Members of the Mason City Police Department and Cerro Gordo County Sheriff’s Office, as well as social workers and corrections workers from various agencies were provided with a 40-hour interactive training session this week at The Music Man Square to help mitigate mental-health crisis situations.
SolutionPoint+, a San Antonio, Texas-based company conducted the workweek-long course, laying out a curriculum that combined classroom lecture with role-play, focusing on assessing and de-escalating situations with individuals experiencing a mental-health emergency.
Presenters Jesse Trevino and Joe Smarro, both former police officers experienced in crisis intervention, turned their experiences into hyper-realistic scenarios for the students of the class to work through.
Trevino said the academic portion of the training is important, but it’s the interactive parts of the class that have the most impact when it comes to teaching the workshop.
“We learned what was most special about the training, and what we didn’t even (originally) account for was the role-playing,” Trevino said. “We responded to hundreds and hundreds of calls in the field. We just saw so much, so all of the role-plays are derived from a real call that we’ve had in the past.”
Attendee Rebecca Barrett, who works as a probation and parole supervisor with the Department of Correctional Services in Cerro Gordo County, said she found the training invaluable.