News & Events

Meeting with Barb Ertle crisis programs schools

Description: Met with Barb Ertl, who works with school districts across the country developing crisis plans, to discuss the possibility of her recommendation to these districts to utilize HOPE -AACR in the event of a crisis. Discussion with Barb to educate her on HOPE, our level of training as well as different deployments we have been deployed to. She was very impressed with our high standards for training and continuing education. She stated it was very important to her how we do not self deploy and that we are trained on incident command. In her eyes the most important part of a deployment is that our teams understand that we are an invited into the schools to assist them, as guests, and we are not entitled to be there. She stated that she felt our training was very thorough but to be sure to focus diversity. She recommended that HOPE become involved in local DCORT (Disaster Crisis Outreach Referral Teams) and also attempt to become members of the Emergency Behavioral Health Consortium. She stated that belonging to this organization will give HOPE an endorsement and assist us to receive deployments. The next day we received an email that she was very impressed with HOPE and that she will be recommending HOPE in all of her trainings and consultations.