One of my consulting cases was for a child at a public school with severe behavior problems. I typically consulted with the school about once a week. The behaviors were largely well-controlled, but we still had extreme problems that occurred rarely. Therefore, the school team formed an emergency response team. This team included several people who would always have a walkie and be on-call in the case of an emergency.
One day, I walked into the school just as the emergency response team was being called. But when the school secretary (who apparently did not remember my name) saw me, she called it off and said “don’t worry—the man in blue is here.” I then went to assist with the emergency that was occurring.
I am often the person that gets called in an emergency situation. Although as I get older, this is less and less likely to be me. I suspect we have a potential problem in that there are hidden reinforcers to the people who are called to handle emergencies. Handling an emergency involves breaking of the routine, novel problem solving, people deferring to the expert, a feeling of accomplishment, and often thanks from grateful people. These reinforcers can shape your behavior in insidious ways. Most importantly, you might be spending too much time on emergencies and not enough time teaching the appropriate alternative behaviors that will meet a natural contingency that will make a difference in the long run.
I recently read the book Upstream. He discusses one of the issues in preventing problems from occurring is that we celebrate the lifeguard who saves a drowning victim, but not the swim teacher who prevents someone from drowning in the first place.
Certainly, in most organizations there are huge rewards for the people who are called to handle the emergency situations. That’s appropriate. But I suspect we probably don’t do enough for the staff in the preschool who work daily with a child to teach mands and build tolerance levels that prevent these extreme problems in the first place. It’s a very tricky problem as there are certainly ways to prevent problems that are not in the child’s best interest.