Safety, Confidence, & Connection at AchieveKids

AchieveKids is not a typical school. As a comprehensive special education campus serving students ages K-22, it provides the intensive, specialized services that local school districts are unable to offer on their own. With a full multidisciplinary team including mental health clinicians, behavior therapists, BCBAs, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, and credentialed teachers, the campus is built around one purpose: supporting the whole child.

For Briana Gibson, Director of Education at AchieveKids in Palo Alto, CA, that mission requires more than good intentions. It requires a shared framework, rigorous training, and tools that work in the most high-stakes moments. That is where Safety-Care comes in.

A Framework That Brings Teams Together

At the heart of AchieveKids’ approach is the behavior crisis cycle, an evidence-based model that maps the stages of behavioral escalation from baseline through peak and back to recovery. What makes AchieveKids’ implementation unique is how they have embedded both applied behavioral analysis (ABA) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) into every phase of that cycle, giving staff clear, research-backed guidance on how to intervene based on where a student is in the moment.

“We took every phase of the cycle and determined the best support and intervention style based on the student,” Briana explains. “Because we know all students kind of mirror this cycle, however, the way we intervene and support that student might look different.”

Safety-Care fits seamlessly into this multidisciplinary model. Rather than operating as a separate system, it reinforces the same foundational thinking: understand the precursor behaviors, prioritize de-escalation, and treat physical management as a last resort, never a first response.

Practical Skills That Build Real Confidence

One of the most visible outcomes at AchieveKids is what happens from day one of Safety-Care training. All staff are required to be certified before working one-on-one with students, and Briana notes the shift is immediate.

“Just the difference between when you enter into our organization, never working with a student with behavioral challenges, and immediately diving into that Safety-Care curriculum, we see an instant difference in the confidence in the way our staff are able to approach our students,” she says.

That confidence comes from the practicality of the training. Staff learn to communicate clearly in a crisis, identify who is taking the lead in any situation, manage their own responses to avoid power struggles, and stay calm and objective even in high-stress situations. Briana describes it as almost a choreographed approach, one where everyone on the team understands their role and can move through it systematically.

AchieveKids has taken this a step further by maintaining Safety-Care certified trainers directly on each campus. When a difficult incident occurs, those trainers are present in every debrief meeting, reviewing whether protocols were followed correctly and identifying what can be done differently next time to improve the outcome or prevent escalation in the first place.

Debriefing as a Core Part of the Process

At AchieveKids, the work does not end when a crisis does. Every incident prompts an emergency debrief meeting that day, bringing together all staff who were involved along with the student’s full IEP team.

These meetings serve multiple purposes. They give staff a structured space to reflect and support each other. They provide the Safety-Care trainer an opportunity to ensure procedures were implemented correctly. And they create a moment for the ABA therapist and mental health clinician to assess the therapeutic needs of the student following the incident.
“Safety-Care is really great at highlighting the fact that these are procedures needed to keep everyone safe, however, we don’t want to abuse these procedures,” Briana shares. “Everything leans back to wanting to ensure we’re not doing this [physical management] with kids, and let’s figure out how we don’t have to.”

When Safety-Care Is Needed Most

The students AchieveKids serves often present with severe and complex behaviors, including aggressive outbursts, significant elopement, and in some cases, situations involving suicidality or self-injury. In these moments, the systematic approach that Safety-Care instills becomes critical.

Briana describes staff who can enter a high-intensity situation and remain calm, neutral, and objective, keeping both the student and themselves regulated. “I realized that Safety-Care training has really supported our staff with remaining objective, with remaining very vigilant and very systematic in the way that they view these behaviors,” she reflects. “None of our staff really see these behaviors attached to the student. We understand that behaviors are attached to emotions and different aspects of support that students can’t figure out in that moment.”

Extending the Impact Into Families and Homes

As AchieveKids looks ahead, one of the most exciting developments is bringing Safety-Care into the home. After hearing from families who were experiencing escalations outside of school and looking for answers, Briana’s team launched a pilot of Safety-Care for Families.

The response exceeded expectations. Six families participated, and many sent not just one caregiver but multiple people from the household, all learning the same tools and strategies being used on campus.

” I was very excited to be able to offer the fact that Safety-Care had a families curriculum,” Briana says of one parent who had been searching through regional centers and healthcare providers trying to find this kind of support. “It’s all thanks to Safety-Care being able to have that curriculum for parents that we were able to train them on.”

The result is a more unified system around each student, where the strategies that support them at school are mirrored at home, and families feel equipped rather than overwhelmed.

Advice for Other Programs

For schools and programs looking to strengthen their own crisis response systems, Briana’s advice is simple: take a team approach and make sure that team spans disciplines.

At AchieveKids, their Safety-Care training team includes a behaviorist, an RBT, and a speech-language pathologist, each bringing a different professional lens to how crisis shows up and how it can be supported. “Being able to have different eyes and lenses on crisis and the way that crisis operates on campus, we’re able to get a bigger picture of how to support our students,” she says.

When the whole team is aligned around the same language and the same approach, the impact goes beyond any single incident. It builds a culture where safety, dignity, and prevention are not just goals but everyday practice.

About AchieveKids

AchieveKids is a non-profit that operates two highly specialized schools in Palo Alto and San Jose, CA to meet the needs of the most complex learners in special education. AchieveKids serves students aged 5-22 of various needs that uses a multi-disciplinary approach that blends best practices from Special Education, Mental Health, Behavior Analysis, Speech and Language, and Vocational Education to develop highly individualized curricula to incorporate into each student’s daily lesson plan.

The primary mission of AchieveKids is to create a greater opportunity in the lives of students in special education through exceptional schools and collaborative educational services that enable students with special needs to thrive.