Insights Blog

Threat assessment and BIT/CARE teams increasingly encounter reports that arrive with a screenshot and a question: “Does this mean something?” A student has “764” in a username. Someone references a “lorebook.” A disturbing image contains blood, knives, skulls, or unfamiliar symbols. A parent discovers an online account filled with violent memes. The instinct to decode these signs is understandable, but it can also pull teams in the wrong direction. The newly released Nihilist

Brian and I recently presented an InterACTT webinar on building resilient BIT/CARE teams. We talked about workload, role clarity, burnout, team culture, and what happens to teams after they have been doing this work together for a while. Those aren't necessarily the topics that get people excited about joining a BIT/CARE team, but they have quite a bit to do with whether the team is still functioning well a few years later. I have always been a little cautious about the wor

Six Weeks to Build a Team. Much Longer to Build a Good One. An approaching deadline in Michigan caught my attention. By October 1, 2026, every public and nonpublic K12 school in the state must have a Behavior Threat Assessment and Management, or BTAM, team. Michigan law requires those teams to include, at minimum, a school administrator, a mental health professional, and a school resource officer or other appropriate local law enforcement official. As I write this, Michigan

He said it almost in passing, as a dark joke at the end of a difficult conversation, a throwaway comment in a frustrated email, a vague post at 2 a.m. that made someone stop scrolling. And the question that follows is always the same: is he serious? When it comes to young men and suicide, the answer demands our full attention. Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. They attempt it less often, but when they do, they are far more likely to use lethal means a

There is a lot of money to be made convincing young men that something is wrong with them. The trick isn't necessarily convincing them that they are hopeless. It may be more profitable to convince them they are almost there. A little more muscular. A little richer. Better looking. More dominant. Better with women. More respected. There is always someone online willing to sell them the thing that will finally get them there. A recent WIRED article, “The Manosphere Isn't a Move

At least once a year, I get an email or phone call from a concerned community member about a student of concern. Generally coming from a place of care, a well-meaning dean or faculty member will often explain various interactions with the student that have elevated their concern and prompted the report. Typically, in these cases, I do my best to listen, explain that we will look into it, that we follow a process, and that a member of our team will reach out to the student. I

As a former Dean of Students and BIT Chair, I constantly worried about how we applied our often-limited resources. Most of those resources, as anyone who has sat around a BIT/CARE table knows, are the people at that table, and most of them already wear two or three other hats. Add in the fact that there are typically plenty of cases competing for the team's attention, and figuring out where to put our time and energy becomes a pretty important part of the work. I learned that

Across higher education, safeguarding students is no longer a peripheral concern; it is central to institutional integrity, student success, and public trust. In the UK (more specifically, England), the Office for Students (OfS) has introduced a new condition of registration for higher education providers, E6: Protecting Students from Harassment and Sexual Misconduct, which represents the most significant regulatory shift in student safeguarding in over a decade. E6 came into

There is a phrase that I often use when talking with my staff, particularly those working around behavioral intervention. It goes something like this: “If I am going to be all in about us supporting students, I need to be all in as it relates to supporting our staff.” This has come from my own reflections and experiences, in which I have often been taken aback by what seemed like two very different approaches to supporting the two audiences. Some time ago, a case manager I

Think about the last time you referred a student of concern to your campus BIT or CARE team. Now think about how many of those referrals involved young men. For many campuses, men are often underrepresented in referrals, or don't appear at all until a situation has already escalated, not because they are struggling less, but because they have been taught, in ways both overt and subtle, that struggling is something you handle alone. Understanding why that is, and what we can

If you work on a Behavioral Intervention Team or CARE team, you know how quickly things move. A new law appears. A case at another campus raises important questions. Someone shares a reporting strategy or meeting process that suddenly makes you rethink how your own team operates. Most of us learn about these things in pieces: a conference session, a listserv thread, a conversation with a colleague between meetings. The goal of this blog is simple: to bring useful ideas about