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Safe Physical Intervention Program
The West Virginia-based Safe Physical Intervention program is designed to enable teachers, counselors, administrators, and other school personnel to deal effectively with physically aggressive, impulsively violent students in crisis situations. In doing so, it favors social integration over isolation, avoidance of passive-restraint over restriction, and commonality over clinically labeled difference. In this way, when compared with institutions, the Safe Physical Intervention program manifests the emergent uniqueness of education.
After all, community-based deinstitutionalization in mental health has stalled and been reversed. Community-based corrections, work release, and other less-restrictive alternatives to incarceration have fallen out of favor in criminal justice. Similarly restrictive developments have characterized the recent history of the juvenile justice system.
In public education, however, minimizing restrictions and promoting inclusion remain paramount concerns. The Bush Administration’s re-authorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act under the admonition No Child Left Behind, has re-emphasized this commitment, binding it firmly to accountability measures and costly sanctions.
The federally mandated assumption is that effective schools can educate everyone. This applies even to actively disruptive, sometimes violent students whose behavior is uncontrollable by conventional procedures and practices.
Therefore, when a program is developed that enables educators routinely to work with difficult students who have challenging behaviors in a safe, non-damaging, non-restrictive fashion, it generates interest. Safe Physical Intervention is such a program. Consisting of a set of easy-to-teach, easy-to-learn, minimally intrusive physical intervention techniques, Safe Physical Intervention emphasizes de-escalation of angry episodes and maintenance of established and workable social relationships.
Safe Physical Intervention is designed to be therapeutically effective while assuring the safety and dignity of educators and students. It’s final objective is inclusion of all in a common social and educational endeavor.
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