Martha Holden
Two North Carolina school districts are implementing a crisis prevention and intervention system created at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research that teaches school staff how to use trauma-informed practices to anticipate and de-escalate disruptive behavior, manage aggression and help students learn social and emotional skills.
Outreach staff from the BCTR conducted a week-long intensive training program for school employees last month called Therapeutic Crisis Intervention for Schools, or TCI-S thanks to a grant secured through the Children’s Center of Surry in North Carolina.
The idea behind the program is to provide the entire school with a framework, training and resources to equip teachers and staff to respond effectively to students in crisis situations. This ultimately helps students to learn constructive ways to deal with frustration, failure, anger, rejection, hurt and depression.
TCI-S provides guidelines that help schools create the policies, procedures and data feedback loops to prevent crises whenever possible and manage crises safely when they occur. The training includes the tools school staff need to help prevent a crisis, de-escalate a potential crisis, manage a crisis, and reduce injury that may occur due to a crisis.
TCI-S is part of the BCTR’s Residential Child Care Project, which translates current research into programs that are designed to improve the quality of care for children in group care settings, schools, juvenile justice programs, foster care, adoptive families and community-based programs.
“When the children served at the Children’s Center of Surry were struggling in school, the leadership of Children’s Center pursued a grant to fund a TCI-S training of trainers for their local schools,” explained Martha Holden, director of the BCTR’s Residential Child Care Project. “The Cornell instructors reported that the group who attended the training were highly motivated and felt that TCI-S would help to improve the relationships among students and teachers and reduce many of the problematic behaviors being experienced.”
