What Parents Aren’t Told About Crisis Intervention: The Hidden Business of Managing Student Behaviour

If your child struggles at school, there’s a good chance the district will draft something called a staff response plan or student support plan. These are often framed as “unified approaches” for keeping everyone safe during violent or high-risk incidents.

But here’s the truth: these plans are built on whatever crisis intervention program the district has purchased, and that choice drives everything. It dictates how staff view your child’s behaviour, how they’ll respond when things escalate, and in some cases, even when your child will be sent home.

And these programs? They’re not actually supportive. They’re commercial products. Big business products. The Crisis Prevention Institute, one of the most widely used training providers in North America, is owned by Wendel, a massive European private equity firm. In 2019, Wendel bought CPI for $910 million from another private equity group. Nearly a billion dollars exchanged hands over a business model built on “managing” behaviour.

School districts spend tens of thousands of public dollars each year licensing, training, and recertifying staff in these systems. And let’s be honest, one major reason schools stick with these programs is legal liability. If a student is restrained and a parent challenges it, the district wants to point to “approved” training and a written plan to cover itself. These plans protect the system first, not the student.

Worse still, most of these models aren’t even evidence-based. They have little to no rigorous research showing they improve student outcomes, reduce crisis incidents, or prevent harm. Districts are investing huge sums into programs that have more marketing behind them than research.

We use reactive approaches and then act surprised when the student continues to struggle. Crisis after crisis, the same scripts are followed, the same behaviours are “managed,” and nothing changes because nothing about the environment, the demands, or the root causes has been addressed. Instead of being proactive, identifying and solving the problems that cause a student to become escalated, most plans lean heavily on reactive de-escalation techniques. These methods may calm a child in the moment, but they do nothing to prevent the same crisis from happening again tomorrow.

They are sold to parents as support, but look closer, most of what’s being taught isn’t prevention at all. It’s intervention. It’s about reacting to behaviours after they happen, not creating the conditions for those behaviours to never happen in the first place.

Staff are trained to respond once your child is already in distress: clear the room, call the office, keep a “safe” distance, strip the environment of hazards. That’s not prevention. That’s crisis management.

And one thing’s for certain: the more we teach staff how to manage crises, the more they manage crises. It becomes the default. It becomes the plan.

Parents, you have the right to ask questions, advocate for real prevention, and never sign any plan that uses punishment like sending your child home as a response to distress. You have the right to know exactly what program your district is using, how much it costs, whether it’s evidence-based, and what it actually teaches. You have the right to challenge any plan that’s built around behaviour management or reactive de-escalation instead of proactive prevention.

Real prevention removes triggers before harm happens. It changes the environment. It solves the problems that cause distress. It builds trust, safety, and transparency, and gives your child choice and power in shaping solutions.

If a plan only springs into action when your child is already in crisis, it’s not protecting them; it’s protecting the system. And it’s time to stop letting billion-dollar behaviour management companies and school district lawyers decide what “support” looks like for our kids.

Because every time we settle for a reactive plan instead of a proactive one, we are agreeing to let our children be placed back into the same situations that hurt them the last time. We are agreeing to repeat the harm. And parents, you have more power than the system wants you to believe. 

Use it. 

Refuse it. 

Shut it down. 

Make it clear that our education system is far more concerned with reacting to student behaviour than with preventing the problems that are affecting them and actually doing something about it.