The training at the heart of the Institute for Understanding Behavior — therapeutic crisis intervention — has been prescribed in the settlement of a lawsuit that challenged the practice of sending disruptive children to hospital emergency rooms.

Legal Services of New York City brought the lawsuit against the Department of Education on behalf of six children between the ages of 5 and 7 who attended schools that repeatedly removed or threatened to remove them by calling 911.

None of the children required medical care and were calm by the time they arrived at hospital emergency rooms, said Nelson Mar, the staff attorney for the Bronx office of Legal Services. “911 cannot be used as a disciplinary measure,” he said. “This is part of the overly harsh treatment of students which leads over time to youth disconnected from the school system.”

Legal Services found that public schools in New York made more than 3,600 calls to EMS for students who were allegedly disruptive in class in the 2011–12 school year. It also found that the majority of students removed by EMS have disabilities.

As part of the Dec. 15 settlement, the DOE has pledged to provide training in therapeutic crisis intervention to 500 employees per year over three years at schools that have made the most 911 calls. Staff will be tasked with learning how to calm a child before a crisis point is reached and sharing those strategies with the school community. The settlement also requires efforts by the school staff to involve the child’s parents at every stage.

The settlement recognizes that a 911 call must be made in critical situations that cannot be handled safely by school staff.

“It’s a start,” said Dana Ashley, the director of the Institute for Understanding Behavior, a consortium of the UFT and the DOE. “The DOE recognizes therapeutic crisis intervention as a curriculum that has value and should be used uniformly within the school system.”

The institute trains the entire staff of its participating schools in the research-based intervention strategy to address the root causes of student behavior issues. It also has a behavior specialist on site to support the school. That whole-school approach is widely seen as more effective, Ashley said.

A new chancellor’s regulation, due to take effect on Aug. 1, 2015, will require every public school to form a crisis intervention team charged with creating a plan to de-escalate a crisis situation to avoid a call to 911, and to provide orientation in the plan to the entire school.