Sometimes the training begins with an exercise: Visualizing what you believe a school shooter looks like.
"Most of us may think that you were maybe a white male. That's who we're looking for. If we were to do that, we would we'd miss out on all these other potential plots that are going on the background," NTAC Program Manager David Gabbard told the trainees.
The reality was shown to hundreds of educators and law enforcement at the Almond Campus of Warren High School in Gurnee in March.
"Our research on school attackers have shown that there is no profile of the type of student that will carry out an attack. They ranged in backgrounds, demographics, even ages," said Lina Alathari, chief of the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center.
"This example, the 11-year-old student... When his mother was doing the dishes, she had noticed that knives were missing... and had just had this gut feeling. So, she called the school. And when school officials located the student, they found that he had in his backpack those three knives as well as a handgun," said Gabbard during the training.
The common link, according to the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center or NTAC, is behavior.
"Grievances directed at staff or at work, it appears staff, romantic relationships and otherwise personal again was the number one reason for somebody wanting to plot their attack," said NTAC Education Program Specialist Kelsey Morris.
NTAC, established a year before the Columbine High School shooting to prevent targeted violence, is teaching communities to see those concerning behaviors and take action before damage is done, not to punish, but to help save the lives of targets and potential perpetrators of mass violence.
"Everybody who is working with children, with kids, with teenagers on a daily on an hourly basis, they need this vital information to look for the warning signs to make sure that we don't have any targeted violence at a school or anywhere else," Lake County, Illinois State's Attorney Eric Rinehart told the I-Team.
"Those are important because they're, you know, the trainings that they have to go through, the discussions that they're having throughout the year to ensure that they know what to do if a situation does arise," said Lake County, Illinois Regional Superintendent of Schools Michael Karner.