8 Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Crisis Prevention Training Program

If you’re responsible for selecting behavioral crisis prevention training for your district, you’ve probably run into the same problem every administrator does: it’s genuinely hard to tell one program from another.

Vendors use different terminology. Course outlines rarely spell out exactly what’s taught. And the marketing materials all say roughly the same thing: our training is proven, our training is trusted, our training keeps students and staff safe. So how do you actually compare them?
This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t just your experience. Researchers ran into the same issue over fifteen years ago, and what they found is still worth understanding today.

What a 2010 study found

In 2010, a team of researchers published a review in Teaching Exceptional Children examining commercial crisis intervention training programs marketed to schools. Their motivation was timely: Congressional hearings, a Government Accountability Office report, and a letter from the U.S. Secretary of Education had all drawn national attention to the risks associated with physical intervention in schools, and districts were being asked to invest in formal training without much guidance on what to look for.

The researchers reached out to 22 commercial vendors and asked them to answer a detailed questionnaire about their training content. Thirteen agreed to participate. What the researchers found was that these programs varied enormously: training length ranged from 12 hours to 36 hours, the physical procedures taught ranged from none at all to eight or more variations of a single hold, and the amount of time spent on prevention and de-escalation, as opposed to physical procedures, differed sharply from program to program.

Their conclusion was direct: there were no commonly accepted standards for what this kind of training should include, and the differences between programs were significant enough to matter.

The questions haven’t changed

What’s notable, looking back at that research now, is how well the comparison points the researchers used still hold up as a framework for evaluating a program today. If you’re in the process of selecting or renewing a crisis prevention training vendor, these are the same questions worth asking:

1. How is training time divided between prevention and physical procedures? Most crisis situations can be de-escalated before any physical intervention is ever needed. A program’s hours should reflect that.
2. Which physical procedures are taught, and to whom? The researchers noted that certain floor positions carry the highest documented risk of injury, which is likely why most of the programs they reviewed had already stopped teaching them. A conservative program keeps its basic curriculum simple and gates higher-risk techniques behind advanced training for the few staff who truly need them.
3. How are staff trained to monitor safety during an incident? This includes watching for signs of physical distress, involving multiple staff when possible, and knowing exactly when to release for safety.
4. Does de-escalation continue throughout a physical intervention? A physical hold isn’t a pause in de-escalation. It’s the moment de-escalation matters most.
5. What happens after an incident? Debriefing and documentation turn a single event into information a school can actually use to prevent the next one.
6. What are the certification and recertification requirements? Skills fade without practice. Annual recertification for both staff and trainers is a meaningful signal of rigor.
7. Is the program aligned with trauma-informed practice? The 2010 researchers flagged this as an open question they weren’t able to answer with the data available to them at the time. It’s a fair question to ask directly today.
8. Does the program fit the framework your district already uses? Crisis prevention training should extend a school’s existing MTSS or PBIS investment, not compete with it.

An open question, more than a decade later

That question about trauma-informed practice is worth sitting with for a moment. In 2010, the researchers were candid that they simply didn’t know whether the programs they studied addressed the risk of retraumatizing students with histories of abuse, or students whose sensory sensitivities changed how they experienced physical contact. They called it out as a gap in their own research, not a settled matter.

More than a decade later, that shouldn’t be a gap any school is willing to leave unanswered. Any program under consideration should be able to explain, specifically, how its approach accounts for students who have experienced trauma. Not as a line in a brochure, but as something built into how staff are trained to prevent, de-escalate, and respond.

Where Safety-Care fits

Safety-Care, the crisis prevention training developed by QBS, was one of the 13 programs included in that original 2010 review, evaluated alongside the most established names in the field. It was built by behavior analysts around the same principles these questions are designed to surface: prevention first, a conservative set of physical procedures, safety monitoring and continued de-escalation throughout any intervention, thorough documentation, and annual recertification for every certified staff member and trainer.

Today, Safety-Care supports more than 3,600 organizations and certifies more than 300,000 people annually. Districts that have implemented it have documented reductions of more than 58% in the use of physical management, decreases of more than 70% in seclusion hours, and 57% less staff injuries, along with improved staff confidence in responding to crisis situations.

Whatever program you’re evaluating, ask these eight questions and expect specific answers. We’ve put together a complete evaluator’s guide that walks through each one in more depth. Download the guide to work through your own evaluation, or talk with our team about how Safety-Care answers these questions for your school or district.

Reference

Couvillon, M., Peterson, R. L., Ryan, J. B., Scheuermann, J.B., & Stegall, J. (2010). A review of crisis intervention training programs for schools. Teaching Exceptional Children, 42(5), 6–17.