Topic: Enhancing School Safety Using Behavioral Threat Assessment
This webinar will introduce participants to the role of Behavioral Threat Assessment as a key component of a robust, multi-layered approach to school safety and security.
In response to the continued pace of deadly school shootings, many states, local jurisdictions, and school districts have implemented mandates for behavioral threat assessment in schools. Effective threat assessment programs are demonstrated as a primary driver of prevention of violence, with a focus on early identification of problems in a safe and caring school environment.
In the webinar, she will provide the conceptual foundation for understanding targeted school violence, learn the behavioral threat assessment process, and address approaches for intervention and monitoring. Based on research by the U. S. Secret Service and thought leadership in the threat assessment professional community, emphasis will be on how to prevent targeted violence through proactive strategies to identify, assessment and manage risk in students.
Speaker: Margaret Coggins, Ph.D
Dr. Coggins is a trusted advisor and an experienced security consultant, bringing over 30 years of specialized work in the prevention of targeted violence, threat assessment, behavioral analysis, and change management. She is a subject matter expert in workplace violence prevention programs; school and campus safety; insider threat and fraud prevention models; and, protective intelligence investigations. Much of her current work is focused on consulting with businesses, corporate clients, schools, and institutions of higher education to implement threat assessment programs.
Dr. Coggins is a former Federal executive, having served nearly 20 years as a Senior Manager for the United States Secret Service Office of Protective Research, and the Chief of its Behavioral Research Program. Dr. Coggins’s research efforts provided the foundation for the Secret Service school safety initiative, leading to current best practices in the prevention of targeted violence in schools.
Following 9/11, she was appointed as a Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, to support its transformation to a Federal law enforcement mission, retiring from Federal service in 2012.
Dr. Coggins earned Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts degrees in psychology from the Catholic University of America. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Dickinson College.