The shape
30 minutes asynchronous · 4 hours live · 1 hour one-to-one.
Why four hours and not eight
School staff cannot give up a full school day.
Comparable programs run eight hours across two days. Schools cannot absorb that, so they send one person, who returns unable to transfer what they learned to anyone else. A program that cannot be delivered within the constraints of a school schedule does not get delivered.
Four hours is not a compromise on content. It is the constraint the design had to meet, and meeting it is what lets a school send a team rather than a representative.
What sits where
The asynchronous 30 minutes, completed the week before, covers the foundations: the Oregon picture, why universal screening, what SAFER is, the landscape, and the law in brief. Content that does not need a room. Never spend live time on something a video can do.
It ends with one question, submitted before the live day: what is the thing you are most worried about? Those answers shape the day, unattributed.
The four hours live covers everything that needs practice, disagreement, or someone watching you try it. Reading results, the same-day conversation, safety planning, Elevated Clinical Risk, turning data into interventions, and what happens next. Two role plays. Two breaks.
The one-to-one hour, held within three weeks, is implementation planning for your specific school. Your calendar, your people, your data, your gaps. The output is a one-page work plan with names and dates on it, not notes.
There is no standalone implementation webinar you complete alone. That model asks a school to do the hardest part by itself, weeks later, when momentum has gone. The one-to-one replaces it.
Who should come
A team, not a person. At minimum:
- Whoever will build safety plans
- Whoever will hold the queue
- An administrator who can make decisions about calendars and staffing
- The person who will own follow-up. See Module 9.3
If the follow-up owner has not been named yet, the training is the moment it becomes obvious that it needs to be.
✓ Take Action. Before you book the training, find out who your consulting clinician will be and whether they can come. They do not have to. But a clinician who has been through the day understands what they are being called about at 2pm on a Thursday. See Module 5.5.
What the training is adjacent to, and not a replacement for
Oregon has other suicide prevention training, including Youth SAVE, which trains adults to assess and intervene with a young person already in front of them.
SAFER's training is about the system around that conversation: how the student gets found, how a whole building gets screened in a week, who sees them and by when, and what happens in the four weeks after. Schools benefit from both and they do not substitute for each other.
