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With the Red Lake High School shooting this past spring having left 12 wounded and 10 dead, including the student-shooter, school administrators across the nation may be starting a new school year concerned about the potential for students to threaten and carry out acts of violence. School officials can turn for help to a new book, "Guidelines for Responding to Student Threats of Violence," by University of Virginia professors Dewey G. Cornell and Peter L. Sheras. In the first comprehensive manual of its kind, Cornell and Sheras, both clinical psychologists in the Curry School of Education, present a field-tested model approach that gives school officials a step-by-step decision-tree for assessing and resolving student threats. The threat-assessment approach represents a radical departure from profiling and zero-tolerance approaches, which are the most widely used practices in the nation's schools. Contrary to these approaches, the FBI and U.S. Secret Service have advocated the use of threat assessment.

"The FBI [in 1999] made a series of recommendations for schools to use a threat-assessment approach - as opposed to profiling or zero tolerance - to prevent student violence," Cornell said. "We used those recommendations, along with the Secret Service recommendations, to develop and field-test our threat-assessment guidelines."
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