Published on: September 21, 2025
Part Five of the TNG@25 Anniversary Blog Series By: Brett A. Sokolow, J.D., Chair, TNG Consulting
Throughout the remainder of 2025, we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of TNG’s service to the education field, with blogs that commemorate our accomplishments and the people who have helped support our mission along the way. This fifth installment of our blog series highlights one of our most important accomplishments: innovating and popularizing a pre-threat model of behavioral intervention unique to the threat assessment needs of an educational environment.
TNG’s first partner, W. Scott Lewis, my dear friend for nearly 25 years, has written a great blog on the groundbreaking work of NABITA, which contextualizes the importance of what NABITA offers. I first connected with Scott over the innovative behavioral intervention team he had initiated when he worked on a campus, and I kept tabs on his work as it evolved. I didn’t quite grasp what he was trying to do, other than to create yet another student support mechanism. Needed, certainly, but it didn’t seem like a seismic shift to me. It all crystallized for me when the shooting at Virginia Tech happened in 2007.
I was focused on sexual violence prevention and Clery Act compliance at the time, and I was not interested in expanding TNG’s footprint or scope of services. I followed the accounts of the shooting, and it dawned on me that preventing sexual violence and school shootings had significant intersections, and the work of sexual violence prevention was not being applied as broadly as it could be. It’s too simplistic to say that violence is violence, but there are commonalities to different manifestations of violence that are worth understanding.
This intersectional idea led Scott and me into deeper conversation, and a forensic deep dive on how something like Virginia Tech’s shooting might have been prevented. It was only an intellectual exploration; an effort to understand the incomprehensible. It prompted me to tune in to higher education’s response, and it struck me that the entire conversation was about hardening targets, lockdown drills, and better security. I was incensed to see the lessons learned were 100% focused on response, not prevention. They were missing the piece about Scott’s Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT). Scott and I began to spitball about how a merged model of threat assessment and a BIT could add value. It was nothing more than a couple of people who cared exploring what could be.
As with most things that incense me, I took pen to paper to see if I could collect my thoughts. Our op-ed on what went wrong at Virginia Tech went viral, before that was even a thing. We tapped into something, and the field responded. Scott and I went to work transforming the op-ed into a whitepaper, and Preventing the Preventable became a Zeitgeist. It’s always been stunning to me how sometimes you can catch a moment—saying the right thing at the right time, without even knowing it, or even understanding that you’ve launched a fundamental truth bomb. The next thing I knew, Scott and I were teaching colleges across the country how to form BITs.
It all happened so fast. It wasn’t intentional. We were sharing a conceptualization one day and were asked to operationalize it the next. We weren’t threat assessment experts, and it’s facile to say we faked it until we made it. We took intersectional concepts from sexual violence prevention, Scott’s BIT innovation, and the lessons of what went wrong at Virginia Tech, and devised a team that would have the best potential to head off future incidents that bore similar tells.
Key to our successful promulgation of the model was that it was centered on engagement with at-risk individuals pre-threat, whereas most threat assessment work at the time focused on engagement as threats emerged. We knew that left unchecked, behaviors that appeared innocuous could quickly spiral into tragedies. We figured out how to teach schools to stand up teams that would recognize those signs (the technical term is “leakage”) of emerging violence, on the premise that intervening early could head off a pathway or trajectory toward violence. We also realized that in order to empower teams, colleges and schools needed to cultivate a culture of reporting, so that the team could address the whole person, using all the pieces of the puzzle it could muster. Interventions are more powerful when there is more data, and more accurate data, available to allow the interventions to be tailored to the student’s needs.
The last piece of the puzzle is that, after working to stand up about 1,800 teams in two years, teams that have today protected countless lives, my wife, Cori, and I were enjoying some wine after a week of intense travel and training. She asked me, now that you have all these empowered teams on campuses, how do they support each other, share innovations, and harness scale to ensure that every school has a team with the resources it needs? I pondered that over a few sips, and then Cori suggested, ‘What if we started an association for BITs that could bring all these practitioners together?’ That was 9,300 members ago.
Today, with the foundational insight of TNG partner Saundra K. Schuster, J.D., M.S., and our team of experienced consultants, we’ve created all the materials needed to stand up and manage effective teams. NABITA has certified thousands of professionals in team techniques, risk assessment, and case management. We’ve created a professional home that allows teams to synergize with each other, allowing BIT efforts to become much more than the sum of their constituent parts. We offer manuals, kits, tools, rubrics, protocols, checklists, and everything a college or school needs to operate a team that has the potential to save lives, increase completion rates, foster persistence and resilience, and drive retention. We do it with the kindness of an outstretched hand to students whose struggles need not end in disaster, but can instead end with a degree, a career, and a full life ahead. Good thing we wrote that op-ed.
The success of NABITA prompts me to end this series by reminding all of us that law doesn’t have an answer for everything. As a young practitioner, I realized that law doesn’t answer every question, and that for some questions, law is not the answer at all. When I can’t tap my legal training or case law, I’ve turned to a very simple principle time and again in my professional life: do what best honors the equal dignity of all members of our communities. I’ve recommended this path to our clients, and it has been the secret to our success for 25 years. It’s the best kind of risk management there is.
Join us in shaping the next 25 years of safer, stronger education. Learn more at www.tngconsulting.com.