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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.