GUILDERLAND — On Tuesday evening, the Guilderland schools superintendent, Daniel Mayberry, posted a notice that a middle-school student “had compiled a list of staff members and non-specific first names upon which they wished harm.”

Guilderland Police subsequently investigated, visiting the student’s home, and “determined there was no credible threat to the school community,” Mayberry wrote.

No arrest was made.

Administrators learned of the list on Jan. 30 when a student emailed a screenshot of the list, Mayberry told The Enterprise on Feb. 4.

Mayberry did not reveal the gender or grade of either the student who wrote the list or of the student who followed the oft-given advice of “say something.”

That phrase was popularized after the Dec. 14, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut that killed 20 children and six educators.

A group called Sandy Hook Promise was formed that set about educating school leaders on ways to avoid violence in schools.

Mayberry estimated there were 20 names on the list although, he said, since “it was just a screen shot,” there could have been more.

The police, he told The Enterprise, worked with Colleen Willetts, the Seneca House principal at Farnsworth Middle School, on the investigation.

Asked what harm was intended, Mayberry told The Enterprise, “There was no identified action or threat”; rather, it was “a generalized list,” he said.

The student who made the list is currently in an out-of-school suspension, Mayberry said. “It’s not determined yet when they will be back,” he said.

The situation is markedly different from the incident in February 2024 when a Farnsworth student was charged with making a threat of mass harm, a misdemeanor, after he composed what Farnsworth Principal Michael Laster termed “a kill list on his personal device.”

That student “was transported to a Mental Crisis Center under Mental Hygiene Law 9.41 and was referred to Albany County Probation for the criminal offense,” Guilderland Police said at the time.

He was out of school for the rest of the school year but returned when he started at the high school in September 2024.

CSTAG

As part of the district’s response to the discovery of the student’s list this school year, school administrators, mental-health professionals, and staff met to evaluate the situation fully and determine appropriate next steps, Mayberry wrote in his post.

“The process was CSTAG, which is a Comprehensive School Threat Assessment [Guidelines],” Mayberry told The Enterprise.

He explained, “It’s a multi-step process; it’s questions and answers. And, from that, you make a determination as to: Is there a legitimate threat or not? It examines all kinds of things from intent to what the action was to what access they may have to any type of material that could cause harm.”

Guilderland’s building administrative teams and support staff were trained in CSTAG  in November at the superintendent’s conference day, Mayberry said.

The process was developed by Dr. Dewey Cornell and his colleagues at the University of Virginia in 2001, following the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado when two 12th-graders killed 13 students and a teacher before killing themselves.

Cornell writes in an overview, “Both the FBI and the Secret Service conducted studies of selected school shootings and found that these students were often victims of bullying who had become angry and depressed, and were influenced by a variety of social, familial, and psychological factors.”

While those government agencies cautioned against profiling, they did “point out that almost all of the students who attacked their schools had communicated their intentions to attack directly or indirectly to others, typically their peers. Had these threats been reported to authorities and investigated, the shootings might have been prevented,” Cornell writes.

Hence, the task Cornell and his colleagues took on was to develop a threat-assessment model for schools.

According to the University of Virginia website, the CSTAG process has been extensively examined through field tests and controlled studies that demonstrate its utility and effectiveness.

The CSTAG model of threat assessment is an approach to violence prevention that emphasizes early attention to problems such as bullying, teasing, and other forms of student conflict before they escalate into violent behavior. School staff members are encouraged to adopt a flexible, problem-solving approach, as distinguished from a more punitive, zero-tolerance approach to student misbehavior.

The guidelines follow a five-step decision-tree. The first two steps are a triage process in which team members investigate a reported threat and determine whether the threat can be readily resolved as a transient threat that is not a serious threat.

Examples of transient threats are jokes or statements made in anger that are expressions of feeling or figures of speech rather than expressions of a genuine intent to harm someone.

Any threat that cannot be clearly identified and resolved as transient is treated as a substantive threat. Substantive threats require protective action to prevent the threat from being carried out.

The remaining three steps guide the team through more extensive assessment and response based on the seriousness of the threat. In the most serious cases, the team conducts a safety evaluation that includes both a law enforcement investigation and a mental-health assessment of the student.

“You don’t prevent a forest fire by waiting until the trees are ablaze,” said Cornell in a PBS NewsHour segment reported by Lisa Stark.

Cornell cautioned against “fearful overreaction” as he cited examples of a child being suspended from school after chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, or of a first-grader in Maryland being suspended after he pointed his index finger and said, “Pow-pow.”

“These are fearful overreactions that send a really negative message throughout the school,” said Cornell.

He believes zero-tolerance policies make schools less safe, and make students less likely to report concerns.

The goal of CSTAG, he said, is not to automatically expel a student but, rather, to address underlying problems.

“When schools use our model,” Cornell said, “their suspension rates go down, their bullying goes down, and the threats aren’t carried out.”

Mayberry said of the CSTAG process, “Sometimes things come out that are just something somebody said and sometimes things come out that somebody has an intent.”

When the Guilderland team went through the CSTAG process for the list-maker at Farnsworth, they determined “it wasn’t a credible threat,” said Mayberry.

Asked what plan the district will follow after making that determination, Mayberry said on Feb. 4, “We are working on that right now.”

The district’s code of conduct and discipline rules are being consulted, he said.

“It’s going to be specific to the student and the incident ….,” he said. “It can’t be revealed because the plan is specific to an individual student and releasing that would violate their privacy rights.”

“Faith in the process”

Mayberry, in both his post and in his interview with The Enterprise, encouraged parents to talk to their children “about the seriousness and real-world consequences of their words and actions” and also of the need to report anything concerning.

“I think the most important piece is that we have those conversations so that we have our children thinking about the things that they say and they do,” Mayberry told The Enterprise.

“In light of the times,” he went on, “we just really want kids to be thinking about what you say and do before you do it … And to hopefully make better choices in those decisions, but also to seek out help if you need help. That’s why we have social workers and counselors and administrators to support those processes.”

To the community at large, Mayberry said, “My hope is that people have faith in the process and faith in the fact that we took all the necessary steps to help protect our school population and our families and their children.”