present the relevant descriptive data about violence in schools. I then highlight a case evaluation model for violent students, using pertinent guiding principles that the FBI developed based on its analysis of students who killed multiple people (planned school attacks).