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Certification Courses

DPrep Safety's online certification courses provide schools, colleges, and workplaces with the tools and knowledge to support their students and staff. Contact Lara Barrett, Director of Client Relations, with questions.​​

BIT/CARE FRAMEWORK

Align your team with national best practice

Learn the knowledge, skills, protocols, and best practices to effectively participate in or lead a BIT/CARE team.

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Behavioral Intervention Teams (BIT) and Campus Assessment, Response & Evaluation (CARE) teams play a critical role in ensuring safety, support, and early intervention in schools, workplaces, and organizations. This course equips you with the knowledge, skills, and protocols to effectively participate in or lead a BIT/CARE team.

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Numerous fields of study, including psychology, education, and security studies, have looked at the issue of targeted and mission-oriented violence and have come to the same conclusion about the solution – diverse, multidisciplinary, collaborative teams that can identify concerning behaviors early and implement strategies to reduce the triggers for escalation and increase protective, supportive, and mitigating elements around the individual at risk.

 

This course is centered around DPrep Safety's research-based 35 standards for these teams. The central building blocks for a BIT/CARE team are directly connected to these standards, which are divided into four categories, 1) team definition (the team’s purpose and scope of activities), 2) team operations (how the team is organized to meet team goals), 3) case processing (how the team manages a case through the initial report), 4) Continuous improvement (supporting the on-going functioning of the team and ensures the membership is supervised and trained and that processes are reviewed and maintained). The standards provide a starting point that helps teams better understand the logistics required to build and operate a BIT/CARE team in line with best practices. Whether your team is well-trained or just starting out, this review of BIT/CARE core concepts provides the framework for an effective team.

DETAILS

Our BIT/CARE Framework course is based on DPrep's thirty-five team standards.​​

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  • Team definition outlines the team’s purpose and scope of activities.​

  • Team operation defines how the team is organized to meet team goals.

  • Case processing describes how the team manages a case through the initial report, contextual information gathering, risk assessment, interventions, and documentation.

  • Continuous improvement supports the ongoing functioning of the team and ensures the membership is supervised and trained and that processes are reviewed and maintained.

BIT Team Standards

STANDARDS

Private: BIT/CARE Framework, tailored to your team's training needs - ideally following a team needs assessment. Starting at $7000 for virtual, $8500 for in person. 

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Hosted: Share costs by inviting area teams to train on your campus. 

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Online: We provide BIT/CARE Framework training live online several times each year. 

  • The class run from 11:30–5:00 ET, with a one-hour break from 2:00–3:00

  • The cost is $449/person or $399/person for groups of 5 or more

  • Class recording will be available for those who are unable to attend a session due to scheduling conflicts.

  • Group rates are available for most courses.​

  • Upcoming trainings:​

DATES

HELPING STUDENTS THRIVE: MEETING BASIC NEEDS

Practical guidance to support students 

Equip your team with ready-to-use resource guides to simplify student support and drive academic success.

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This virtual certification course is offered to college staff, counseling, BIT/CARE members, and faculty interested in assisting students in achieving success in their college goals. Brian and Allison will review core intervention, support, and advocacy skills drawn from the fields of social work, counseling, life coaching, academic success, disability accommodation, tutoring, and career services. They will address challenges and offer practical strategies to address housing and food insecurity, academic readiness, mental health, safety planning, study skills development, time management, mental wellness, social support, navigating community services, critical thinking and problem-solving, fiscal management, emotional regulation, and improving self-advocacy. There will be opportunities for case review and discussion, demonstrating how to apply these skills effectively. While Brian and Allison will provide the lead instruction and design for the course, a series of supplemental videos from DPrep Safety’s subject matter experts will offer insight into applying these techniques successfully with the student population.

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The course will review of students' core areas of need. We will discuss the importance of assessing local, state, and federal resources and how basic needs staff, case managers, counselors, social workers, and other support staff can better educate students to access resources. We will offer a collection of resource sheets describing the various approaches to helping with worksheets for students to use to put these skills into practice. We will also include several interactive breakout sessions to discuss case study examples showing how these topics are applied.

DETAILS

This course includes more than twenty resource sheets that provide an overview of the intervention approach, what population and problem it would be useful to address, and a case example of the intervention approach in practice, along with worksheets for students to put these concepts into practice.

 

Get a sneak peek at the Safety Planning Skill Sheets.

Safety Planning Skill Sheet
  • Addressing Anxiety: The ABCs of REBT. Assisting students in recognizing their irrational thoughts is the first step in helping them find alternative ways to process the world around them.​

  • Addressing Food and Housing Insecurity. Access to food and housing is a crucial barrier for college students, preventing them from focusing on their academic progress.

  • An Optimistic Mindset: Positive Psychology. The study of what goes right in life, from birth to death, and at all stops in between. It examines the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

  • Apologizing Well. Understanding how to apologize well builds trust, demonstrates responsibility, and helps students grow personally and socially throughout their college experience.

  • Body Doubling. Body doubling is a focus strategy where you work on a task while another person is physically or virtually present, not to help or supervise, but simply to provide structure and accountability.

  • Boundaries in Social Relationships. Students with developmental disorders or other social challenges need help learning the importance of setting boundaries and engaging in positive social interactions.

  • Building Habits & Making Change: Transtheoretical Change Theory. This approach outlines how people progress through various stages before becoming ready to make lasting changes in their lives.

  • Bystander Empowerment. Bystander empowerment equips college students with the awareness, skills, confidence, and support necessary to safely and effectively intervene when they witness harmful, risky, or potentially dangerous situations.

  • Controlling Your Stress. Regaining control of your stress is crucial for success in college, including recognizing the difference between stress and burnout.​

  • Developing a Better Plan: Reality Therapy. Creating plans and goals for a student in a manner that ensures success based on wants, direction, doing, evaluation, and planning (WDEP). Plans should be simple, attainable, measurable, immediate, controlled by the planner, consistently practiced, and committed to.

  • Domestic & Intimate Partner Violence. Working with domestic violence and college students requires a trauma-informed, student-centered approach that prioritizes safety, autonomy, and access to support.

  • Focusing Attention & Executive Functioning. Executive-function scaffolding skills enable turning a foggy, overwhelming situation into a tiny, doable plan. That means prioritizing ruthlessly, breaking tasks into “first steps,” setting up reminders and structure, and reducing friction with warm handoffs and scheduling help so support is actually usable.

  • Improving Study Skills: Work Smarter, Not Harder. A successful college career begins with understanding what each of your professors and instructors requires to earn a good grade in their class.

  • Managing the Medication Discussion. Understanding the challenges to medication cost, access to providers, compliance, and consistency when taking medication.

  • Money Management. This material will benefit the many students who have not received financial literacy training and often make poor financial decisions when receiving payments from grants, loans, and paychecks.

  • Navigating Conduct and Title IX. Students are often overwhelmed when they enter the student conduct and/or Title IX process. Staff should understand how to support and advocate for the students they are working with on campus.

  • Navigating Hard Conversations. Guidance for staff and faculty on when and how to address complex topics, including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, reproductive rights, gun ownership, political divides, race relations, immigration, and LGBTQIA+ rights.

  • Overcoming Being Overwhelmed. One of the things we can teach our students is how to manage their feelings of panic and dread and to center themselves to focus on the tasks at hand.

  • Pronoun Usage. Understand why pronouns are important as they relate to gender identity, expression, and the separate issues of sexual orientation.

  • Rational & Irrational Fears. Rational fears can motivate planning and help-seeking when they remain proportional to the situation. Irrational fears, however, often exaggerate consequences and lead students to avoid, procrastinate, or isolate themselves.

  • Reading the Room & Thriving: Emotional Intelligence. Emotional intelligence (EQ) refers to the ability to recognize our own and others' emotions. It affects group dynamics, individual and group performance, creativity, communication, and motivation.

  • Roommate Conflicts. Roommate conflicts on college campuses often stem from everyday differences rather than major incidents. When concerns go unaddressed, small irritations can escalate into tension, withdrawal, or passive-aggressive behavior, making early communication and support key to preventing more serious problems.

  • Safety Planning: Mental Illness and Suicide Risk. The collaborative process between the staff and students aims to increase warning sign awareness and build internal coping strategies to overcome challenges they may face related to self-harm, suicide, and general functioning.

  • Self-Advocacy. An important skill for any college student is knowing when to ask for help and advocate for themselves in various settings, including the classroom, with friends and family, at work, and with their healthcare needs.

  • Stalking. Stalking can have serious, wide-ranging impacts on college students, affecting nearly every aspect of their daily functioning. This stress can disrupt sleep, concentration, and memory, leading to missed classes, declining academic performance, and withdrawal from campus activities.

  • Stress and Burnout Assessment. This assessment helps students gain insight into their functioning in college. This checklist can be given to the student to complete and return to you for scoring and further guidance.

  • Support Critical Thinking Skills: Redefining Failure. Narrative therapy helps students see their stories from a different perspective. The story doesn’t change, but how they think about it shifts

  • Supporting Students of All Religions. Given the recent conflict in the Middle East and the increase in tensions between Jewish and Muslim students, it is helpful to better understand the conflict and how to address it.

  • Taking Care of Hygiene and Shared Spaces. Addressing odor and hygiene concerns is a student-support intervention that sits at the intersection of learning, dignity, equity, and well-being. When handled with privacy, compassion, and clear referral pathways, these conversations shift the focus from embarrassment or punishment to support, connection, and student success.

  • Understanding the Black College Student Experience. Recognizing the obstacles faced by the African diaspora helps institutions develop targeted resources and policies that promote equity, mental health, and academic success.

SKILL SHEETS

Private: Basic Needs training, tailored to your team's training needs. Starting at $7000 for virtual, $8500 for in person. 

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Hosted: Share costs by inviting area teams to train on your campus. 

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Online: We provide Basic Needs training live online several times each year. 

  • The class run from 11:30–5:00 ET, with a one-hour break from 2:00–3:00

  • The cost is $449/person or $399/person for groups of 5 or more

  • Class recording will be available for those who are unable to attend a session due to scheduling conflicts.

  • Group rates are available for most courses.​

  • Upcoming trainings:​

DATES

VIOLENCE RISK & THREAT ASSESSMENT

The knowledge you need to make a difference

Understand threat assessment, interviewing, written threat analysis, and risk mitigation strategies.

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This live, online certification course addresses violence risk and threat assessment in workplaces, schools, colleges, and universities. This course will cover all aspects of threat assessment, including intake and interviewing skills, assessing written threats, and developing risk mitigation plans.

 

We review foundational concepts in violence risk and threat assessment, provide practical guidance on interviewing skills for gathering information from the person being assessed, and outline how to write a report that offers useful, accessible guidance to the referral source.

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The class will use case studies to teach core concepts and allow time for interactive discussion and reflection. These case studies will address universal threat assessment concepts and draw on workplace and college settings. Supplemental resources, including research articles, checklists, informational one-sheets, discussion questions, and training exercises, will be provided.

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Interested in a deeper dive and practical experience with threat assessment? Check out our master class: Threat Assessment in Practice.

DETAILS

This training includes one-year access to our online triage and threat assessment tools. These research-based expert systems reduce bias, ensure consistency, and address subjectivity in information gathering and decision-making.

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Pathways Triage Tool Logo

The Pathways Triage Tool assesses student behavior to determine the risk level to both the student and the community. When indicated, Pathways will recommend further assessment for suicide or violence risk.

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DarkFox Threat Assessment Tool Logo

The DarkFox Violence Risk Assessment Tool is an online expert system that collects and organizes data related to a potential violence risk. The information shared is used to develop a unique threat management plan, supported by research from the fields of psychology, criminology, threat assessment, and law enforcement.​

TOOLS

Private: Violence Risk and Threat Assessment training, tailored to your team's training needs. Starting at $7000 for virtual, $8500 for in person. 

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Hosted: Share costs by inviting area teams to train on your campus. 

  • ​Upcoming trainings:

 

Tuesday, February 24 – Register Now!

  • In person training hosted by the University of Indianapolis

  • 9:00 - 4:30 ET

  • Cost: $499/person; $449/person for groups of 5 or more

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Online: We provide Violence Risk and Threat Assessment training live online several times each year. 

  • The class run from 11:30–5:00 ET, with a one-hour break from 2:00–3:00

  • The cost is $449/person or $399/person for groups of 5 or more

  • Class recording will be available for those who are unable to attend a session due to scheduling conflicts.

  • Group rates are available for most courses.​​​

  • Upcoming trainings:​

DATES

THREAT ASSESSMENT IN PRACTICE

The Behavioral and Threat Management Institute

A two-day workshop providing hands-on practice interviewing and assessing live actors

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This immersive two-day certification course is designed to move threat assessment professionals from theory to practice. Led by Dr. Brian Van Brunt and the DPrep Safety team, participants will receive direct, practical guidance on the real-world challenges that threat assessment teams face every day, including interviewing subjects, analyzing social media, and creating accurate, defensible reports.

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Attend live in New Orleans or attend virtually. Virtual participants will be formed into teams. Each virtual team will be assigned a facilitator who will guide them through case development, answer questions, and ensure access to resources.

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Live Actor Interviews: Each participant will interview a professional actor portraying the subject in a complex threat case. You will receive detailed feedback and advice for strengthening your interviewing skills.

 

Applied Teamwork: Collaborate with your cohort to analyze the threat, assess risk, and create a tailored mitigation plan using strategies relevant to your own institution or workplace.

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Case-Based Learning: You’ll review case details, form a team, gather intelligence, and conduct structured interviews. From there, your team will develop an assessment report and risk mitigation plan. 

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Rotating Experiences: Across two days, participants rotate through different roles and scenarios, developing agility in handling personalities, defensiveness, and complex case dynamics.

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Learn more at www.btaminstitute.com

DETAILS

Cases involve students, faculty, and staff, and are designed to touch on a wide range of issues faced by teams. 

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Previous Cases:

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Ella Moreau: This tough-as-nails student can take care of herself. Ella is insightful and challenging in the classroom as she studies mortuary science and dreams of opening a funeral business, building on the idea of renewable and sustainable burial processes that involve placing the body into the ground to nourish a tree. There have been concerns in the classroom and on social media regarding some frequent and slightly gruesome posts related to her criticism of the existing funeral business model. This recently escalated into a threat against her professor, which came to the attention of the CARE/BIT team and local police.

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Professor Dusty Harrington: Students find this middle-aged professor's lectures increasingly hard to follow and off topic. Staff and colleagues give Professor Harrington a wide berth due to his eccentricities. However, recent discussions related to his extremist views on the Middle Eastern conflict in Gaza and his warnings about an approaching apocalypse have caused Human Resources and the University Threat team to put the professor on temporary leave to be assessed for safety. There are requests for a threat assessment, a psychological assessment, a level of care determination (involuntary hold), and a determination of fitness to return to campus.

CASES

Next Session: June 11 & 12, 2026

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While the course is built on the idea of in-person training, we recognize the need for online opportunities as well. Choose the format that fits your team.

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In Person

$969

per person​

Virtual

$799

per person​

Virtual Team

$2499

up to 10

team members

 

We provide dinner on the first night for in-person attendees based on local New Orleans restaurants and cuisine. For example, one of our local instructors cooked a crab and shrimp boil for participants during our first session, and coffee and beignets were plentiful.

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We believe in this training approach, even though it is a bit more costly than a simple tabletop exercise or walking people through a case study. The individual interview experiences, feedback on your written report and mitigation plans, and opportunities to watch others approach their interviews in various ways offer a level of feedback you just don’t get from other conferences and trainings.

DATES

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