Best Practices for Collaborative Threat
Assessment and Violence Prevention

Mr. Van Dreal is the Principal at John Van Dreal Consulting and recently retired as the school psychologist and the director of the Safety and Risk Management Services for the Salem-Keizer School District. He has more than 30 years of experience in threat assessment and management, psycho-educational evaluation, crisis and behavioral intervention, and security and risk management systems consultation. He is recognized internationally as an expert in threat assessment and as a pioneer of multidisciplinary threat assessment.


In 1999, he began the development and implementation of the Salem-Keizer Model, a multiagency student threat assessment system that is considered by experts to be a leading practice and is identified by the U.S. Department of Education and the What Works Clearinghouse as a best-practices program. Through that collaboration, he has worked daily with educators, human resources, law enforcement, justice and mental health personnel in the assessment and management of youth and adult threats of aggression within the schools, higher education, public/private institutions, and the community. As a practitioner, he has conducted thousands of threat assessments and managed hundreds of high-risk cases. He is the editor and principal author of the book Assessing Student Threats: Implementing the Salem-Keizer System, Second Edition, and he has co-authored a number of threat assessment and school security projects. He currently advises the Oregon Governor’s Task Force on School Safety.