School Threat Assessment & Management Project (STAMP)

SLO-STAMP has carried out ongoing threat assessment education for educators, mental health professionals, law enforcement, and other community professionals throughout its active period. At these various trainings, community professionals are guided through threat assessment example cases and educated on threat assessment and management principles by leading experts in the field.

SLO-STAMP has provided a number of threat assessment and management training sessions specifically for members of County Level 2 Community Threat Consultation teams in San Luis Obispo and Tulare Counties. These trainings focus on special topics, provide more in-depth case studies, and facilitate community organization engagement beyond what SLO-STAMP Level 1 Trainings provide.

A main goal of SLO-STAMP is to create a collaborative community team that can consult with the boots-on-the-ground district threat assessment teams for cases of targeted violence and connect them with community resources that will be essential in deterring the student(s) from violence. As part of the threat management process, SLO-STAMP's Level 2 Community Consultation Team conducts follow-up check-ins with school site teams to ensure upstream prevention of targeted violence.

Through our workshop presentations and community outreach efforts, SLO-STAMP has further developed the community capacity of mental health professionals. Mental health agencies, private practitioners, and social service agencies that have attended SLO-STAMP trainings have demonstrated an improvement in their knowledge and confidence in threat assessment principles. SLO-STAMP has worked to strengthen the roles of community behavioral health organizations in the school safety system in the region. 

Our approach is strongly rooted in the Salem-Keizer Cascade Threat Assessment Model. The SLO-STAMP team at Holifield Psychological Services Inc. has collaborated at length with community threat assessment Chairs to create a streamlined and standardized procedure through which threat assessment cases can be processed. This process ensures confidentiality while allowing for clear communication and collaboration between community entities that allows threats to be managed and student safety to be prioritized.

SLO-STAMP has collected data throughout its activity period that demonstrates the ability of the threat assessment process to filter out cases of violence that are unfounded, implausible, or otherwise no longer need to be looked into. According to our data, the number of threats decrease the higher up one goes in the system of severity that we have. This means that we are successfully weeding out cases as mentioned before and, additionally, that our goal of upstream prevention is being fulfilled.