Supporters, however, say threat assessments give school staff a structured system for the sensitive and serious process of gathering information to evaluate the probability of a student causing harm to others. Without it, there is greater potential for school staff to overreact and make rash decisions that would inappropriately – and perhaps disproportionately – push more students toward suspensions, expulsions or arrests. “It's a question of whether they do them intuitively, impulsively, out of fear and anxiety, or they do them systematically with a standard process,” said Dewey Cornell, a cl...