The Secret Service’s newly-released report on creating programs for conducting a threat assessment in schools provides a guide for officials to compare to their own systems.

The report was released by the agency’s National Threat Assessment Center, which was created in 1998 to provide guidance and training on threat assessments to criminal justice and public safety professionals.

Threat assessment programs should be one part of a larger campus protection system. Still, when done right, threat assessments can be an extremely powerful tool to protect your campus because, despite popular opinion, there is no reliable profile of student attackers.

“Rather than focusing solely on a student’s personality traits or school performance, we can learn much more about a student’s risk for violence by working through the threat assessment process, which is designed to gather the most relevant information about the student’s communications and behaviors, the negative or stressful events the student has experienced, and the resources the student possesses to overcome those setbacks and challenges,” the authors state.

The report should be interpreted as “minimum guidelines” for school officials to adjust to their own unique campus situations.

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