Psychological First Aid for Schools (PFA-S)
As a best practice the Psychological First Aid for Schools (PFA-S) program is a part of a schools Emergency Operations Plan and trains school staff and equips them with effective crisis response strategies. The program’s main objective is to ensure the safety and well-being of students, staff, and families by being prepared and responding quickly during crises. PFA-S focuses on eight core actions: 
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- Initiating contact
- Ensuring safety
- Stabilizing emotions
- Gathering information
- Practical assistance
- Establishing support networks
- Teaching coping skills
- Facilitating collaborative services
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The aim is to create a safe and supportive learning environment for everyone involved. PFA-S teams respond to any threat, hazard, or incident in a school district.
Training is available to all staff members in every school district building using the Nebraska School Safety model, which offers a common language and evidence-informed interventions to assist school communities. Our program builds resiliency, helps students and staff recover, and utilizes adaptive coping strategies.
PFA-S Toolkit
Psychological First Aid for Schools (PFA-S) is an evidence-based intervention model that helps people cope more effectively in and following a crisis situation. The PFA-S Toolkit was created to provide school district PFA-S Teams with resources to help plan and prepare for effective response to crisis situations in their districts.
The PFA-S Toolkit provides the following:
- An overview of how PFA-S fits in the districts Emergency Operations Plan (EOP).
- An explanation of the role PFA-S has in the Nebraska School Safety model.
- Resources for each of the 8 core actions in PFA-S.
- Tabletop exercises for safety teams.
- Social media messaging.
Click on the image to access the toolkit.
Video Overview of PFA-S
FAQ
● Psychological First Aid for Schools (PFA-S) is an evidence-informed intervention model to assist students, staff, and families in the immediate aftermath of an emergency and can be used by any trained staff member or community partner.
● PFA-S provides emotional support and coping information to students and staff.
● The PFA-Steam is involved in all portions of the School Safety Model: Prevention, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery
● The goal of crisis response is to reduce distress and anxiety experienced by members of the school community when a crisis occurs.
● Prevention is mitigating or minimizing the harmful effects from the crisis. We encourage teams to take an active role in monitoring and analyzing building data. We want all school staff to know how to recognize and report any differences they see in school behavior and/or academic performance.
● In preparedness, each PFA-S team works with EOP team members to create lessons and schedule practices for all the Standard Response Protocols: lockdown, secure, shelter, hold, and evacuate
● The minute the incident starts, the PFA-S team begins responding. In the response phase, the team works to stabilize the crisis situation. Standard Response Protocol and Standard Reunification Method (if evacuated from school site) are utilized.
● Recovery deals with how to restore the learning and teaching environment after a crisis to ensure current and long-term needs are met. Recovery is the traditional role of crisis teams.
● Every district needs staff members who are trained to respond to hazards, threats and incidents.
● The PFA-S terminology comes through the federal Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) training. Each district needs one trained team to respond in a crisis and either name, PFA-S or crisis team, can be used by districts.
●NDE provides PFA-S training that covers the 8 core actions of Psychological First Aid.
●NDE also provides training for ESU’s in developing supports for their school districts.
●Training is based on the from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network National Center for PTSD.
●The use of ICS is required for all school districts receiving federal emergency preparedness funding.
●PFA-S training covers ICS and provides practice in applying ICS in scenarios.
●ICS is basically defining who is taking command of the incident and understanding the command can change hands as others respond to a situation.